le sigh.

it's always unpleasant to discover you've been mistaken, and that people don't give as much of a damn as you'd thought they did.

eventually, of course, you assimilate the discovery, you re-work your expectations and move on and everything's fine. but no matter how many times this happens (and it can't not happen, unless you make a conscious decision never to stop doubting people ever, and that's just not in my nature), the moment of realization is never going to be much fun.

grading phonology assignments

why do they keep forgetting [h]? they've got a whole corpus in which [h] occurs not infrequently, and one kid after another just doesn't include it in the phonetic inventory. i don't understand ...

and

why do they all think the palatal nasal is voiceless?