Linguistical Logistics

I like words. I mean I really like words. Which is why I'm sad that my language classes are becoming more of a chore and less of the delight they used to be. It also (somewhat belatedly) occurred to me that readers of my blog might get the mistaken impression that I only know Italian. Ha. If my Italian is on par with my German (and that's not saying much) it's only because of my high school French. Yes, I am so accomplished I can whine in four languages. FOUR. Am I fluent? Absolutely not (although I can understand foreign tourists, and some movies without subtitles). My roommate likes to boast that I'm fluent in French (Deux croissants, s'il vous plait monsieur!) and that I'm slowly mastering German and Italian. While I love her for her faith in me, this isn't exactly true. And I doubt taking two languages back-to-back is helping my poor confused brain sort this out.

Scheduling Tip: If you're taking multiple languages at the same time, try to put them on different days of the week, or if that's impossible, then at least separate them by a couple of hours and/or other classes. It absolutely sucks to go straight from German to Italian and be unable to understand simple stock phrases because I think my TA is asking me to conjugate "machen" in the past tense instead of "fare." And you can always tell when I get really confused because I start madly throwing in French words to make it look like I know what I'm doing. Then there's the inevitable awkward pause as my classmates (never at their best at 9 AM anyway) sit there stupefied, trying to parse out what I just said. Stump the teacher can occasionally be fun. Stumping your fellow students on a regular basis isn't; it just makes you the class outcast. 

Language classes aside, I love to play with words. I had my friend Anthony edit my English paper (yes, the one I was supposed to be working on when I put up Monday's post) and one of his comments pretty much typified my word-addiction. He wrote: "I wish I could live in your world where all these words float around." This came after I described J. K. Rowling's best trait as an author as her ability to approach the mundane from a slightly "tip-tilted" direction. Anthony, having read a lot of other things I write, loves to pick on my word choices. Some others he took exception to were amorphous, mores, leonine, and...there were more but I've forgotten them. I like ten-dollar words. And no, I'm not even an English major.

If I were to start waxing poetic about writing and language we'd be here until the world ends (I highly doubt 2012 is it. I mean, I want to at least study abroad and have a boyfriend before I end up a tyrannosaur's dinner or a lump of charcoal). So I'll throw out an image you're all familiar with and let you fill in the blanks yourself. I am the girl who sits in the middle row in class and takes copious, random notes interspersed with doodles while occasionally throwing out mind-bending phrases that either silence, annoy, or confuse my classmates.

I may lack Uhura's talented tongue (Oh God, I am such a nerd, but Chris Pine is hot and J. J. Abrams is awesome) but I always have and always will love words, even if I ignore every grammar rule there is and my spelling continues to be...creative.

A domani
WolfGrrl