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...
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...coming unstuck in graduate school.
Friends in the academy and beyond
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5 comments:
first. i totally had the same thought process about lascivious during that paper.
second. did i mispronounce insidious? or was it someone else?
Only if I have also been mis-pronouncing it my whole life. I heard two people say "in-sid-you-us." That can't be right. Right?
oed online!
1) I heard lascivious being pronounced in a way that shocked and frightened me several times this weekend, because it's not how I've EVER said it.
2) I'm pretty sure I've said "in-sid-you-us" once or twice, but I think "in-sid-ee-us" is more correct. But yes, we should make this a drinking game. And we should do it by always bringing booze to talks in thermoses. Or flasks, if you want to be flashy. Or we could have little scorecards, and then immediately afterwards adjourn to a bar and chug the proper amount of beer.
I keep hearing 4-7 inches of snow. Then I go to my favorite weather blog to see what's up and...nothing.
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