Tired and tagged.

I'm incredibly tired right now. Incredibly, because I slept quite well. The first thing in the morning, however, I went to the Linna library reading room and read for two hours. It was so dark in there that I could barely stay awake.

Besides, the early hours of the day are the least effective for me. No matter how much this society is built on the assumption that all people just love to wake up early and can work effectively starting from 8 am, it's never going to be a reality in my case. Some people are simply more evening/night creatures, and they never catch the early worm. (Or whatever the hell that saying is.)

I don't remember anything from what I read, except I noticed some Canadianisms in the text. Always good to have ideas for possible new research projects.

So I got tagged by Amoena. I'll make an attempt at doing what I'm supposed to. I'll admit right away that I don't know any other bloggers well enough to tag them. I mean, I do read some blogs. But if I suddenly gave a comment that I tagged them, they'd probably be scared out of their wits. I'm a stalking kind of reader.

Anyhow. The rules, which I copied from Amoena:

1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

And the facts.

(1) I plan to write a science fiction novel one day. I'm already on page three.

(2) The only thing I miss about last summer are the frequent Messenger sessions with Amoena.

(3) There is a guy in my German class who(m) I'd like to ask out, but haven't worked up the courage yet. (Because let's face it, Finnish men almost never take the initiative. And Italian and French men far too often.)

(4) I'd like to become a mum before I turn 30. To hell with career, I want babies! (Actually I think I could have both.)

(5) I like to spend quality time with my little brother by watching horror movies. We don't care about bad ratings, as long as it's R-rated. If there are zombies, we're going to watch it.

(6) The same brother once gave me edible underpanties for a Christmas present. How sweet of him.

(7) I suck at math, but I was the only one in my class who scored full points in the algebra test. I like the simple beauty of equations.

So there. Over and out.

A Finite jest.

I read about the author David Foster Wallace in the paper. I'm glad somebody ordered his big hit, Infinite Jest, at the main library in Tampere. I have got to read that book when it's available.

I like the thought of a 1000-and-plus-pages book (with footnotes too!). Something alluring about them. If you like what you're reading, it's a wonderful feeling to know that it's going to last for a long while yet.

Wallace is dead now. He suffered from depression for 20 years until he finally killed himself at 46. So the columnist wonders why he did it, since he had a family, success with his career, a wonderful life history.

To my mind, the right question is why he didn't do it any sooner. Can you imagine 20 years of severe depression? How on earth did he do it? It doesn't matter how many wonderful things you have in your life if you're depressed. They don't help that much, sadly.

Sometimes I wonder how it's possible that I'm still hanging on here, and I'm barely 25. I can't imagine living like I have so far for 20 more years, so I don't imagine it. I just don't plan my life that far ahead, but I keep my hopes up. One thing at a time.

I got tagged by Amoena. I'll get down to that soon. I don't really understand what it means though. Is it like those letters that used to circulate among strangers, where you wrote something about yourself and sent it forward?

You know, back when people still wrote letters. In case you don't know, they're these pieces of paper with writing on them. Writing that was written with a pen. Handwritten. Can you imagine?

I'm a little worried about my letter writing hobby. I've exchanged letters with my dear cousin for 16 years now, and we've always written at least once or twice a year. Now that she lives in the same town, I wonder if she'll want to keep it up. Well, maybe we'll continue as soon as we live in different towns again.

Almost left my values at the desk.

I'm a little offended now because I didn't get that ticket in the mail that informs/reminds me that I'm entitled to vote in the local elections. Hello, I've voted before - what are they trying to tell me?

Anyways. I found a candidate after all, and since the university library, Linna (my mind always goes to "prison", instead of the writer Linna), had an advance voting booth, I figured why not.

I'd decided on the person already, but this morning I got an ad from another candidate. He had a special ad for people living in my area, and there he mentioned that he's against a certain project that nobody in the neighbourhood wants.

For a moment, I was tempted. Something concrete like that would be so easy to have as your basis in voting. But I couldn't leave my values at the desk (as some Parisian hotel allegedly asked their customers to do). I can see through his populist tactics.

He probably had a special ad for every region in this town (Tampere is a town, not a city, no matter how much they try to fool us), and had something to be against or promote there, and fish in votes.

Looking more closely at the ad, with lots of text and nice pictures, I didn't get that feeling that I could trust that person. I want the ad to somehow radiate honesty, humbleness and non-populism. Sometimes a dash of populism is refreshing, but only acceptable if the voter is made aware of it.

It's extremely annoying how some people underestimate my ability to see through the visual and verbal rhetoric of their ads. So I tend to go for people who have an endearingly clumsy, simple and bland ad, which nevertheless says everything I need to know. I found the candidate first, and only then did I notice that he's also from the right party too. Perfect.

The last time I voted, it was where I grew up. All the candidates were middle-aged and didn't really resonate anything in me. I voted for a person whose ideals I can't stand nowadays.

