First day of class today (for me at least). And oh, what a day it was. Started out innocently enough with my alarm at 7:30, getting up at 7:50, showering, making coffee, getting (more or less) pretty for the day and running to class at 8:51. Thankfully it is under 6 minutes to the building I was looking for. End summer vacation.
First class was two hours of corpus linguistics, which is something I have looked at for all of 45 minutes in fall semester last year. It was horribly presented, poorly explained, and altogether miserable. This was excellent though. The prof is Irish and went on to describe the common collocation of the intensifier "fucking" and kept saying "cunning linguists" and chuckling to herself. But really knows her stuff and is quite accomplished at it too, which is reassuring. It's a lab class, and we are graded on two assignments, worth 40% and 60%. Wonderful.
Break for lunch, a quick clean up, failure to open a bank account and some textbook shopping. Then it's off to Syntactical Theory and English Syntax. Which just so happens to be taught by the guy who basically invented syntax as far as the English-speaking world is concerned. His CV is 19 pages long and can be found here: I have too much time on my hands. He would be much easier to resent if he wasn't actually very funny. But he is. Nerds. Anyways, he sort of jumped into the whole subject balls deep, instructing us to read about a hundred extra pages in this book or that if we're feeling lost. (Lost, me? Pssshht...) And of course he wrote the textbook. Not in that "Oh buy my book" way, but in that "Oh every reliable book on the subject was written by me" way. Eff.
SO. Looks like I'll be reading a bit tonight. No matter, there's free wifi and two-pound pints next door. Happy days!
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