IF I SPOKEN TO MY PARENTS HOW KIDS TALK NOW DAYS I`D BEEN KNOCKED OUT

Believe it or not, this is an actual group on Facebook. Please tell me I don't have to tell you everything that's wrong with that group name :) I really try hard to not to be judgemental, but this stuff blows me away sometimes. When I took Linguistics 100, I was told that linguists are only supposed to "describe" language, not "prescribe" it, but with that comes some huge problems, the biggest one being how lexically ambiguous English can be.

Honestly, a few years ago I was a huge stickler for spelling and grammar (grammar is what attracted me to linguistics in the first place), but I'm pleased to say that I've mellowed regarding that subject. However, when a database like this Facebook group falls into my lap, I can't help but analyse it.

I took some excerpts from comments people left on the group's wall, indicating how the English language can be completely misinterpreted if it's used incorrectly or without enough context (I haven't edited or omitted anything). English is so ambiguous sometimes that you have to be super specific, or else some random person (in this case, me :D ) will take what you're saying the wrong way.

• "I was married with my 5 children. The F word was never spoke in our house untill my 3 oldest children started going out and running around. I can't stand that word and all of my children and grand-children know it. The people in the world today has no respect for their self." You were married to your five children?
• "My parents would duck tape me and put me in the closet if I WAS BAD. Nowadays thats child abuse." You have tape made out of ducks? Plus, I'm pretty sure that was child abuse back then too.
• "It's kinda like the difference between 1st and 2nd degree murder? I don't much like either, but I will grant you that there is a whole heck of a lot of people who deserve it." Okay there isn't much to misinterpret in this one, but I am kind of afraid for my life.
• "TALK BACK TO MY DAD? loooool i'd rather jump off a bridge because he is RIPPED and he would pound the hell out of my ass :p" Umm...
• "I got the belt across my butts if I talkd bak,." You personally have multiple butts?
• "GET A BEET DOWN!" Are you swallowing beets?
• "What's worse is when you got it at school for fighting on the playground and then the school contacted your parents and you got grounded and licks when you got home" Your parents licked you as punishment?

On a side note, what horrifying traumas must have happened to a person (actually, almost two million Facebook users) to have them relate so fervently to such a blatant pro-child-abuse forum?

Trying is the first step to failure

I'm not actually feeling emo, it has just been a long week :)

I've been rewriting my paper, and I have done the majority of it (I think) but I think I'm getting too tired for this because I just wrote a list of stuff I still need to do, and it included absolute gems such as:

• redo table of contents = duh


• fill in abstract = duh


• add footnote re: data = duh


• amend conclusion = duh


• learn how to make footnotes = FAIL AT LIFE :(

I so can't wait for this to be done. I enjoy the challenge but I'm not impressed with my performance at this. I feel like all I'm doing is complaining and I need to snap the heck out of it. I feel like I'm a liar when I tell people I'm getting my honours, this is so not ideal.

Sorry, I guess I am a little emo.

HAPPY PICTURE!

what UP?

I love lamp

Here are two more of Chris' lovely sayings:

Causifying: "We tend to Englishify things"
Adjectiving a verb: "He walkingly went there" - This is my personal favourite so far

Why do I find this funny?

And why am I an idiot when it comes to posting videos?

Seek it out yourself, friends!!

"SNL: Who Wants to be a Millionaire: Steve Harvey"

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire/1222357/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR1fEowAClU

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!

1. There is a potion that makes you shrink.

2. There is a cake that can make you grow.

3. There is a real place called Wonderland.

4. Animals can talk.

5. Cats can disappear.

6. I can rewrite my honours paper.

If wishes were horses, I'd be eating wish meat every night

True story.

Specifically, I have two wishes in mind today.

One: I'm happy for those friends of mine who live happy healthy lives; my wish for those friends of mine who don't yet live happy and healthy lives is that they soon will. I know a lot of people who seem to get kicked around by the world sometimes.

Two: I wish my paper would write itself. My prof sent me an email saying my paper needs some rewriting to be done, and I'm okay with that, I just don't know how much more I can do. I'm at the limits of my writing ability already, truly. Do other people ever get this far and have nothing to show for it at the end of it all? I wish I knew. And now I'm thinking about it some more, and I think I see that getting this paper back for rewrites again isn't necessarily a bad thing. Actually, in the long run, I think it's a good thing, because who wants to do a terrible job and get pity-passed? Not me. I want to do so good, and the first step is doing those damned rewrites. The thing is, if I can't bring this paper up to par, I will have nothing to show for it. I hope it doesn't come to that..


*EDIT* My mom just said that wishes should be light like a salad :)

"Clever Title"

The last LIA to grace this blog; behold, in all it's glory:

This post is of general interest

If you understood the title, you are awesome. If not, you are still probably awesome. Probably.

When I was younger, my sister and I would listen to a lot of audio books borrowed from the library, and one of the best ones of all time was Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B Gilbreth Jr and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. It is autobiographical, chronicling what it was like to grow up in the early 1900s in the Gilbreth family. There were twelve children, six boys and six girls, and their upbringing was interesting because of the weird ways they were all raised. Their father was a motion study expert who was constantly looking for ways to make things more efficient, and in the summers they would all live in a couple of lighthouses on Nantucket Island. Enough about the book though.

