Mostly Harmless

Whew! Its been a whirlwind ladies and gentlemen. When was the last time I talked to you? Meh, I’m not going to check right now. Many things have been happening in the world of linguistics. Some that made me feel pretty certain that I wanted to quit; others that at least partially re-motivated me to hang on. I was thinking this weekend (as I’m wont to do) about how pretty much everyone doesn’t really know what I do, to the exception of my colleagues/peers who do the exact same stuff. And this is not your fault, no, it is my fault for neglecting to take the time to attempt an explanation of the abstract and nuanced world that I submerge myself in daily. So, in full on geek-copycat blogger style, I will present to you a trilogy in five parts:

(1) What linguists actually do/care about (i.e. don’t treat us like English majors, we promote splitting infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition)

(2) How our grad program works/is different (and why it’s useless to compare it to grad programs within your general scope of knowledge).

(3) The deal with linguistic conferences (they’re basically parties that we get universities to send us to at various coordinates on the surface of the globe)

(4) Intra-linguist relations (because you know how warm and fuzzy we can all be)

(5) How linguistics relates to/affects you (or more clearly, that it doesn’t)

Hopefully the trilogy will set you up for an appreciation, or at least a clarification, for we linguists, and get you to stop asking how many languages we speak.

But back to breaking news. I went Harvard & MIT for a conference this weekend. Two very different schools, for being 25 minutes walking distance from each other. Apparently MIT only has 10,000 students, and 7,000 of those are grad students, which I think means it’s a bigger achievement to be an undergrad there. Also, Cambridge/Boston has a sickening number of Starbucks (but I was reminded several times that the west coast/Washington-Oregon has waaay more), which sucks b/c Starbucks is really not my favourite (their coffee I got in the airport on Thursday was bitter and required an unnaturally high ratio of cream and sugar) and they seem to have eked out the smaller franchises and independents there. But Harvard is super fancy, as expected, but the campus has much less of a collegial feel than I expected. It was, however, painfully clear that pretty much everyone walking around Harvard Square was soaked in super saturated money water. I laughed out loud with a student who was helping at the conference expressed concern about the “cutbacks” that Harvard had to make because of the economic crisis. So don’t care! The Harvard kids will be fine – maybe they won’t have central air in their on-campus lockers or free foot massages or that new super high tech multi-media classroom, but I waste no tears for them.

And MIT is less about the class and more about “what’s the craziest building we can create barely within the confines of physical laws?” I have pictures, I’ll have to upload them to my computer and share them (but if you’re impatient, google-image search the Stata Center).

Today I had a defense for a major paper (first out of two) that I had to write for my program, and I passed! Yay! Now on to all the other work that needs to be done. So much fun.

But keep an eye out for my super exciting series coming up. I’ll try to be faithful in writing it in good time.