Supergrunch

Happy belated birthday Gaggle! I'm good at wishing belated birthdays.

Thanks, we shall see... I'm writing on the internal syntax of wh-elements (e.g. who, what, etc.) from a crosslinguistic perspective. And I applied for a PhD at UCL, but got no funding, so I'll be staying at Cambridge.

I can play now! The 1.5 update lets you play without OpenGL, so the game runs on my computer without nearly killing it.

So I got funding for PhD position on a cool syntax project. Now I "just" need to get a distinction on my masters to be accepted...

Well, I get about 69-70, depending on how much you count half-watched films. I'm still kicking myself for not getting round to seeing A Clockwork Orange or the original Alien. As well as many others.

I have to agree with this, it's hilariously bad. When I went on it we were all trying not to burst out laughing at when the ride started and we realised that that was all it was.

No exams for the first summer since I was 6, so yay for that. I do have to write a 20,000 word thesis though...

Well, you can get some STIs via oral sex, but the incidence is far lower for things like HIV, although there is a very rare form of mouth cancer that can result from oral sex (there was a BBC documentary on it a month or so ago). And of course there's no pregnancy risk.

I find them a bit disturbing really, something about things being inserted beneath the skin...

Is that in Tokyo? I wish I'd been...

Or maybe you're just a sinner in your own eyes. Also I don't understand why there's quite so much condom hatred, I'm really not that bothered.

Current side effects are man boobs and lactation. Seriously.

I think it's something like 97% so long as you use them totally correctly and they don't break. But people generally get it wrong some way or another, hence the lower percentage. And I think I can guess your malady... Also Dan - are you sure you don't mean an implant?

I just read this last week, but I've yet to see the film. Might try and watch it tonight - sounds like it might actually be better than the book. As for the novel, I quite liked how the sense of progression in the protagonist's maturity was indicated by the writing style - by the end he seemed like a real writer with flashes of immaturity, which contrasted quite sharply with the stark and slightly odd initial style. Although I thought this early style was less convincing. And while the plotting worked well at the start, it fell apart a bit towards the end. Before that, I read Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, which is the fourth in a series about a private detective (I've read the others too). She writes very well, with lots of astute and sometimes quirky observations (e.g. describing polystyrene chips as "albino quavers"), but I have to say I'm getting annoyed with her overly intricate plots filled with slightly clumsy parallels. Not that I dislike intricacy, it just has to be done well... Talking of which, a while before that I read David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was stunning as expected. The confidence he uses in driving the dialogue-driven story to unexpected places without any sense of the author's hand driving things is just awe-inspiring. As is his ability to create hundreds of believable characters, and to conjure up the atomsphere of a dystopian future in a historical setting. And it's maybe not entirely relevant, but I've been reading more of e.e. cummings, one of my favourite poets, recently. I love this poem even though I fundamentally disagree with it (it might be fun to write a reply, actually): pity this busy monster,manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victum(death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness -electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange;lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born-pity poor flesh and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go Sadly though, I don't get nearly enough time to read fiction as I'd like - above are most of the novels I've read since summer.

Facebook relationship adds are hilarious. Does it still say "X wants to be your girlfriend. - Y/N"?

Well, language as studied by linguists is actually spoken language rather than written language, as the first is natural whereas the second is basically just convention. So it's up to them really - they have to decide whether they want to restrict themselves to the standard writing system or not, as what they're dealing with is conventions. But it's definitely used quite a lot in writing, although usually in fixed idiomatic things like I [heart] NY. Note also that the heart symbol isn't actually a picture of a heart, it's more of a cultural icon, which makes it more like a character too. So yeah, hard to say, but I'm not too bothered either way.

Facepalm at this thread. Dictionaries aren't intented to be definitive records of what's correct, they're just supposed to be (inevitably partial and incomplete) records of usage, though of course they can also be useful if you want to know a spelling. This doesn't mean that anything not in the dictionary isn't part of the language - after all, dictionaries only list headwords, so even eats isn't included. The OED in particular is a record of written English, and so if something gets written enough, it's fair enough that it gets included. Although I don't know what they count as "enough" or which written sources are acceptable. So yeah, they call themselves "the definitive record of the English language," but that's just marketing speak for "we think we're the best dictionary." My sister does I think, it does seem like an odd candidate to include though. And google, hoover and biro are all in the OED, I just checked. As above, this basically stems from a misinterpretation of what dictionaries are for. Unless of course you're a second language learner of English, in which case there are much better sources than the OED, which are actually oriented towards learners. It's actually quite different to I or A - instead of (roughly) representing a phoneme, it represents a concept. So it's more like a Chinese character than an English letter, although far more ideographic than most Chinese characters are. That's kind of the right idea, but people come up with "rules" all the time that were never actually used, like the one about splitting infinitives. Also I think the organism metaphor is a bit odd as it implies that language somehow exists outside of speakers.

Please don't start this again.

Wow, can't believe I didn't notice that. Welcome back. Anyhoo, am going to Edinburgh this weekend for a conference, which is kind of fun. Haven't actually written my prestentation yet though...

I always thought this was the standard explanation of Dugtrio, at least:

Thread derail! I'll reply to Moogle/others via visitor messages or another thread. The main problem is that the whole "nobody should ever teach rules" is a bit of a straw man - hardly anyone is against a standardised form of the language.

Yep. etc. etc.

Apparently my dad thought this song was actually about oral sex.

This has virtually nothing to do with the content of my degree, it just irritates me when people try and make others feel inferior for not conforming to standard English. I don't study standardisation/dialectology at all.