Voting is such an ambiguous issue for me. It's so hard to know whether you're truly having an effect on the things you want or not. Most candidates you don't even know until they start advertising, so you tend to know only what the ads tell you, or what they're telling you while they're campaigning. I'd think that they're not quite in their normal behaviour in that position.

Not voting makes me feel bad, because it's not like I'm protesting or anything. It would be out of laziness and ignorance and not-giving-a-shitness. But if I vote, I always feel like I could have known just a little bit more, that I didn't make as informed a decision as I'd like to.

I read about a study that people who are interested in politics and follow up on those issues on a daily basis and know a lot about what's going on, actually think (and probably know as well) that they have a lot of impact by voting. They know the mechanisms on all governmental levels, so they know which people can change which things and where, so they target their votes accordingly in different elections.

But if you're like me who doesn't really know that much, it feels like I'm shooting in the dark. It seems so likely that I might be causing more harm to issues close to my heart by voting than not voting, because I might be voting for the wrong person, simply because I didn't look that much into it.

So it's really more about being able to say that yes, I did vote. My conscience is clear now. But actually I think, hope, that the person I voted can't be too wide off the mark.

Stalking is only human.

I can't believe how much traffic my now-defunct blog is getting. The two that are actually alive, not so much. Not that I really care how many visitors I get. I'm losing my interest somewhat in blogging.

At least it's mostly irrelevant traffic on the old blog. In the sense that Google, or some other search engine, has directed people there, even though it's not what they were looking for. Like someone was searching for Van Gogh or Gallen Kallela, and they end up at my blog. I feel sorry for those people.

Then again, I can't believe how search engine-challenged so many people are. I rarely ever have to click on a link to know if it's relevant or not. I can usually tell after a second or two if the search results as a whole are relevant.

I've noticed some people can waste as much as 20 seconds on looking at their results, before they notice that their search words may not have been correctly spelled, or simply unsuitable for their purposes. It's incredible.

Yes, I stalk my visitors a teensy, tiny bit. I think it's normal.

Like I enjoy watching every move that Avril Lavigne makes. I wonder if it's making me regress a little every time I watch videos or pictures of her. I just can't see anything wrong in being infatuated with a female singer for, hmm, six years now?

I only wish she'd grow up a little more and start dressing like people her age. She's only a year younger than me. Wearing clothes from her own brand, aimed at 12-15 year olds by the looks of them, is simply not cool with me. But I also love the fact that she's so eccentric.

Yesterday the flu that has been trying to get me for over a week, finally got me. I was so nauseous and tired that I didn't do anything else but sleep, eat and watch all the Avril stuff I have on my laptop. So sinfully stupid and silly and oh so fun.

I was too tired to cook, but I had these tea crumpets in the freezer. I had put cottage cheese in them, following a tip from Amoena. I was surprised to find that they were really tasty. Especially with some leftover cheese melted on top.

Oh, Canada!

I'm interested in Canada and Canadians. It's a little difficult to explain why exactly. I can't remember when I got first interested in them, or why.

I can tell you that I like their dry sense of self-irony. I like their nature. I like their literature. I like their music. But Canadians themselves find it difficult to define themselves. Usually it's by defining what they are not - at least not Americans. So maybe it isn't so surprising that I can't put my finger on why they fascinate me.

I can truly appreciate the fact that their government and everything about their country is so well documented. They have all these wonderful sources online, available free for anyone to use! There are archival materials on, pretty much anything you might be interested in.

The annoying thing is, they're usually in pdf files, as you might expect. A colleague of mine (I don't want to describe people I know in too much detail so I'll use such a grand term) complained in his dissertation that there is a worrying tendency of uploading texts online in pdf files, rather than transcribing them at all.

It's something only a corpus linguist would complain about, but I completely sympathize now. For anyone else but a corpus linguist, pdfs are usually good enough. But they're simply not viable for including in language corpora!

I got hold of this splendid corpus of present-day Canadian English. But since I'm going to have a diachronic dimension in my dissertation, it would make sense to have historical Canadian English as well. Sadly, there is only one such historical corpus in existence so far, and even that isn't available to anyone else but its creators.

Since the aforementioned colleague collected a corpus of hiw own for his dissertation project, and since I helped categorize and update it, I'm not too shy about the idea of compiling a corpus of my own.

But finding old Canadian English online in a reliable format is such a hopeless task. If you find something that has been transcribed, there's always the concern about whether it has been modernized or not. If a text is only available as a pdf file, it's pretty much of no use, unless I transcribe it myself.

I'm not really afraid of doing a lot work for my project. I wouldn't mind transcribing texts in principle. The problem is that I know that it would probably postpone the gathering of my actual research data too far in the future.

If I were to do so much work, I would have to take into account so many issues related to corpus compilation. There are numerous different views on how one should compile a corpus.

Some are willing to overlook any bias in the selection of the texts, in their length and text type, register, time of publication, anything that might affect the language of a text in relation to any other texts.

