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healingmirthI've been noticing lately that my favorite conversation/comment-starting word is "so" as in "so I was walking to class yesterday and..." I have no idea how long I've been doing it.
I was reading a story yesterday where the author used the same fragment construction over and over again, to the point where it started drawing me out of the story to notice the grammar, and I just gave up and stopped reading, which I almost never do, because I was so annoyed by it. She may have been doing it as part of the characterization of point of view in the story, or she may always write like that. I don't know, but either way, it irritated me. As a result I'm going to make a conscious effort to stop with the so (like I did at the beginning of this sentence!) or at least vary my word choice a little.
Apparently the new big thing in fashion is wearing dog tags. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'd read about it, but I hadn't seen anyone wearing them as an accessory until I walked past a guy on campus this morning. I wouldn't be as conflicted if it was more like people wearing ribbons, and less like people wearing those bracelets, which I'm sure some people do because they think it looks cool, rather than because they're really behind the message. I didn't really (still don't really) have an opinion about crosses as fashion accessories, and that's the closest analogy I can think of. I don't have any problem with military-inspired fashion, and certainly any yahoo can buy surplus camo or whatever, but somehow fashion dog tags seem to be stepping over a line. I wonder if I'm attaching too much quasi-sacred meaning to them. My personal experience with active duty military is pretty heavily weighted towards Hollywood.
And even more rambling:
On the off chance that anyone ever reads the following and needs context - I am taking a statistics class this summer. It is not, in my opinion, "real" math. This is probably lucky for me, because I typically get C's or worse in real math classes. The name of the class is "Statistical methods" and apparently, the point of the class is for people reading journal articles to understand the vocabulary of the statistics they contain. I don't remember a single thing that I learned in probability or statistics in college, except for the obvious stuff about flipping coins and rolling dice, and the n-choose-p stuff about pulling red or black balls out of a bag. None of what we have covered, except for the gambling probability, which I remember, and Venn diagrams, which I remember from the 4th grade, seems even vaguely familiar, and so I'm not sure if this is simply way more practical than what they taught at Tech (likely) or I really never learned anything the first time (scary, but all things considered, also likely).
Our professor is, I'm pretty sure, Indian. His native language is Bengali, so I guess he could be from Bangladesh, but either way, he's not from around here. Between the random cultural references that don't quite sync, whether its one of his that we don't get, or one of ours that he doesn't get quite right, and the accent, we spend a fair amount of time guessing at what he's saying when he goes off script from the lecture notes. He is very fond of using Georgia football as an example of whatever he's trying to illustrate, which is admirable, but as I think all of the students in the class are grad students who did their undergrad elsewhere, we don't really care. He occasionally branches out into the Atlanta Braves, or more recently, tennis, both of which have also been clunkers. But man, is he ever trying to engage us in the class, and I'm starting to appreciate that.
Moving on to the story I was actually going to tell, in statistics today, the professor asked me a question that we didn't actually know the answer to yet, and it caught me off guard. He's in the habit of either asking someone in particular whether they understand what he's just gone over, to which you can pretty much answer yes or no with no pressure, or asking the class in general to work through an example of some sort that we've done before. Today, however, he gave us the formula for an approximation, and then walked up to me and asked why he did it that way. I'm still not sure that what I said was actually correct, but I guess it was in the general vicinity of correct. Now I want to know whether it was just dumb luck that he asked, or whether it had something to do with my behavior in class, so I can change it and not have to be singled out anymore.
I was reading a story yesterday where the author used the same fragment construction over and over again, to the point where it started drawing me out of the story to notice the grammar, and I just gave up and stopped reading, which I almost never do, because I was so annoyed by it. She may have been doing it as part of the characterization of point of view in the story, or she may always write like that. I don't know, but either way, it irritated me. As a result I'm going to make a conscious effort to stop with the so (like I did at the beginning of this sentence!) or at least vary my word choice a little.
Apparently the new big thing in fashion is wearing dog tags. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'd read about it, but I hadn't seen anyone wearing them as an accessory until I walked past a guy on campus this morning. I wouldn't be as conflicted if it was more like people wearing ribbons, and less like people wearing those bracelets, which I'm sure some people do because they think it looks cool, rather than because they're really behind the message. I didn't really (still don't really) have an opinion about crosses as fashion accessories, and that's the closest analogy I can think of. I don't have any problem with military-inspired fashion, and certainly any yahoo can buy surplus camo or whatever, but somehow fashion dog tags seem to be stepping over a line. I wonder if I'm attaching too much quasi-sacred meaning to them. My personal experience with active duty military is pretty heavily weighted towards Hollywood.
And even more rambling:
On the off chance that anyone ever reads the following and needs context - I am taking a statistics class this summer. It is not, in my opinion, "real" math. This is probably lucky for me, because I typically get C's or worse in real math classes. The name of the class is "Statistical methods" and apparently, the point of the class is for people reading journal articles to understand the vocabulary of the statistics they contain. I don't remember a single thing that I learned in probability or statistics in college, except for the obvious stuff about flipping coins and rolling dice, and the n-choose-p stuff about pulling red or black balls out of a bag. None of what we have covered, except for the gambling probability, which I remember, and Venn diagrams, which I remember from the 4th grade, seems even vaguely familiar, and so I'm not sure if this is simply way more practical than what they taught at Tech (likely) or I really never learned anything the first time (scary, but all things considered, also likely).
Our professor is, I'm pretty sure, Indian. His native language is Bengali, so I guess he could be from Bangladesh, but either way, he's not from around here. Between the random cultural references that don't quite sync, whether its one of his that we don't get, or one of ours that he doesn't get quite right, and the accent, we spend a fair amount of time guessing at what he's saying when he goes off script from the lecture notes. He is very fond of using Georgia football as an example of whatever he's trying to illustrate, which is admirable, but as I think all of the students in the class are grad students who did their undergrad elsewhere, we don't really care. He occasionally branches out into the Atlanta Braves, or more recently, tennis, both of which have also been clunkers. But man, is he ever trying to engage us in the class, and I'm starting to appreciate that.
Moving on to the story I was actually going to tell, in statistics today, the professor asked me a question that we didn't actually know the answer to yet, and it caught me off guard. He's in the habit of either asking someone in particular whether they understand what he's just gone over, to which you can pretty much answer yes or no with no pressure, or asking the class in general to work through an example of some sort that we've done before. Today, however, he gave us the formula for an approximation, and then walked up to me and asked why he did it that way. I'm still not sure that what I said was actually correct, but I guess it was in the general vicinity of correct. Now I want to know whether it was just dumb luck that he asked, or whether it had something to do with my behavior in class, so I can change it and not have to be singled out anymore.
