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Steve Pinker’s Words and Rules
In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker provides a well-rounded glimpse into linguistics, history of languages, language families, childhood speech errors, neural networks, and various other related topics through the examination of regular and irregular verbs. What one might consider a rather boring topic on the surface (“j’ai, tu as, il/elle/on a…”, anyone?) is presented in such a manner as to make reading the same lists of the families of irregular verbs (in four languages, no less) several times bearable and even interesting. I found my interests leaning towards the history of languages and language families discussed throughout the first five or six chapters and my attention waning on the last…
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What happens when all the love is gone?
One develops some damn shin splints and sore feet, that’s what. I need new shoes. Even walking, I can feel that the cushioning is gone in the toe/ball of the foot section of these, and my feet are starting to stay sore all day after my runs. They’re just cheap Saucony Grid Auras, but they’ve served me well for over three hundred miles. I need to acquire another pair, is all. This morning, I walked 3.5 mi at a 15:17 pace on the track. I even remembered to reverse direction today so that I’m going clockwise. And I managed to keep count of laps. I’m starting to wonder if there’s…
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Just a stroll with a side of iron
I suppose another challenge in this blog will be to keep the titles interesting. How many ways can I label a weight-lifting workout or a run? I got a half-mile into my first interval yesterday morning and felt a splint-like twinge in my left leg. Given that yesterday was my sixth day in a row of running, with two of those days being my rougher “weekend runs”, I decided to walk. I’d rather miss a day (or even the rest of the week) in running than to miss two weeks from splints or even longer if I let it compound into something more serious. So a day or two of…
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A brief touch on dialect
So I’m now reading Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes’s American English: Dialects and Variation, and I love the way they explain the details and quirks of the dialects as though the reader has never heard them. Not that that isn’t a good thing, because it’s generally known what assumptions can do to someone, but it’s highly entertaining to read: Another Southern American helping verb form which serves to convey a meaning which is not readily indicated in standard English is the word liketa, as in It was so cold out there, I liketa died. Historically, liketa comes from like to have and seems to have been equivalent in meaning to…
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And so we begin…
I’m not sure where I want to go with this. I want to track my workouts in a journal-like form to allow me to better track progress, problems, and conditions. I’m also not sure how regular I will be with this. The goal, of course, is to post after every workout, running or weights, to achieve the benefits of running this here blog. We’ll see. Current workout schedule: Monday thru Friday, 05:30: Run intervals for three to five miles on school track. Problems to track: splints, asthma/sinuses, upper-body posture problems. Tuesday, Friday, 17:00: Weightlifting with upper-body focus. Bench/ground base jammer, lat pulldown, shoulder press, tricep pushdown. Follow by ten minutes…