A Girl With a Sword

you feel nauseous?

Okay, I keep hearing this really weird grammatical construction and I'm trying to figure out what's going on because even though it's not right, it still makes sense to me that people should use it.

Here are some examples:
"the door knocks"
"the rich guy torments in fire"

The first example I heard on NPR, a guy was telling a story and instead of saying "then someone knocks on the door" or "then there is a knock on the door," he just said "then the door knocks." And I thought, oh, he was into his story, he's just combining two sentences or something. But then I read the next example on Pitchfork, in their review of the new Pinback album, and those reviews, you know they are proofread and everything. So someone, somewhere, who is well educated, thinks that this construction is grammatical. I talked to my syntax prof about it and he said that it's kind of like the whole transitive/intransitive "breaks" thing where you can say "She breaks the window" and "the window breaks". A lot of verbs aren't like that, though. I can't say "She kicks the door" and "the door kicks". And you definitely can't say "he knocks on the door" and "the door knocks" or "he torments the rich guy" and "the rich guy torments."

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out whether this is a construction that is becoming acceptable, or whether its a random slip up that just happens. Have any of you heard this?

To make it all more complicated, a girl in my class the other day said this:
"I found it envious that he could speak so well."
Is that the same kind of thing or is it different? Now she should have said "I found it eviable" as in "it was enviable" which would be refering to the object, "it", but she says "I found it envious" as in "I was envious" which is refering to the subject.
object: enviable
subject: envious

This is like the old "naseated"/"nauseous" distinction. You say "I feel nauseated" because you are the object of the nausea, instead of "I feel nauseous" which means that you are making someone else feel nausea.
object: nauseated
subject: nauseous
Now this distinction is pretty much gone, everyone says "I feel nauseous." So it makes sense that some people would carry this on to other words, too and say "It was envious that he could speak so well."

All of these take a word that is usually used for the subject: "knocks", "torments", "envious", "nauseous" and use it to refer to the object. Which is kind of like the passive, which turns the object into the subject: "She broke the window" --> "The window was broken by her." And I'm writing my syntax paper on the passive, which is perhaps why I find this all so fascinating.
Plus, it's really cool.

the crane wife

Have you pre-ordered your copy?

You gotta love a band for whom life is a costume drama.

hook up

Today the nice young man from the cable company came and hooked me up some internet. Now I have it, it's only in the livingroom, but I do have a wireless router. It's just in Pennsylvania with all the rest of my stuff . . . So far it's been as on/off a connection as I've been having everywhere lately. Internet Man said it might be the damn VPN I have to have for the University network. Well, we'll see how this goes. What I'm really happy about is that now when I wake up at two in the morning and can't remember the name of that movie I saw a few months ago I can look it up and feel better.

This seemed particularily appropriate (click it to make it bigger):

(This is PhD, a comic strip I discovered last fall. There's a pretty little link at the bottom of my side column if you want to read more of it. I love it, but I think academic novels are the best thing ever so that kind of explains the appeal.)

avast, ye land lubbers!

International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

"Long John to his friends . . ."

for humanities students everywhere

weird name

Have you thought about how rare a college name "Covenant College" is? I mean, most colleges and universities are named after either people (John Brown, William & Mary, Washington, Notre Dame, Calvin) or places (all the state universities and U of Chicago, Boston U, SLU, Northwestern). Covenant is named after a thing. I can't even think of any other schools named after things. Kind of makes me wonder if Wallace will go after the name next. I mean, how can we be legitimate with a name like "Covenant College." Oh, I thought of one other school with a name like Covenant--Trinity College. Although, I don't know if that counts. Is Trinity a thing or a person? Tricky question.

