A Girl With a Sword

you can't clean words

All I've wanted to do for a week is clean and make things out of paper and rubber cement. It's that feeling I used to get in college during exam week that made me want to color or cross-stitch. (Remember the Disney coloring book? And how I photocopied all the pictures so we could keep using them? Good times.) I just want to see that I've accomplished something concrete. I've been working on my syntax paper for weeks, well really, I haven't stopped working on it since I started in January, but we've moved on to phase two. Since the beginning of June I've been making lists of my data, basically using my sound emission verbs:

e.g. baa, babble, bang, bark, bawl, bay, beat, beep, bellow, blare, blast, blat, bleat, boom, bray, bubble, burble, burr, buzz, cackle, call, carol, caw, chant, chatter, cheep, chime, chink, chir, chirp, chirrup, chitter, chug, . . .

in all possible types of sentences. I've used them with "agent oriented modifiers":

Grandpa bellowed to bring the cows in.
The cows bellowed to show they didn’t want to come in.
The horn bellowed to wake up the campers
The horn bellowed to make the pedestrians get out of the way.

I've used them in sentences with locative inversion:

The babies babbled in the nursery
The nursery babbled with babies.

The brooks babbled in the woods
The woods babbled with brooks

I've used them with directional phrases:

The train chugged into the station

And I've used them in my favorite, the causative alternation:

The music blared
He blared the music

And now I have to figure out which of these sentences sound "acceptable" (i.e. would a native English-speaker use them) and which of them are right out, and my brain is just feeling kind of addled. It might be the rubber cement . . . At any rate, that's what I'm doing and when I'm not doing it that's what I'm avoiding. I did my spring cleaning on Wednesday, on the last day of spring. I cleaned almost every surface corner and crevice in my entire house, changed the light bulbs that have been burned out since before I moved here, and put out traps for the cockroaches, because knowing they are in my house really disturbs me. Still haven't turned on the air, although I've started closing the curtains during the day. Now it's night and there's a beautiful breeze coming into my spotless living room. Here's a picture of my living room when it's not quite so spotless:

I also started reading the Dr. Wildeman recommended Doctor Dolittle's Delusion today. I'll probably have more thoughts about that later this week.

Posted by linnea at June 22, 2007 1:07 AM