I can't begin to tell you why I have been thinking of this recently, just that I have. I remember in third grade, we had a classroom spelling bee, which I won. My winning word was "government". I remember pausing after the "R", considering whether the "N" belonged or not. It did not occur to me to ask for a repeated pronunciation or for alternate pronunciations, and it occurred to me that when I had heard the word spoken, it was most often the pronunciation in which the "N" is dropped — which is a legitimate alternate pronunciation in the dictionaries I consulted this morning before starting this blog entry. I opted to throw in the mysterious "N", and I won the bee. Surely my finest moment in this life. Presumably, winning the classroom spelling bee would have qualified me to go on to compete against all of the other classroom champions in a school-wide bee. However, I have absolutely no recollection of any such thing. I would be a...

I have had a recent fit of "creativity"--although you surely wouldn't have guessed it based on my lack of recent blog posts. Anyway, the result is that I recently re-launched my online store , with a boatload of new t-shirt designs. Won't you check them out? They're mostly humorous designs. (Although I guess humor is a subjective thing. They amuse me, anyway. Perhaps they will amuse you as well. Perhaps even enough that you'd be interested in buying some?) Here's an example: Of course, my old designs (previously posted here on my blog) are there as well, and I've also included both a t-shirt version and a mouse pad version of my "world famous" Bleeding Heart photograph. (I say "world famous" because the image has spent quite a lot of time as top image search result on Google for the search phrase "bleeding heart". I figure that's as close to world famous as anything I've ever been associated with is likely to get....

Well, after many months, I've finally put a new design on my on-line store . If you like the design, and want it on a shirt (or even if you don't especially like the design but want to show that you're a free thinker), you're invited to go there and order. As always, comments are welcome.

This morning, I invited most of the authors of the Language Log blog to take a look at my last blog entry. (Most, not all, only because there were a few whose e-mail addresses I was unable to locate.) Anyway, what has ensued is a fairly fascinating discussion that's been carried on via an e-mail thread rather than as comments to my blog. Oh well. At least they all included me in the e-mails, which have been most edifying. (They're a bunch of professional linguists, and I certainly am not.) So here's the gist of what seems to be the consensus: Both usages are in common parlance. This does cause confusion when people of one camp converse with people of the other camp (especially when scheduling, as the "next Wednesday" issue is just as much a problem as is the "last Wednesday" issue). The rift does not seem to be a recent development. This has been previously studied from a linguistic perspective. Such divergent dialectical usages are probably more common...

Last weekend, we went to MINIs On Top 2006. We went up on Friday and I was wearing a t-shirt of my own design. I got several compliments on it, so I'm taking that as an encouragement to mention my t-shirt designs here. These are available through cafepress , in case you're interested. The two designs I'm offering at the moment couldn't possibly hold much interest for anyone outside of New Hampshire. Perhaps future designs will appeal to a wider audience. I'll be sure to post new designs here as I produce them. As with everything I post, I welcome your feedback.