cage-free

well, my iPod stopped working again, but the good part of this is that I got to listen to This American Life today (it was the episode "That's Not What I Meant"). This American Life makes me miss Hope. I went grocery shopping today and grocery shopping is always such a confusing experience for me. I hate making decisions about whether or not to get the expensive mayonaise, even though it tastes better than all the other kinds. And should I get the cage-free eggs even though they are more expensive and buying cage-free eggs reminds me that there are bad things going on in Africa that I need to look up and figure out how I can help and then I wonder if any helping is just hypocrisy for me, the girl who buys an iBook because she wants to feel cool and then it all becomes this moral dilemma and so I move on to the tuna fish only to find that there are about thirty different kinds of tuna fish. I had a long conversation with the stock boy about what things like "light chunk" and "white solid" meant and ended up just getting the pretty green can with the mermaid on it. And they didn't have onion bagels today, why didn't they have onion bagels? But I got hummus and tomatoes and now I feel healthier. And I got granola because I'm not interested in any cereal that isn't granola, even if it does cost more. Gotta just make my own. I'm really really missing the Wilkerson dining hall at UND. They had about thirty different kinds of cereal and they had these amazing chicken strips called "chicken strips o' fire" that they would serve at least once a week. Okay, enough dwelling on food.

and for those who only read entries with pictures, here's one of a William Blake painting, since I am writing this while sitting among William Blake paintings:

smoky

So I've been coming to this same coffee shop pretty regularily since I got here. I like it, it's made out of an old house so it has lots of different rooms and funny corners. It's smoky, but I don't mind that. I missed the smoke when I was in Boston. (I've also realized that pretty much everywhere smells like smoke here.) They play good music. Right now it's Andrew Bird, who I really haven't listened to enough. My current listening alternates between long streams of Mountain Goats and long streams of Sufjan.

I'm enjoying Columbia so far. I mean, it is kind of small compared to Boston, and even compared to Omaha, and I do spend almost all of my time on or near the campus. I like that the Publixes here are brick, although it still doesn't make up for not having Trader Joe's. Damn I miss that place. When I went to see Colin Meloy last January he was tuning his guitar and he looked around at the crowd and said, "why don't you all turn to the person next to you and tell them . . . your favorite item from Trader Joe's." I would judge people entirely by their favorite item at Trader Joe's, if I wasn't so busy judging them entirely by desktop background picture, homepage, and favorite 69 Love Songs song. My favorite Trader Joe's item is the Maple and Pecan cereal. The other day I went out to suburbia and went to Starbucks and World Market and Target. I like suburbia sometimes, its like junkfood and bad movies--sometimes it's just fun. Speaking of movies, check out the trailer for Driving Lessons with Rupert Grint. I'm also excited about The Last King of Scotland, but I think it's because it reminds me a little of Hotel Rwanda. Conflict in Africa and all. And of course there's Marie Antoinette. Chris Guest also has a new movie coming out in November, For Your Consideration, which is not a mockumentary. Whatever shall we do??

I've been working on translating Old English all day, my brain is a little tired.

zero tolerance for zero tolerance

I want this book.

we can always use more sufjan

I'm on my third cup of bad coffee for the day. There have been no cups of good coffee (although early in the day I am too incoherent to notice these things). One of the people at work brought in good coffee today, though. We just have to find a grinder. I've been learning about percolation lately. I haven't used this method since the summer after my freshman year, when I lived with Emily Barfhead Shaw's LSD-coffee maker (may it rest in peace). Percolation makes fun noises.

I've also been learning about syntax and sociolinguistics and Old English. Those are the three classes I've settled on. I decided that four was too much. And today I am thinking, and this could be just the bad coffee talking, that I love syntax more than anything else, definitely more than sociolingustics. And this is significant because I went into linguistics thinking I wanted to be a sociolinguist. But I'm realizing that may not be where my fascination lies. I like the clear abstractness of syntax and phonology. The problem, though, with choosing to be a syntactician or a phonologist is that I would pretty much be alienating myself from the rest of the world. You can't talk about syntax and phonology with people the way you can talk about Jane Austen, or even The Faerie Queene. So, that's my thought for the day concerning where this is all going.

Also, bought Sufjan's The Avalanche yesterday. So far, I love it. I wasn't sure what to expect, it being what was rejected from Illinois and all, but you can always use more Sufjan and that's exactly what this is.