SC had Rhosgobel and SO over for the Super Bowl. While SC is a fairly knowledgable football fan, and former 2-way lineman ([In high school. On the JV team. -- ed.]), if Semantic Compositions became a sports blog, it would cause much rehashing of SC's not-quite-legendary aphorism about opinions and indices. While various attendees at the SC Super Bowl party suggested he'd want to keep a diary, SC already suspected that there wouldn't be enough interesting linguistic material to be worth discussing, and didn't bother. Nevertheless, a few observations:
1) Phil Simms was at one time a quarterback of above-average talent. However, either sacks or innate stupidity have rendered him unable to correctly use the word "rhythm" in a sentence. So he uses it in every single one, hoping he'll get it right eventually.
2) At one point, Simms commented that the Panthers' style of play was "fun, but not exciting". This led to repeated wisecracks, once the game started to feature actual scoring, about plays being both fun and exciting.
3) Sports writing is prone to all sorts of obnoxious cliches, and this goes triple for sports broadcasting, where the "talent" is frequently qualified by virtue of being ex-players, not being interesting. SC found himself wishing that the cliches would at least rise to the level of snowclones, and not be the same old junk like "team X really came to play today" (what, last time they just bought tickets?) or "player Y just showed tremendous heart" (funny, I don't see an open chest cavity). SC wouldn't nitpick about these sorts of things if they weren't so singlemindedly deployed in place of an original thought. Or even a different thought.
Due to SC's failure to properly rewire a fairly complex home theater setup after having temporarily removed the amplifier for service, all attendees at the SC party were treated to 5.1 channels of high-amplitude square waves in place of what should have been a quick audio demonstration after the game. SC wishes to take a moment to publicly denounce the poor quality of Radio Shack audio cables, especially their connectors, and to encourage the proper grounding of all electrical equipment, with 3-prong plugs wherever possible. SC also wishes to remind his guests that if his living room was a little bigger, it would have been 7.1 channels, so they should count their blessings ([And if you gave any consideration to our decor, it would have been 0.0 -- Mrs. Semantic Compositions])
Finally, in keeping with SC's tradition of public acknowledgement of those who link to him, he wishes to thank Rachel for interesting commentary, as well as having publicly linked to this site. Ergo, up on the blogroll she goes. SC was going to ask if the title of her blog, "a tear in the fabric of spacetime" was inspired by Madeleine L'Engle, but the answer has already turned out to be an enthusiastic yes. SC hasn't read any of her novels in a long time, but agrees that they're very worthwhile, and very much worldview-changing as well. Someday, SC is going to start in with a rant about child language development, and that will be high on the recommended reading list, along with the writings of Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Frank Baum, and other people who knew better than to fill children's brains with mush (read: Judy Blume and J.K. Rowling). One question for Rachel, though -- weren't you disappointed when you found out that mitochondria were really a lot less exciting than they were in Ms. L'Engle's books?
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