Journal of a Sabbatical

April 30, 1999

today

April 30, 1999

Newburyport Boat Ramp
24 greater yellowlegs
900 oldsquaws
2 mallards
uncountable gulls mainly ring-billed

Plum Island
4 gadwalls
5 great egrets
2 greater yellowlegs
2 American crows
1 American robin
1 killdeer
8 double-crested cormorants
1 snowy egret
21 Canada geese
4 green-winged teal
1 northern harrier
1 red-winged blackbird
1 white tailed deer

National Poetry Month

Poet of the Day

Philip Levine

headache

Claris Home Page doing something weird with plugging in the base URL for the document.

package from Charla in today's mail - Anne Lamott's new book - looks really good - can't wait to start reading it

Attachment Opener from DataViz finally arrived - must remember to bring it to Kevin's house on Saturday to give to La Madre so she can read attachments from me on her PC -maybe should've bought another copy for Kevin, and one for Donald, and one for BiB - but BiB has never complained about not being able to view attachments, which either means he can view them just fine or he can't view them but hasn't told me... Also MacOpener for Zsolt so he can open things I send him from ClarisWorks (now Appleworks) ... should have had them ship that one directly to him...

The Yankee Talk volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English arrived today too. A bit disappointing. Doesn't have "nor'easter" spells it "nor-easter" instead and simply defines it as a wind or gale from the northeast - no explanation of how it got to be pronounced and spelled so out of character with the rest of New England English. I still think if it really is New England in origin it should be "notheastah".

It gets points for having three variant spellings of quahog (the other two are cohog and quauhaug).

It loses points for confusing circular cross-referencing of "stone wall" and "stone fence" - if stone fence is what New Englanders call a stone wall and a stone wall is what we call a stone fence, what the heck kind of structure are we talking about?

It gets points for listing both cabinet and frappe as meaning what the rest of America calls a milkshake, but loses points for not cross-referencing them.

Loses points for listing wicked as only modifying good - as in "wicked good rock n' roll" - and not other things like umm, bad, fast, hard...

Loses points for claiming the joual dialect is restricted to Maine and Quebec. What about Lowell, Mass. and Woonsocket, RI? "Il fait un home run!" is standard French? standard English?

And so on and so forth. "The months go by, the world goes on."