Life changed today? Check

Karin here.

I just spent a most delightful morning on our sunny couch reading a book that makes me want to be a better person. It makes me excited for student teaching and continued learning instead of dreading all that work. I feel like I have the energy to do all those great things I've dreamed of doing like going to the gym and being a good dance teacher and being friendly to the fridge repairman and everyone else I run into. I'm even starting to grasp the feeling that life will keep on changing and I can learn and grow and adapt right along with it. My happily ever after wedding is not the climax or end of my life.

And the book? It's about polygamy. A Mormon Mother by Annie Clark Tanner is the autobiography about a Mormon girl who grew up as the daughter of a second wife in late 19th century Utah and then practiced it as an adult. If that's not fascinating enough, she was married to one of the early presidents of Brigham Young College only a few years before the manifesto came out. Her insightful perspective is surprisingly progressive as she examines parent and husband-wife roles, changing church teachings, and obedience as a virtue through her own experiences.


Also, lest you think I lie around all day reading such high literature, let me explain that I read it for a class on Utah History, which I need to head to...right now. It's taught by Professor Spencer Fluhman and like the book, I highly recommend it. Who knew Utah history was so crazy? And amazing. And crazy.

Dear Mr. Simmonds

Today I submitted a response to an editorial published in The Student Review on the need to abolish or wage war against "corrupt" English. The author seemed very agitated at the use of fail as a noun. Poor guy. Here is my response, which I hope is included in the next issue.

Dear Mr. Simmonds,

A return to the noblest of English indeed! Unfortunately such linguistic corruption is nothing new and part-of-speech conversion is but a small fraction of the issue though I will keep this discussion limited to the issue of part-of-speech conversion for sake of length. We language prescriptivists have a great share of work cut out for us in such an endeavor.

You would not believe the number of occasions that I have heard the nouns access, host, mail, dress and even switch used as verbs. This verbification, it seems, will not cease! Is it really too difficult to say, “I do not have access” instead of “I can not access” or even worse “I can’t access”? For heaven sakes! This is English! We do not affix our negative particles! There is little as dreadful as agglutination (though this is a separate issue). Is it so difficult to let our nouns and verbs remain separate? Is it too difficult to remember that mail is something we send, not something that we do? It is not! I assert that this is not a function of difficulty but rather laziness and lack of intellect. Sloppy speech is among the vilest of sins and is used among the vilest of people.

I am, however, running into some personal difficulty in the matter. I recently learned that sleep was not originally a verb but a noun and since I do enjoy using it as a verb I fear this makes me a hypocrite. I am unsure of how to resolve this. If you have any advice in the matter I gratefully welcome your response.

Sincerely,

Justin Stark
BYU Linguistics Major

ONE|UNO|ОДИН|BIR

Dear Everyone,

This is a blog by Justin and Karin. Mainly we thought it would be a good way to keep in touch with our family members and friends who we don't get to see a lot.

It’s been two months since the beginning of perhaps the most significant union since the yankees shot up all those racists or slave owners or whatever. I guess to be more specific, a reunion seeing as how this union has a history of separation also. Never again though. We promised.

We've settled into our home at the foot of BYU. This is official today I guess because we finished making our curtains—kind of. That’s what we're saying but the kitchen doesn't have any... yet. We like our house a lot—well really we only have a basement, but we sure do like it. Except that it's always cold...and that the kitchen smells some kind of funky.

More significantly, Justin is still saving the world one delinquent at a time, at the treatment center where we met almost two years ago. I (Karin now) am working for an organization that is affiliated with BYU and only The Largest database about the status of women. It's called WomanStats (womanstats.org). My job is to get pumped up with feminist angst and appalling trivia via reading government documents and news articles. I pull out important information and then categorize it into one of 300+ categories so that researchers can go onto the database and type in a country and a category (such as domestic violence or voting rights) and retrieve a ton of cited information on that topic. Pretty sweet.

Justin still gets his rant on about the vices of two party systems, the IRB, racism, sucrose, motion control running shoes, and linguistic prescriptivism (how dumb is it that database is one word whereas a lot isn’t. When was the last time you used the word lot. You didn’t). He is working on some research, which he received a grant for. Something about words and side effects, he thinks it’s important and hopes to get published. Wouldn’t that be special?

Karin is trying to find a high school who will pay her to practice teaching on their students (also known as an internship) so that she can finally be done being a student herself. She is also getting a bunch of 10-year-old girls ready for their dance recital in April. Please cross every appendage you have for me! (Woops I broke character—now you all know whose writing this vaguely 3^rd person paragraph.) It’s a good day when we get through dance class and no one has cried or gotten hurt…Our show is the first weekend in April and it’s gonna be big. I’ll be playing a mime who provides comic relief between dances. Note: I said mime. Not sideshow.

Don’t forget to spay and neuter your pets.