Linguistics? Yech.

The IPA, Chris says, is cool. Not. I have some 500 words to write out in the International Phonetic Alphabet by Thursday. I also have 3 chapters to read.

What really bugged me, though, is that I have complained that all I know about linguistics concerns monkeys and feces. So what did we do for over an hour today? We watched the old Nova program about the freaking chimp and the damned shit. Great.

I heard a great quote today about writing. Flannery O'Connor (a woman I don't much like, personally, but whose stories I enjoy -- particularly, "A Good Man is Hard to Find") said something to the effect that if you survive childhood, you have enough material to write about for the rest of your life. I need to find the actual quote, but in the meantime, I intend to use this with my own students.

Speaking of my own students, I probably need to finish that syllabus for the fall -- and I need to order an instructor's manual for the book I chose, though I haven't ever used one before. I guess I think it would just be nice to have -- and they're free! Free books of any kind make me happy. Wasn't it Erasmus who claimed that whenever he got paid, he bought books and if there was any left over, he would buy food and clothes. Or maybe it was Michael Jackson.