Trees and Stuff

You can really tell if you love a class if you find yourself playing with the ideas of the class in your freetime. I (Eric, the younger twin) am doing that a lot this quarter.

For my both birthday and Christmas I got those desk calendars where you tear off a page and see the little saying, factoid, joke or whatnot on the page. The little pages are piling up on my desk, so what do I do? I make syntax trees on them. Syntax is the structure of language, and you show that structure in little tree diagrams. We started working with them this week, and I find myself diagraming sentences. I was watching Monk last night and started diagramming lines from it.

The other day we devoted a large portion of our time to analyzing the Groucho Marx joke "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Awesome! In my nature of sound class we experimented with using two sounds to cancel eachother out completely. It's possible. And in Swedish we are learning how to talk on the telephone. It's a huge difference from English, or my other language Japanese. In Japan they are very polite, with special phrases that you only ever say on the phone. "Oh hello, very honorable caller" etc. English is neutral, "Hello, this is Eric" In Sweden you are very blunt just your first name or even better you just say your phone number. They are only 6 numbers in Sweden and when someone calls you, it is fine to just say that.

It is no exaggeration to call this my favorite quarter so far.



Oh and I am going to start pressuring the other Braunsey to put something up soon.