Recently I was boredly browsing the internet, and I decided to look up the Gilbreth family. I had this image in my mind of what they all looked like, and so I really should have left well enough alone, but my curiosity always gets to me so I just had to find them. I thought there would be lots of pictures available since this is a pretty famous book (numerous publications and several movies have been made), but pictures were scarce. The pictures I did find, however, totally shattered my childhood memories. Of the pictures of the family members that I could actually find, none of them were anything like what I had imagined, and for a while I felt like I had ruined the magic of the book. I've since gotten over it, but it's strange how much it affected me at the time.

If seeing what the Gilbreth family actually looked like wasn't shocking enough, I just had delve deeper, and I found a complete list of birth years...and death years. Why did I look this up? Why? I knew they all grew up in the early 1900s, why did I actually have to go and confirm what I should have already known? Reality sure bites sometimes. I knew that the parents would already be dead, they were both born in the 1800s so if they were still alive I'd be kind of creeped out. And their father dies in the book so I've been over that one for years anyway. But out of twelve children - oldest born in 1905, youngest born in 1922 - only Fred is still alive (born in 1916). Can you imagine coming from a family of twelve children and being the only one left? Honestly, I'm not sure if I'd ever be able to handle it if my sister died, and she's the only sibling I have, so I can't imagine what it would be like to experience eleven sibling deaths. But then again, I think it would be hard for Fred to be as close to eleven people as I am to my sister, so maybe it wasn't as bad as I'm thinking.

I looked all of this information up recently following receiving my very own copy of Cheaper by the Dozen (audio book) as a gift. I recommend it to everyone, even though I'm not really giving it a fair chance here with this post :)

What's that? *gasp* Just the wind!

Thinking about it, I'm afraid a quite a few things. I never really thought of myself as fearless, and I never thought I was a scaredy-cat either, but my list keeps growing :) methinks it's time to conquer some or all of these:

• Spiders
• The dark (I wasn't always afraid of the dark, this one is relatively new. And it's only sometimes.)
• Developing Alzheimer's Disease
• Heights
• Possibly not amounting to anything important in the world
• Birds (Just pet birds, and I'm not sure why, they just freak me out.)
• Becoming blind someday (I'm not afraid of going deaf though, I'm pretty sure I could handle that without too much trouble.)
• Dying (Okay, I can't really conquer this one.)
• If Mirror Megan started moving around independently of Real Megan
• SPIDERS!

Sorry about all of the lists lately, I'm going to have to get more creative.

My Five Biggest Pet Peeves of Written English Language Use

In no particular order:

1. Using "your" instead of "you're"
2. Misuse of there/they're/their
3. Using apostrophe S ('s) on plurals (e.g. taco's should be tacos, DVD's should be DVDs, 1950's should be 1950s)
4. Writing "should of" instead of "should have" (it's based on hearing "should've" and then misinterpreting the phonemes for the words)
5. Writing a comma where there should not be a comma (e.g. "Writing a comma, where there should not be a comma.")

Bonus pet peeve: When people give you a list of there item's, and then they list bonus item's when they could of just extended the list. Seriously, your not stupid, so why list a bonus, when you don't need to.

LOUD NOISES

My boyfriend makes the most interesting linguistic choices. I think I will start chronicling them as they come along before I forget them. I'm really quite lucky, the stuff he says is often delightful:

Verbing: "She likes to lawnmow"
Backforming: "So it's not badminton, it's goodminton!"
Pluralizing non-count nouns: "We can use lots of different rices."

Wow when I started this post there were at least five things I wanted to write down, but I've forgotten some clearly. Fear not, I will be back.

Umm...What?

I looked up my grad photos online today, and all I can say is wtf? I got these professionally done and the photographer didn't even notice that my hair was flipped up? He took like 20 photos, and maneuvered me and fixed my hair on several occasions, and didn't notice this. So now I get to choose from 3 different photos (below) that are basically all the worst ones by default.

Also, I typically don't photograph very well, so only giving me 3 options to choose from is generally not gonna do it for me, as proven yet again by this set. Seriously, there isn't one photo in this set where I don't look nuts! You can definitely see my resemblance to my dad (not that my dad looks nuts, mind you), particularly my eyebrows do the same thing his do when he's smiling (one arches up while the other does not). Also, my one eye looks smaller than the other when in real life they are the same size.

I dunno, I think maybe number 3 is the best? Or maybe number 2? But definitely not number 1.

And again with the hair! Bah.

Honey Honey, how they thrill me!

I love musicals, they are just so wonderful and fun and addictive. I really enjoy live musicals, but musicals-turned-movies are amazing too. I dare you not to like at least one movie in this list of my favourites (in no particular order):

• Mamma Mia
• RENT
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Grease
• Almost every animated/computer animated Disney movie (waaay too many to list, plus if I listed them would you finish reading the list? I think not. Suffice to say (again) that Disney is awesome)
• Annie
• Hamlet 2
• The Prince of Egypt (with an amazing multi-lingual song if you search the special features)
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
• Hairspray
• The Wedding Singer (this movie would never beat up your landlord)
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Your Head A-splode!

Posting this particular Life is Average comic is not without a little tongue-in-cheek :P