What Finishing a PhD Looks Like

Brought to you courtesy of Ladybug's Dad, who gave us a new toy for Pancho to play with while whiling away the hours with me in the Faculty, even into the wee sma's of the morning.

Gadamer, Qt #1

I'm liking Gadamer, so a new series of quotations ripped out of context seems appropriate:

"To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge, but makes it possible"

- Truth and Method (2nd rev'd ed, 2004), p. 354

Birthday Fashion - for family only

Thanks to Mom and Dad, I now have two years of Mars Hill Audio coming my way through cyberspace - yay! highly recommended - you can download a sample edition by going here. Other lovely gifts from family include (from Dom) the hilarious book Watching the English and the cd, Raising Sand, a collection duets by the unlikely duo Alison Krauss (usually paired with Union Station) and Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin) produced by T-Bone Burnett. Also, Pancho's Mom and Dad funded some shopping for summer clothes (which I rather needed), so to give them the pleasure of seeing what they made possible, I thought I'd do a wee fashion show for them. So if you're not them, there is simply no need to watch. Seriously. I mean it. I was not made for modeling.

Zotero to the rescue!

If you haven't yet heard of Zotero, watch this. It's a free, open-source bibliographic tool that operates from within Firefox, but can be accessed on- or offline. Zotero can "see" bibliographical material on webpages--say, within an online library catalogue, or on an Amazon page for a book recommendation--and grab it, store it, and export it properly formatted for a few mainline bibliographical styles with the click of a single button.

Highlights:

• It can also be used as a web archiving tool, as it can capture "snapshots" of pages
• you can annotate snapshots with highlighting and notes that are saved to your hardrive along with a copy of the page. Wow. That is way cool.
• it organizes information into an adaptable, drag-and-drop, hierarchical folder system - again, better than Endnote
• you can put the same references into different "collections" without copying and pasting and risking not updating
• you can create links between references/files
• you can add as many separate notes as you like, and be as long-winded as you like, and attach them to whatever reference/snapshot you like
• you can attach other files to the references/snapshots -- e.g., other snapshots, or pdfs, or your essays...
• your library can be portable and not confined to one computer
• you can export and import in all the major formats (BibTex, RIS, Endnote, etc.)
• you can export properly formatted citations in some styles (Chicago, MLA, for example)
• it can and will replace Endnote, which I really don't want to have to shell out $300 for to get updates that fix problems instead of offering better features.

Also, a perfect tool for blog-cruising of wanna-be public intellectuals...

Neologism: Upbraision

I began disgruntled with the following sentence from Chapter 2:

This passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s remonstrance to John Oldcastle has generally been read as a blanket condemnation of argumentative Lollards who dispute interpretations of the Bible.

"Remonstrance" just doesn't ring. It's there because some of the 19th c. titles of the poem identify it as "Remonstrance to Oldcastle" and so the word was the first my mind (or perhaps my fingers, which have typed the phrase several times) chanced upon.

I was casting about for a better word, and the first I came up with was "upbraiding". Now, I've in general set up a new policy: the avoidance of gerunds and participles as far as possible, since they almost always (1) make syntax more confusing for the reader and often (2) make sentences less clear. E.G., with "upbraiding" the sentence would read:

This passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s upbraiding of John Oldcastle has generally been read as a blanket condemnation....

Clearly, not an improvement. In fact, it sounds a little like Hoccleve is braiding Oldcastle up into a blanket...eek.

But then I realized the perfect word: upbraision. Thus enabling:

This passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s upbraision of John Oldcastle has generally been read as a blanket condemnation....

Ahhh, the creation of nouns from verbs - what's not to love? So what if our consciously archaic Spenser was one of the last to use upbraid as a noun? (nb. the noun form was used in Early Middle English, esp. in didactic literature)

SPENSER F.Q. III. vi. 50 Faire Psyche to him lately reconcyld, After long troubles and vnmeet vpbrayes.

-- F.Q. IV. ix. 24 Through lewd vpbraide Of Ate and Duessa they fell out. (OED)

Interesting that both instances of upbraid in FQ are "unmeet" and not earned. But let us exploit that in the connotative potential of my word. Upbraision is better than upbraid. First, the sounds are better: "pbrzn" is metonymically onomatopoetic (i.e., it sounds like a rug-burn of the spirit, if the spirit were physical). It also sounds like blowing a raspberry (as they say here in the UK), an expression of contempt. And consider the homophonic potential:

His upbraision really rubbed me the wrong way
That was some upbraisive sermon this morning!

I was advised (by a grad student) to create a Wiki article for it and then cite Wiki if challenged. Hopefully, that is not evolving into "scholarly practice"???