NO.

Professionalizing blog?

For me, the Graduate Student Conference this weekend inspired a new way to stay awake during talks.

A game: Listen for the Dubiously Pronounced Word.

There's one in every talk. You just have to spot it. Sometimes it's clearly a case of the person being wrong. Then you get to spend a couple of minutes feeling superior and/or figuring out how you can formulate a question with that word in it, so you can say it right. But sometimes you can't decide if it's the speaker that's butchering a term, or if perhaps you have been doing so for years. Then you get to spend a couple of minutes trying to figure it out. Either way, that's 2 or 3 minutes you're neither asleep nor listening to the talk, which is a win-win. Plus, listening to individual words is way better than listening to whole sentences, much less trying to connect sentences together.

Some words from this weekend I used to be sure of, but am not anymore:

lascivious
aporia
eschewing
insidious

Now if there were only some way to make this a drinking game...