senioritis

When most people get senioritis, they feel blah. They see the end in sight and go, "I don't even care anymore," and just kind of slack through to graduation. For some reason, I seem to have it the opposite way around. I think this is the hardest I've ever worked in my life. Yesterday I spent six hours writing a research paper, and the sad part was, I actually enjoyed doing it. That's probably good, since I have five more papers due in the next week.

I got in a big argument with a girl in my language and gender class over whether the word "pen" should be phonetically spelled with a schwa or an epsilon. She ended up asking the teacher, who said, "Um... schwa maybe?" But the teacher's an anthropologist, not a linguist. Sorry, but a schwa is an unstressed "uh" kind of sound, like in the last syllable of "melon" or "open" or the first syllable in words like "above" or "confront." It's the sound that really throws people off in spelling because it can be spelled with pretty much any vowel, because it's unstressed and has no specific form. But "pen" is one syllable, so the vowel is stressed, so it's pronounced in a different part of your mouth, so you would use an epsilon, which makes an "eh" sound, like in "met" or "bed" or... "pen." I don't even see how she can argue with me on this. Especially since she tries to spell the word "bird" with a schwa. There's no schwa in "bird" unless you're trying to pronounce it "buhrd"! You know what the vowel sound is in the word "bird"? The R! Seriously, the letters R, N, and L can all function as vowels. Cool, huh?

It's kind of weird that I'm now at the point that when I talk to my friends outside of class, we talk about academic stuff. I ran into my friend Jeremy and he started telling me about the verb themes in the Athabaskan languages. And I already knew about it from a class independent of his.

Geez I'm such a nerd!