Thursday, March 23, 2006

And Not Just The Obvious Ones, Like "Saloon"

Apologies for yet another protracted absence. I've been... well, not exactly busy as such. Anyway, Queensland was ravaged by a hurricane, and I found out that I've had a paper provisionally accepted by some journal or other, so there are entries on both sides of the ledger.

I'm also about to lose access to my old university account in the US, so I've been rummaging through the last five or so years of email and keeping the good ones. Patterns begin to emerge in your correspondence if you do this in a short enough space of time, even in addition to the usual patterns you see after staring at a screen for hours on end. Many, if not most of these several thousand emails were sent from my office and consisted of passionate negotiations with others on campus over the question of whether we were going to go to the bar, and if so which bar, and when, and what were we to do upon arrival at the bar. Reading through them en masse, one receives the impression that a primitive new language is taking shape before your very eyes; one with fifty-odd words for "bar".