A Manifesto of Dialectical Diachronics

The history of languages worldwide and especially the history of English clearly show progress towards increasingly superior forms. Whereas we can expect these patterns to continue as we progress, Dialectical Diachronicism advocates revolutionary efforts to further these changes and accelerate our progress:

1) Regularization of plural and tense paradigms (not paradigmata). No more of this “octopi/octopodes/octopuses?”, “syllabi/syllabantes/syllabuses?”, “kleenexen/kleenices/kleenexes?” and “moose/meese/mooses?”, nor such monstrosities as “dived/diven/dove/doved/doven?” and “drunk/drinken/drunken/drinked/drank/dranked/drunked/dranken?”. All plurals shall use the +/z/ morpheme, and preterite and past participles (regardless or use) shall use +/d/. Spell them as you see fit.

2) Furthermore, no more special treatment for [3RD.SG.PRES].

3) As be already the norm in common speech, ‘them’ be the proper pronoun for use for an animate individual when their gender be unknown or irrelevant.

4) The shortage of verbal morphology and the inexorable advance towards pro-drop thenecesitate a reanalysis of subject pronouns as prefixes. (Some members of the committee thave recommended that wego through a period of weanalyzing them as clitics. Itshall be put up for a vote at the next meeting.) The details thebe still being worked out.

English speakers of the world, wefind ourselves at a crucial moment in history: now. When a friend who thebe ignorant of the revolution thespeak the unenlightened way, warn them sternly. When an enemy thespeak in the unenlightened way, quote Vogon poetry at them. In a few short years, weell speak an even more superb language, even cooler than now, and weell reminisce, saying “Yremember how wespeaked back then? Webeed so unenlightened and whack.”

And now for something completely nother

Given the widespread use of the “a whole nother” construction, one would expect ‘nother’ to show up in other constructions, but after much highly scientific introspection about my internal grammar, I was convinced, though puzzled, that it did in fact not work in other constructions.

I was talking with slowlane tonight, though, and she said, “He’s got a full nother week.” There it is–a perfectly sensible utterance. Where else does ‘nother’ already appear in the wild? How else shall ‘nother’ be used?

Googling ‘nother -whole’ doesn’t show much of interest, but buried in the hits of the surname Nother and “‘nother” at the beginning of a phrase, are “some nother stuff” and “some nother wierd things.” Furthermore, ‘”a * nother” -whole’ turns up “a hefty nother thing”, “a good nother 20 years”, “a totally nother context”, “a single nother person”, and “a couple nother questions”, among others.

That was almost fun

I did my taxes. (w00t!) I have an adjusted gross income almost 4 times as much as last year, and my total tax (including self-employment tax from tutoring) was less! It was also free, with nothing to mail, even though I have to do a standard 1040 with three W-2s and one 1099. Actually not quite free, because I’m paying the feds by credit card, and there’s a convenience fee. But still.

From the post-process survey:

Would you recommend this program to your friends and family?

Yes. I would.

Cox Arena

This morning I had to go down to school for something, and I left by an unfamiliar route. I made a wrong turn and saw Cox Arena for the first time in the almost two years I’ve been here. I’d heard there was some kind of stadium over there.

Vogon poetry

See, see the anxious sky
Marvel at its big puce depths.
Tell me, Biker do you
Wonder why the horse fly ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel drowsy.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your vlegoromious facial growth
That looks like
A cream cheese.
What’s more, it knows
Your pulcritude potting shed
Smells of paramecium.
Everything under the big anxious sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm feets.

Childhood

Some select wisdom of children:

I wanted to grow up and become a marine biologist, which seemed to me the perfect combination of studying nature and shooting people.

I thought cologne would make me smell better when I drank it. After having my stomach pumped I was told otherwise.

I used to believe that I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. That’s why I wanted to be an airport. My best friend wanted to be a firetruck.

Spiders



Today I saw four spiders in all together within a couple cubic feet of each other, and to my eye, they all seemed to be different species, although maybe they were males and females of two different species. Two of them were jumping spiders, with similar colorings but different designs, and the other two were hiding-in-dead-leaf spiders, also rather different in appearance, one much bigger than the other. I couldn’t get any good pictures of the hiding-in-leaf spiders, but the last picture here shows the leaf the bigger one was hiding in.