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lawsamercy, i talk shite.
i combine dialects, too (she said, pointing to the subject line), and it's fun.
have written the first page of the essay due tomorrow morning. it didn't take as long as i remember a whole page taking before. either this means i know the stuff better and thus have more to say about it, or it means i'm getting the hang of bullshitting the oxford-style essay. i'm personally concluding there's elements of both of those in it, and frankly it doesn't really matter how much of each because the exams at the end will be oxford-style essays, and if BSing one's way through them gets just as many points as knowing the material and doing well, then, hey. my mother has always said: the most important part of being a successful student is figuring out what the teachers want, and giving it to them. in an ideal world, the process of figuring out what the teachers want and giving it to them causes the student to learn the stuff; but if there are two students, one of whom has persuaded the teachers that she knows the stuff although she doesn't know jack, and the other of whom knows the stuff cold but can't convince anyone she knows a thing, who's going to get the better grade?
learning that got me out of high school. what you know doesn't matter; what matters is what They know you know.
all this means that i'm at a point in my life where i can write sentences like Carnochan's own account (also 1957) of gemination in Hausa recognizes the phenomenon of gemination as an element of structure; the length of consonants is important, but it is not a matter of absolute length (in microseconds, or centiseconds as Carnochan measured them) but of relative length. And in fact, following Palmer's report of Tigrinya, length itself may not be as important a feature of relative length as one would initially suppose. and confidently expect to be taken seriously.
it is may 2005. within two years, i would like you all to call me Dr Fox (second of that name -- the first being my mother, who's among the best students i've ever known).
in other news, Queen P, formerly the social secretary and now the StX student common room president, rang my bell earlier to ask me if i could step up for the rest of the term and be half a social secretary. (actually he said "how busy are you going to be for the next five weeks?" -- a future politician, that one; i kept saying he was going to be a senator someday, but in fact last week i realized he's actually going to be some senator's legislative director, i.e. not the guy who gets elected but the guy who actually gets things done. however, i've watched enough west wing to know that the answer to "how busy are you going to be for the next five weeks" is, in this case, "what do you need?" [g]) our social secretary is actually, at present, a two-man team, one of whom has done absolutely nothing but flake and leave the country as his whimsy takes him, so he's being kicked to the curb and i'm the choice to fill in, possibly into next fall as well. (and i agreed to do it, which is actually the killer, and another testimony to the smooth-talker-ness of Queen P. i swear a bunch of us should hire him to do our give-us-grant-money interviews for us.) i am the gerald ford of the StX common room committee. only without, one hopes, bumping into things and knocking them over.
have written the first page of the essay due tomorrow morning. it didn't take as long as i remember a whole page taking before. either this means i know the stuff better and thus have more to say about it, or it means i'm getting the hang of bullshitting the oxford-style essay. i'm personally concluding there's elements of both of those in it, and frankly it doesn't really matter how much of each because the exams at the end will be oxford-style essays, and if BSing one's way through them gets just as many points as knowing the material and doing well, then, hey. my mother has always said: the most important part of being a successful student is figuring out what the teachers want, and giving it to them. in an ideal world, the process of figuring out what the teachers want and giving it to them causes the student to learn the stuff; but if there are two students, one of whom has persuaded the teachers that she knows the stuff although she doesn't know jack, and the other of whom knows the stuff cold but can't convince anyone she knows a thing, who's going to get the better grade?
learning that got me out of high school. what you know doesn't matter; what matters is what They know you know.
all this means that i'm at a point in my life where i can write sentences like Carnochan's own account (also 1957) of gemination in Hausa recognizes the phenomenon of gemination as an element of structure; the length of consonants is important, but it is not a matter of absolute length (in microseconds, or centiseconds as Carnochan measured them) but of relative length. And in fact, following Palmer's report of Tigrinya, length itself may not be as important a feature of relative length as one would initially suppose. and confidently expect to be taken seriously.
it is may 2005. within two years, i would like you all to call me Dr Fox (second of that name -- the first being my mother, who's among the best students i've ever known).
in other news, Queen P, formerly the social secretary and now the StX student common room president, rang my bell earlier to ask me if i could step up for the rest of the term and be half a social secretary. (actually he said "how busy are you going to be for the next five weeks?" -- a future politician, that one; i kept saying he was going to be a senator someday, but in fact last week i realized he's actually going to be some senator's legislative director, i.e. not the guy who gets elected but the guy who actually gets things done. however, i've watched enough west wing to know that the answer to "how busy are you going to be for the next five weeks" is, in this case, "what do you need?" [g]) our social secretary is actually, at present, a two-man team, one of whom has done absolutely nothing but flake and leave the country as his whimsy takes him, so he's being kicked to the curb and i'm the choice to fill in, possibly into next fall as well. (and i agreed to do it, which is actually the killer, and another testimony to the smooth-talker-ness of Queen P. i swear a bunch of us should hire him to do our give-us-grant-money interviews for us.) i am the gerald ford of the StX common room committee. only without, one hopes, bumping into things and knocking them over.
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YES. Emphatically yes. I discovered this in my sophomore year of high shcool when my English Literature teacher began the year by giving me 'D's on fucking awesome papers, pissing my mother off so much she couldn't see straight. And when it hit me that I just needed to write what to me seemed like a really bad paper and she gave me a better grade, I felt dirty.
Mom said they were most boring, choppily written papers she'd ever seen me write, and was torn between fist-pumping fight-the-systemism and the fact that I needed good grades. Then again, Mom graduated from high-school at 16 without trying and proceeded to birth me and enter a life of blue-collar armchair academia, so of course she was surprised at the seeming pointlessness. Teehee.
/rambling
I declare that you will look rather snappy with your doctorate and that it shall be great fun calling you Dr. Fox the Younger.