Frustration

God, I love xkcd.com. Makes me feel better when things seem crappy. Or possibly makes me realize that dry sarcasm makes me feel better when things seem crappy.

Frustration:

In science, coming up with numbers on spss that are all a LOT bigger than .05 reminds me of how some boys must feel when faced with the above image. Frustration and frantic thoughts of "wait, maybe if I try it this way...maybe if I can angle it this way...there's something I'm not getting right here...ARG!"

The difference being that with stats, you get real excited when those numbers look much smaller than you'd hoped. And with bras, well, you get a lot more excited when they're bigger than you'd hoped.

GarageBand

GarageBand cracks me up.

I mean, playing music and playing video games just seem like two totally opposite activities. It's a weird feeling, when you haven't seen a full garage band in action before, to walk into a room and see 4 people standing stock-still in a semi circle each playing an instrument and staring at the TV screen with that glazed-over look. It's just funny. Maybe I'm biased because I am really bad at video games, so it's hard for me to get into them. If it doesn't catch my interest within 30 seconds, I will play one game and then can't focus on it anymore. Same thing happens with beer pong actually. I kind of suspect that the real reason is I can't do activities that involve my body doing one thing and my eyes focusing on something else. For example,

Soccer: you're supposed to look up as much as possible, not down at your feet. That was a disaster for me.

Video games: hands are moving around pressing buttons, but it's hard for me to do that while paying attention to a screen at the same time.

...I can't think of any more examples. But anyways, GarageBand is a funny concept to me. I get why it's fun, but it also reminds me how much the world is getting digitalized. Music used to be sound coming directly out of the instrument. You have total bodily control over what it produces. Then, speakers came around, and you still control the instrument, but the sound gets altered and comes out of a different piece of equipment. Then we got MIDI, which takes recordings of instruments making different sounds, breaks it all up into smaller segments and incorporates it into a software program. The music you create then is computer manipulation of different sounds previously recorded, with the physical instrument completely removed from the process. And garageband, now we've come back to the instrument (because it's fun to hold and utilize), except that it's really a representation of the real thing, and the game system controls the way all music sounds. And the point is not really to make music at all, it's to play a game.

Yayy technology, for making real-life situations as abstract as possible!

Mono-America

Conversation means having a dialogue right? "di" referencing two people, "logue" referencing speech.

thesaurus.com's first synonym for conversation IS dialogue. There's even a visual thesaurus (pretty cool) that maps how close words are in meaning to each other. "Language" is a central node, and "communication" and "conversation" are closely connected, only one node off. "Monologue" is farther away on the map, referencing one person's speech. It is the antonym of "dialogue."

How, then, would we categorize TWO monologues??

I mean, conversation is a dialogue, not two monologues. The overlap of monologue and dialogue is...speech (picture the venn diagram). Speech is very broad. Speech isn't the same thing as communication.
Two monologues, then, is an oxymoron.

Having two monologues doesn't get you any closer to a dialogue than two wrongs get you closer to a right. It's faulty thinking.

So why does this happen so much? People struggling to have a dialogue and not seeing that what is really occurring is two overlapping monologues? Maybe it's partly a function of our culture. America - mono-America. One person, each to his own, one and only. (I'm starting to see a sociolinguistic study in my head of frequency of words like "one" compared to "all")
We are each so separate from the whole, independent and "mono"-driven, considering ourselves, as a singular person, more important than ourselves IN CONJUNCTION with others.
I'm not saying this mentality means that Americans don't see how groups are important. It's that we see groups as a compilation of separate individuals, with each individual contributing their particular strength (their own "monologue"), rather than considering how each individual is shaped and strengthened within the group itself.
We don't grow separately. We are not islands. We interact; this is how people learn.
Monologues are lonely. Two monologues are twice as lonely. And a whole team of monologues is really not a great place to be.


(sorry for the pessimism this morning, I will try to post something more uplifting later )

wugs - an explanation

First, I should probably explain the name of my blog.

A wug is an imaginary animal, used in language acquisition research to test children's acquisition of the english plural morpheme.

Then the kid should answer "wugs!"

Urban dictionary definition #9 says that a Wug is "white thug, who thinks he is gangster and hard." #12 says: "a wanna-be thug", and #13: Acronym for Wow You're Gay.

While I do actually think i'm a white thug, this is not what the title means. When i first met my boyfriend and was telling him about my love for linguistics I described the whole Wug test (which he probably was not listening to but just laughing in his head at the word wug - I would have done the same), anyways it became kind of a joke about my extreme nerdiness when it comes to language and science. So when we both were at that point where we wanted to say those three little words but didn't quite want to just say it out loud yet, he sent me a text that just said: "i wug you".

It pretty much melted my heart, and the line became a real hit. (note- i wouldn't suggest using this line on other girls, but it worked on me). So wug came to mean love/affection/adorableness/hugs and all that other mushy stuff. It's our little code, so nobody else has to know we are being mushy, and instead think we are just being super weird.

So the title is just that: Love and Language (and a pre-emtive warning about the nerdiness/absurdity of this blog in general and the posts to come)

On another note, I've also deemed this blog the place where I will put all my ponderings musings and thoughts that are probably not appropriate to talk to people about on a daily basis (especially when they didn't ask) but that I still have to get them out into the world somehow (!) so very little censoring will happen here. People censor themselves all the time in every social situation, and that is necessary. But sometimes I have so much to say that it needs to go somewhere (!) Freud's description of the Ego makes sense in this situation, and named properly. In kindergarten they call it the Golden Rule, modern science blames it on the prefrontal cortex, and my mother just calls it "stop before you think, think before you talk."

But the point is, I need to talk, and the internet likes to listen :)