As a linguist, I believe that there are no real “rules” for language. There are only sets of evolving tendencies and commonly accepted speech-habits. Linguistics, as a field of study, does not strive to be prescriptive (that is, telling people how they should speak), but rather descriptive (that is, telling people how they do speak).

Yesterday, Larissa and I were talking about the “proper” way to pronounce often. When I was younger, I never pronounced the [t] in the middle of the word. But in my adult years, whether through a shift in our culture’s constantly evolving speech patterns, or maybe because there is a growing perception that pronouncing the [t] is a more “formal” or “refined” way of speaking, I have found myself more often than not pronouncing this word with the [t].

Larissa herself was a little confused as to whether or not the [t] should be pronounced, and couldn’t quite remember if she had been pronouncing the [t] her whole life, or just for the last few years. As a compromise, I decided to exercise my rights as a linguist and modify the pronunciation of often to a third form that we can all agree upon: offenton.

So now it is up to you, my loyal readers, to spread the use of this new word, and forever silence the questions of how to say often. I think if we use this new pronunciation offenton enough, it’ll really catch on.

I am currently receiving somewhere in the range of 20 spam comments per 24 hour period. Is this normal for a blog that gets only 20-30 visitors per day? Somewhere out there at Internet Spamming Headquarters, I believe the following conversation has taken place:

Spammer 1: Hey, this Darren guy’s blog has decent writing and pretty pictures. Do you think we could get away with some ringtone, viagra, and penis-enlargement spam in his comments section?

Spammer 2: Does the guy get decent traffic?

Spammer 1: He’s ranked 4/10 with Google’s Pagerank service, so the site can’t be that small. Although most of his comments are from Canadians.

Spammer 2: Well, Canadians need to keep their newly-enlarged penises erect while answering cell phones whose ringers play Nickelback tunes too, you know.

Spammer 1: Point taken. Engaging spam.

Needless to say, I’m now moderating all the comments before they’re posted. So if you’re wondering why you don’t see your comment till a few hours later, that’s why.

Freakin’ spammers.

Larissa and I watched The Sixth Sense earlier tonight. You know, the “I see dead people” movie. Here’s the crazy thing about it: Larissa had seen it before, but COULDN’T REMEMBER THE TWIST ENDING.

As we approached the last 3 minutes of the movie, the tiny shards of memory that she still retained from having seen it before started asserting themselves, and she began to throw out some hypotheses. “Oh! He sees dead people too! No! His wife is actually dead! Oh wait… WHAT?! HOW COULD I FORGET THAT?!”

When it was finally over, she turned to me and said “That was a really great movie! Did it win any awards? It must have!”

So, just to sum up here, she had seen the movie before, she hadn’t fallen asleep the first time, and she absolutely enjoyed it (meaning that she didn’t forget it because she thought it was mediocre), and yet she still forgot the twist ending.

I’m just waiting for the day when I wake up next to her, and have to re-introduce myself to her as her husband. Memento, anyone?

Larissa and I had this conversation the other night, just after having watched all three Special Extended Edition Lord of the Rings movies over the course of the past week.

Darren: So honey, what did you think of these movies?

Larissa: I liked them!

Darren: So, as an outsider to geek culture, do you now understand why geeks like this stuff so much?

Larissa: Yes, but you know, we call non-geek culture “normal”.

It’s 10:30pm, I’m sitting at the computer in my underwear, and I’m almost finished washing over a week’s worth of dirty dishes.

Yes my friends, the dishes had become unruly. They had already conquered the sink and half of the counter, and were preparing for an invasion of the surrounding floor space, and possibly the tops of kitchen appliances. The only available option was to slap on the rubber gauntlets of cleanliness, take hold of the sacred scrubber of oppression, douse it with the enchanted liquid-soap of grease-cuttery, and open a can of whoop-dish!

I cannot put into words how much I dislike the washing of dishes. I never felt this way until I found myself living in a basement apartment with only a single sink with which to wash. Until that point, I had had the use of a dishwasher, and on the rare occasions that I did dishes by hand, I would do them with another person, and make it a social activity.

Larissa, on the other hand, loves doing dishes. She likes the feeling of satisfaction that one acquires by looking at a completed task, and visibly seeing the results of your hard work. Since she works as a teacher, it’s often hard to see how your efforts pay off in students’ lives, but with dishes, the difference is evident immediately.

