name confusion

So the new Nick Cave album, Dig Lazarus Dig, has be getting a fair amount of radio play on the stations I listen to, and one thing I've noticed is that the DJs keep saying "Lazareth" instead of "Lazarus", and not only have they been saying it, but it took me awhile to notice. For some reason it sounds so natural. So I checked Google, and they both get a fair amount of hits, but the "Lazareth" ones are mainly from non-English speaking countries. It seems like it's a mistake, a confusion with "Nazareth," but I'm not so sure. Is there something natural about substitution "th" or "s"? It's like a lisp. Or are they two different language endings, "eth" and "us" that we just added to the name "Lazar," although, to be fair, most of the "Lazareth" hits aren't about the Bible story, they're just names.

the british money

I don't know if this is information available on every major internet news site, but I just found out that the UK is changing the design of their coins.

See the new ones here.

Aw, I get all nostalgic about UK coins, I remember when I used to get 10p (one of the old big ones, before they made everything small) as payment for doing my chores every week and I would go and buy lots of sweets and I would think about how great it would be if one week I could save my 10p and then the next week I would have 20p and be able to buy a pack of nerds! But I never did. And I really like the pound coins they have in circulation now, with the different symbols for Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England, and the mottos in the different languages around the outside, Welsh, Gaelic, Latin (can't have anything in English, that's far too pedestrian for coinage). But I like this new idea of using the Royal Arms. I'm just not sure about it's being split up over six coins. It's a nice design, it's just . . . it's coins, they tend to live separate lives and I'm sure there will be kids who never realize that all those funny pictures are actually part of one big picture, but then maybe it will be a great moment for them when they do realize.

childhood dreams and academic careers

it's a problem:

One of the pieces of advice given to me about writing statements of purpose for grad school applications is that you should refrain from writing about your childhood. This wasn't advice in response to anything I had said or written, apparently this is just a common mistake that people made. What's really wrong with too much life-holism? I think this chart makes it pretty clear, no one studies that anymore. Whatever it was you decided you wanted to do, and still, whatever it is you and your friends think are really cool ideas, no one is studying them and therefore your advisor is going to laugh at you and you're going to have to pick something fairly boring. Man! Why does academia work this way!

Um, yeah, Spring Break is over, I'm feeling fairly jaded, trying to write the abstract for yet another paper that I feel like I've been assigned a topic for. I'm tired and worried and I'm twenty-five and afraid of academic commitment. I'm too young to die! I miss college, sweet sweet non-committal papers on whatever the hell was exciting to me at the time.

verbs, and how they are the key to secrets

This is from the New York Review of Books review, by Colin McGinn, of Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought that came out last fall. I think it's a really good explanation, by a non-linguist, of why I am studying verbs. Levin and Rappaport Hovav, who he mentions near the end, have kind of defined the field I'm exploring. I haven't read any of Pinker's work on verbs, but he's a cognitive linguist, not really my type.

"To my mind, by far the most interesting chapter of the book is the lengthy discussion of verbs -- which may well appear the driest to some readers. Verbs are the linguistic keyhole to the mind's secrets, it turns out. . . .

feel the Illinoise

Barack Obama loves me.

"And as we leave this state with a new wind at our backs, and take this journey across the country we love with the message we’ve carried from the plains of Iowa to the hills of New Hampshire; from the Nevada desert to the South Carolina coast; the same message we had when we were up and when we were down – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope; and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people in three simple words:

Yes. We. Can.

Thank you, South Carolina, I love you!"