10 Years After

Two-Headed Boy

Picked up my Intro to Linguistics test this morning before class. He had that and a homework assignment of mine that he had misplaced to give me. He told me, when he handed me back my bluebook, that I'd done a great job. I quickly skimmed through to see my grade. It was a 97.5, but received 2.5 points on the curve to bring my grade up to a 100. In the hallway I spoke with the girl with the scratchy voice and lack of volume control (She was reading KIng Lear for her Shakespeare class). She indicated that she had received a 93 on the test and that Friday he had stated the highest grade had been a 97. Yeah!

In class we went over historical changes. Answering a question about why the Germans have a letter (Y), but never use it, he commented on the seperation between spelling and pronunciation. He illustrated this with 'know' and 'knife.' While explaining that at one point in time the K (as well as e in knife) was pronounced I tried to make a joke - "People stopped because they felt silly saying ka-nig-it!" A rather dismall attempt to reference Monty Python's Holy Grail, I know. Still, several times when talking about historical change he asked for my agreement. Also, when he made mention of Occam's Razor (more properly spelled Ockham?) a student asked why it was called that. He confessed to not knowing. I stated it was named after a person and when asked about the razor portion of the name I said that I thought it had to do with the metaphor of his argument. It's actually been a bit of a hardship to find out exactly what the razor has to do with what he said. I've seen his principle restated in terms of "shaving off" less simple reasons.

I ran into Rueben leaving the English building. I asked him about StinkyCheese, the guy that reeked so badly Saturday at the Milton Marathon. Rueben mentioned that the guy was a PhD and that he had actually sat in on a few of Reuben's classes "reliving his ungraduate days." Since Reuben seemed to hold him in high esteem I resisted the urge to comment on his maliferous odor. And while I didn't speak of it, I am sure he was nonetheless painfully aware of it.

Also, all this about answering questions reminds me of something from Saturday. At one point during the reading StinkyCheese inquired with the intructor about all the angelic names that Milton uses. He commented that he recognized only a few of them from the Bible and wondered where the rest came from, or had Milton simply invented them. While the instructor waffled between stating that Milton had made them up and his usual attempt to avoid questions, I interjected that my copy (a Norton edition of Paradise Lost) contained an essay in an appendix stating that most of the angel (and fallen angel) names came either from the Bible or Jewish or Christian folklore and that only a few were made up- and these were more like corruption of mythological names. The name in questions was Uriel.