While I also enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that one earns by washing a crap-load of kitchenware, I feel that the annoyance of the work itself overwhelms any happiness that is experienced in finishing the task. I feel the same way, incidentally, about cutting the lawn, or shaving. Sure, the grass, and my face, both look better afterwards, but doing each monotonous, repetitive task uses up valuable time that could be spent watching movies, or re-reading the Dune novels.

For a while, Larissa and I had a fairly good dish-washing system in place. I would save up my dirty dishes for the entire week, and on the weekends when she would visit, Larissa would have the privilege of washing my dishes for me. I knew how much she enjoyed this task, and I didn’t want to deny her the fulfillment of seeing a job well-done. And just so you don’t think I was being lazy, I would contribute by putting away what had been washed and dried, and by searching out appropriate music selections that would create a fun and happy atmosphere for her dish-washing.

Lately our weekends have been so busy in taking care of last-minute wedding and moving preparations, that when we come back to my apartment, all we both want to do is relax and eat Smartfood popcorn. Thus, the dirty dishes multiply, and I am forced to tackle them myself.

I knew that the moment of crisis had arrived when I found myself saying to Larissa over the phone “I think I may skip breakfast tomorrow, because I don’t have any clean bowls for cereal, and there’s no counter space to use for buttering toast”. Larissa’s response was something along the lines of “Why don’t you wash some bowls, then?!” Point taken.

I’m happy to say that the counter is now usable, and the bowls have all been washed. However, I now realize that I’m out of cereal and bread, and it’s too late to go to the grocery store.

The crisis continues.

I know it’s been a few days since my last post. To those of you who diligently sit down at your computer every morning with a hot coffee, and perhaps a tasty Eggo waffle being warmed in the toaster, anxious to read the latest onslaught of mind-blowing insights that this website usually offers with much more regularity, I offer my abject apologies. I offer no excuses, but only a promise to deliver quality content to you with more reliability, and less non-blog-related distractions.

So, on to the insights.

Has the following situation ever happened to you? You pass a stranger on the street, making eye contact just as you reach speaking-proximity, and so you throw out a quick, casual greeting. This greeting, however, is misheard by the person you are addressing, and so they respond with an equally casual response, which has no connection to what you just said. For example:

Me: “Hey there!”

Stranger: “Good, thanks.”

This happens with almost-alarming regularity to me as I bump into people while I read meters.

The only possible interpretation of such an exchange is that, in the casual-ness of my greeting, I must have slightly mumbled my words, so that the stranger only hears two syllables which contain some vowels and an [r] sound. The stranger’s brain takes these criteria, and improperly assembles them to make my words seem to be “How’re ya?”, to which the reply “Good, thanks” is acceptable. Since the stranger and I are quickly passing by each other, and have little chance of ever having to speak again, neither of us is inclined to ask the other person what they actually said, or to correct the discrepancy. You’re just left feeling awkward.

This analysis, my friends, is what you can do with an education in Linguistics.

Larissa had the hiccups last night.

When I find myself suffering from this particular affliction, I usually employ my highly developed mental control and physical awareness to simply “will” the hiccups to stop. Larissa, on the other hand, subscribes to the remedy of “drinking from the far side of a glass”. Executing this maneuver involves bending down at the waist so that you’re almost touching your toes, and tipping the water glass backwards so that the water is being poured onto the roof of your mouth. It’s a recipe for catastrophe, and one of the most ridiculous methods of curing hiccups that I’ve ever heard.

Conversely, Larissa finds my method of hiccup-curing to be equally ridiculous, so last night when she had the hiccups and I told her to “just stop” by power of her will, she sarcastically said “Alright, I’m going to stop hiccupping now!”

And what happened? She stopped! We waited 4 or 5 seconds in anticipatory silence to see if the cure had really taken effect, and it had! With “in your face!” triumph, I reveled in the victory of my hiccup-curing method, saying “You see! It really does work! It’s all about mind-over-body! Your stupid water-drinking thing is ridiculous!”

Larissa’s response? “No, it didn’t really work! I just happened to use up all of my hiccups just then!”

Back in this post, I talked about visiting my friend Julius in Hong Kong in the summer of 2002, and how there was a funny story from that visit that I would mention in another post. Well, this is that post.

Julius, along with his girlfriend and I, were hanging out one night at a cafe-type-place in Hong Kong, and we had all ordered these milk-based drinks, which were not really milkshakes, but more like flavoured milk. Mine tasted like coconut, and I found it quite enjoyable.