Others believe that especially a diachronic corpus should be carefully constructed so that the researcher doesn't have to worry about distortions in their data sets. Personally I think that such corpora may lull the researcher too much into believing that whatever the corpus throws up, it must be the final truth.

On the other hand, it isn't entirely straightforward to take into account everything by yourself, especially if you want to create quantitative illustrations of your data. It's particularly annoying when you're using many different corpora that were compiled according to completely different parameters, yet you'd like to compare them.

So I suppose there isn't much I can do except try my luck with getting my hands on that already existing historical corpus. Always worth a try.

It's global warming, what is wrong with people?!

Another of those posts where I complain about the excessive heating, the rule here in Finland. You know, the global warming is upon us, so WE NEED TO HEAT MORE! Waste even MORE energy! We have the third biggest ecological footprint in the world - so let's make it even BIGGER! There's a thought right?!

I got a note from the landlord, like everyone else in the building, advising me to LOWER my room temperature to 20-22 degrees celsius, and 18-20 in the bedroom. Sounds reasonable right?

NO. The room temperature in my one-room-plus-kitchen-plus-bathroom apartment is never AS HIGH as 18 degrees! So there's NO WAY IN HELL I'm going to DECREASE my living comfort by RAISING the frigging room temperature!!!!!

I have a little fever now so these things really make my blood boil even easier.

I think I'll start boycotting Koskikeskus in Tampere. Last week I went in for only 10 MINUTES and I had to take off my jacket and sweater immediately because I was about to faint, literally! And after I got what I needed, I went to stand outside for a couple of minutes in nothing but a tank top, because I was still too hot from spending as long as 10 minutes inside Koskikeskus!

Wtf is wrong with people here, seriously?! Who the hell decided that too hot is somehow supposed to be comfortable and necessary?! Do Finnish people not know that there are such things as CLOTHES, that you can, like, PUT ON if you're too cold?! And just put on two sweaters if you need to, what's wrong with that?!

I'm starting to think that living in Britain wouldn't be such a bad thing after all. They may not have all things sorted out as regards comfortable living, but at least they are not trying to fry themselves!

"Suggest argue, because only in a dispute born truth."

Doesn't that almost make sense?

It's the wisest thing a spammer has "said" in my comments section. If only their comments were always this "smart", I wouldn't mind deleting them as much.

We quest for a grail of illusive perfection

I no longer regret joining the Linguist List. Recently a rather fiery discussion erupted concerning a review of the book Chomsky's Minimalism.

The main bone of contention was about whether semantics can come after syntax, i.e. whether the human mind creates syntactical structures first and infers the semantics from them only when reading or hearing them.

Personally I believe syntax and semantics are intertwined from the start, but I'm not really one to comment on the issue with any deep insight.

Be that as it may, it's always exciting to see linguists go ballistic. Most of the time, what linguists write in research papers and books is fairly dry.

It's not because the authors can't write in an interesting way. It's simply that it's practically impossible to use colourful language in linguistics without becoming too obscure. Not to mention that in all likeness you'd end up being frowned upon for not taking things seriously enough.

As in this case, the discussion got heated because someone not too informed in the field was stating their opinions a tad too strongly, not disrespectfully but somewhere along the way.

So of course people get insulted and they retort. Whoever started it will as a result get insulted back, because their pride is at stake. It isn't easy for anyone to admit that they're in the wrong and then apologise.

I sympathise and hope that I'll never be in that position. It's not likely, since I rarely feel the need to persuade other people to see things my way, let alone to inform them voluntarily about my opinions.

This incident reminded me of when I was doing background reading on my thesis. I found a couple of articles back from the 1970s where two authors exchanged extremely caustic language in a couple of issues of a linguistics journal. I recall someone referring to this exchange as some kind of "wars", I wish I could remember the exact term.

It was like reading an exciting story, biting your lip as you read on to see what the other person will have to say next about some particularly hurtful choice of term on the other's part. I shouldn't have fun at the expense of somebody else's hurt feelings, but I did.

It was such a rare, precious discussion because it had gotten so personal. Again, I hope no one will ever start throwing dirt on anything I might publish one day. Of course you shouldn't take it personally when the criticism is matter-of-fact and doesn't attack your person, but usually that's impossible.

I know that even very experienced linguists take criticism personally, even though rationally they know they shouldn't when it hasn't been intended as personal in any way. Especially if someone is questioning your competence in your own field, how could you not take insult. Just human nature I suppose.

It's a fine line to tread in general, making a text interesting and accessible while trying to remain scientific, accurate and credible enough. I think it can be done, however. One of my ambitions with my dissertation (the topic of which I haven't even chosen yet) is to make the text much less dry than in my thesis.

I truly believe that blogging has helped me improve my English. It gives an effortless opportunity and a reason to write more than I normally would.

What's more, my blogs are the only place I get to use less formal English. I think I'm on my way to finding that golden middle road to travel when writing matter-of-fact, yet lively language.