No, Thursday's Out....

Romeo, the 6 year old kid who doesn’t read, but calls himself “a numbers guy,” came in today and grabbed some Pigeon stories off the shelf, as he does every week. I told him I had heard an interview with the author, Mo Willems, this weekend. The first Pigeon book came out 20 years ago, and also, The Pigeon just made his operatic debut.   (Great NPR segment.) The Pigeon is very operatic on the page. He has Feelings.   Big feelings. We started on the first book, and then I stopped and said, “You know, we can read these again. But if you want to, we can read something else. Up to you.” “Let’s ahm-wissle fo it!” said Romeo. (He doesn't do R's.) Took me a minute, but I got it. “We don’t need to arm-wrestle! You can just choose a different book. Or not!” “Let’s ahm-wissle! If I win -- same books! If you win -- new books!” “No,” I said. “You just choose.” He got some new books and sat back down. He said, in a distracted way, “If we do this for seven years, we will be toge...

DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL! That’s what the banner by the winking cow on the Milky Way milk trucks says: Drink a mug a milk a meal! There are many Milky Way trucks on I-5. I was behind one for hours recently, silently chanting DRINK a MUG a MILK a MEAL, missing the OF before MILK, wondering if I would have preferred PER meal.  It hailed. It was a crummy drive.   I’m in Phonology this term. I thought it would be an introductory Linguistics class, but Noooooo, that would have been Phonetics. My mistake. I was struggling to keep up, but I stopped. Now the waves wash over me. Sometimes I grasp a concept, and sometimes I just admire one as it flashes past. In DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL, those first three A’s are pronounced “UH.” That’s the vowel sound called schwa, the one that looks like an upside down lower-case E.   In your mouth, the schwa vowel is notable for being right in the middle – not high, not low, not front, not back. Easy to reach. The schwa is by definition “unstressed,” ...

My beloved mother-in-law lives in Las Vegas, and we went to see her last week. No, she is neither a gambler nor a show girl.  She is 98. She’s there to be near her daughter and granddaughter, and she likes heat and sunshine.  Me, I’m a native Seattleite, rain in my veins. I feel parched and overexposed in Southern Nevada. I love the geologic wonders of Red Rocks, outside of town, but purely as a beautiful, alien planet, hostile to human life. And the city makes me crabby, self-consciously aware that I’m a stick-in-the-mud, utterly bereft of party-girl spirit. In the long, windowless corridor between the car park and the lobby/casino/Starbucks/liquor store center of our not-cheap hotel, there are numerous attractions that don’t attract me. I don’t want to renew our vows before a photo of Hoover Dam. I don’t want an extra-large sequined bikini with a long, pointy, apron-like attachment hanging down the front, or a caftan proclaiming: BE a Mermaid!, or a dumb poster with an ext...

Consider the pronoun pin, with SHE, HER, HERS, or HE, HIM, HIS, or THEY, THEM, THEIR.  That plural version needs four instances: THEY, THEM, THEIR, THEIRS. The third person plural has four variations, while those singulars cleverly manage four USES with only three FORMS. I am so grateful that I don’t have to learn English as a second language. I’ve always thought that listing even three forms on those pins was overexplaining. It should probably be enough to have just HER, for instance, and people could infer the SHE, and the HERS, from that. Anyone who wanted to switch gender and number for every usage would be asking a lot: SHE, HIM, OUR, THEIRS.   It would be tough on one’s friends. Ooh! One's friends!! ONE, ONE, ONE’S. Interesting. ONE manages four uses with only TWO forms. Talk about clever. When I first saw pronoun pins, I wanted one that said I, ME, MINE, in tribute to George Harrison, my favorite Beatle when I was a preteen, because I wanted to be “different...