10 Years After

Nobody Hears

In dialectology the guy who taught ESL in Japan was talking nonsense again today. Several of us in the class were discussing the test and which of the two answers we chose. Everyone selected the history of English over the compare/contrast question dealing with levels of dialect. I mentioned how I had forgotten exactly what was meant by levels until halfway through answering the second question. I also commented on how slang remained a nebulous term that was never really agreed upon. That's when the ESL guy started into some soliloqy about nudity- that when it's in the form of a stone statue it's art but when it's in a movie it's pornography. This seemed veyr strange to me. Not all nudity in movies is pornographic, but it does seem to have some sort of cultural taboo. Due to how it went when I engaged him whether over hunters actually kept herds of deer healthy by hunting, I decided not to comment on his remarks. This is also the guy that was steadfast when we were talking about slang that "geek" and "nerd" were obviously distinct words, nothing approaching synonyms. (For him Geek had some conotation of social inadequecy that nerd didn't imply.)

CWL was cancelled today. Apparently the classroom was too hot for the instructor. It was hot, but nothing more than what it is like in any of the classes in the building. He said he spoke with the dean about having the heat reduced. The heater wasn't actually turned on but the steam running through it, combined with the unusual hot weather, made it very hot. Oh, well. We've spent, what?, two months on this project, I suppose another day or two won't matter much in the grand scheme of things. I just hope I receive an A in here.