As I was drinking my milk, I asked Julius where this drink comes from (and by that I meant, which area of China or Hong Kong did this type of drink originate). His reply to me, as far as I could tell, was “From a cow”.

Now, I know that milk comes from cows, and I suspected that Julius himself knew that I was aware of this fact, so I assumed that he was just toying with me. I said to him “Yeah, but where does it come from?” Then, he and his girlfriend both said in unison “From a cow!”

Sensing that something was being lost in the communication process, I got a little agitated and said “I know that milk comes from a cow, but where does this drink come from?!”

Julius and his girlfriend paused for half a second, and then they both began laughing hysterically. I stared at them, bewildered, wondering when I was going to get the joke. Finally, after he caught his breath, Julius said to me “No, no - there’s a region in China called Macau! That’s where these drinks come from!”

I tell ya, going to Hong Kong is worth it just for the funny stories!

Larissa, my gorgeous, amazing fiancee, is a woman of intrigue and mystery - A multi-faceted woman, who balances the qualities of beauty, intelligence, and charity in sublime equilibrium. She also possesses some of the wackiest quirks I’ve ever come across.

Today I’d like to share one particular quirk with you: Her fear of swarms.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t been able to fully nail down the precise domain of situations that this fear encompasses. It could be a mass of insects. It’s appeared in the form of static on a television screen. She was scared by a scene of writhing, injured bodies, groaning on the floor in one particular shot of a martial-arts movie (like what you see at the end of Kill Bill vol 1, but it wasn’t that exact movie). But the situation that this fear manifests itself in most commonly is when we see swarms of birds.

I’m sure you’ve all seen those swarms of blackbirds that like to hang out in fields, and take off en masse into the sky. I personally find it mesmerizing to watch the whole cluster of them swooping, arcing, and gliding in a single, undulating mass in the air. I could watch and be entertained for hours. For Larissa, having to watch these birds would be considered a form of cruel torture.

My most startling encounter with Larissa’s fear of swarms, and specifically these black birds, came one afternoon as we were driving between Hamilton and St. Catharines. We were approaching one of those signs that spans across the highway, telling you which exits are coming up next. As we got closer to the sign, I saw that it was covered in perched blackbirds. Having never seen these birds sitting on a highway sign like this before, I nudged Larissa and said “Hey, check out that sign!” Larissa’s response was something along the lines of

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!

You’ve got to imagine a scream of such magnitude and terror that I actually feared for my own safety as I was driving. When I made sure that I had full control of the car, I couldn’t help but start laughing at Larissa’s insane reaction to the birds.

After we had driven under the sign (Larissa had her eyes closed), she was repeating the words “That’s so gross” over and over again, like a mantra. I restrained my laughter, took her hand in mine, and told her that it was all over, and everything was going to be fine. However, to this day, just hearing me re-tell this story to other people makes her jittery.

Larissa, if you’re reading this, don’t worry - I’ll protect you from those mean ole birds! At least you’re not afraid of underground water reservoirs, like Christy.

Recently, I was reproved by my fiancee for not drinking from the proper straw. Yes, it is possible to get in trouble for that. Here’s how it went down:

While enjoying a meal at Kelsey’s, I found myself growing thirsty. With our waitress nowhere in sight to refill my water glass, I asked Larissa if I could have a sip of hers. She consented. I pulled out my straw from my own water glass, stuck it in hers, and proceeded to slate my thirst. Outrage ensued.

“Why wouldn’t you drink from my straw?!” she asked. “I have my own straw, honey! Why wouldn’t I use it?” I answered. “I can’t believe you just did that!”, she retorted. “What?!” I said. “What’s the big deal?!”

This is the big deal - We have differing views on where the straw is assigned. In Larissa’s view, the straw is assigned to the drink. Therefore, one should use the straw that has already been fraternizing with that drink, so to speak. I, on the other hand, see the straw as assigned to the person. So when it comes time to drink from another glass, my trusty straw comes with me.

Each of us has strong reasons for our particular view. Larissa sees my lack of straw-sharing as a personal attack on her hygiene. I myself would simply rather use a straw with which I am already intimately acquainted, without the worry of tasting lipstick or some other foreign substance on an unknown straw.

Both sides of the debate have merit, I believe. Thankfully, Larissa and I have reached a compromise on the issue.

We do it her way.