Health matters.  I need to get off my soapbox and do a more personal entry.  I had two remarkably good weeks: my stomach problems of all kinds were much rarer, and most days, I had a pretty good appetite.  It's usually in the evenings when food looks least appealing, but most days, I managed breakfast (OJ to wash down the pills; cereal, which has filled my shelves as much as did Seinfeld's; a cinnamon roll, which can always be justified because I need to keep my weight up; and of course coffee.  One of the ironies of my adventure with kidney cancer is that my kidneys work better than they have in many years: I can drink three cups of coffee in the morning without any bathroom breaks, and I almost never have to get up in the middle of the night.  Who understands these things?   By midday I was ok for lunch.  And during the last two weeks, even dinner looked appealing.  The menu may not have had a lot of variety--sushi at least three times a week and, perhaps reverting to childish things, boxed Kraft macaroni and cheese.  But still, I was eating.

At 3 a.m. Thursday, though, everything reverted to a more familiar pattern.  At 3 a.m., then at 4 a.m., then, after a fitful sleep for the rest of the night, more trips to the bathroom, more Imodium added to the rest of the pills, and general fatigue.  My friend Jill called from California and suddenly, with no warning, I couldn't stay awake and had to abruptly end the conversation.  I fell asleep in an awkward position on the couch--my head leaning on Mohamed, one leg over the arm of the couch, and the other, the one with the metal and plastic, dangling awkwardly off the couch.  When I woke up, that leg hurt; the fact that we're having an early bout of chilly weather probably doesn't help with the stiffness either. 

So that's my kvetching for today.  This too shall pass.  But the two weeks of energy and appetite were certainly a nice break.

Language matters:  Gordon, who is the Dean of the College and who also loves language and languages, sent me a link to a blog, Lingua Franca, on the Chronicle of Higher Education.  There is a contest to invent a ridiculous new rule for English grammar.  The editor's example was 'centered around,' a phrase no one worried about till the 1920s, when someone declared that it should be 'centered on,' and that prescription somehow spread into grammar and style guides and became a "rule."  Other obvious examples of "rules" that have nothing to do with the history or syntax of English grammar include not splitting infinitives (I happily split one in paragraph two), not starting sentences with 'and' or 'but,' and not ending sentences with a preposition.  I once heard an adjunct who was teaching across from my office telling his class never to end a sentence with a preposition.  His example was that they should never say, "Where are you from?" but had to say "From where are you?"--to which the only appropriate response would be from someplace where they speak English.

I couldn't resist the challenge of the contest.  At first, I thought about pet peeves (ok, I've got my persnickety side) like "continue on" or "reply back," but those aren't original.  Then I thought about 'anyways,' (the Urban Dictionary has a very vulgar comment about that usage--vulgar, but one I share).  What I finally came up with was this:

New Rule

Never use 'off' after the verb 'go' when an alarm or siren begins to sound.

Logic:  The alarm is off when it ceases, not begins, to sound.

Incorrect:  Dreaming happily, my alarm startled me when it went off at 6 a.m. this morning.

Correct:  Dreaming happily, my alarm startled me when it sounded at 6 a.m. this morning.

Given the generally humorless nature of the comments on the blog, I'm not sure my use of both a dangling modifier and a redundancy in the examples, while focusing on the silly new rule, will be appreciated.  Still, I think my logic is impeccable.  In all the foreign countries where I've taught, even the best speakers will say "the alarm went on," and when I reply (not back), they ask if we say 'off' instead of 'on,' what we say when the alarm stops ringing.  And then I have to stammer an improvised response since the construction is something native speakers never think about.  So from now on, we all need to say, Dreaming happily, I was startled when my alarm went on at 6 this morning.  Now that's logical.