Of course the the majority of the linguistics stuff goes stratospherically over my head, I am monolingual and barely literate in that, but some things don't. Such as, oh, How To Do Things With Words (warning: big PDF). As with much of this stuff it's too much trouble to trace back which blog lead me to that, but now that I've got the thing I'll have to actually read it sometime. And perhaps think about it, agree & disagree with parts of it, and let that get to me enough to go get more stuff on the subject. And etc. etc. etc. My poor old brain gets tired just thinking about thinking about it. It's so much easier to play kmahjongg till my half-crippled dominant arm goes numb or until I win one (which can easily kill 2 or 3 hours).
Which is why at 50 I remain a badly self-educated 8th grade dropout still reeking of Unfulfilled Potential. This doesn't usually bother me, it's not hard to be more intellectual & scholarly than most of the people I've encountered in my economically impoverished life, but when I let shit like this happen it can ruin my whole day.
It's even worse that in the intervening couple hours I'd let myself get distracted by a Fark link & discussion that got me so upset that I forgot what I'd meant to say & do here. Whatever it was you can be sure it was staggeringly brilliant, you'd have been so impressed you'd have to send me money and/or tell all your friends about your great new guru, but now there's nothing left to see but the everyday Davy being dazed & abortively crotchety again.
Maybe I'll just take a nap, or have a beer, or one and then the other. Then later, meaning at some unforeseeable point in the indefinite future, I'll come back get all eloquently ratiocinatory & shit and give Languagehat a reason to link to this here thingy. Unless your luck holds out: you really don't want to know how much smarter I am than your average bore, do you.
