(no subject)

I am ridiculously busy atm. I spent this bank holiday working 14 hours virtually straight, doing something both demanding and tedious (checking linguistics textbooks for errors/problems of content, appropriateness and form i.e. field, tenor and mode, in the relevant terminology), for which I will end up being paid rather less than minimum wage. Now it is typed up and sent off, and I can concentrate on my marking backlog for the next couple of days, and then focus on the final assignments for my maths course...until next week when the next batch of 2nd level assignments will arrive for me to mark (literary theory - oh joy), and then I go to teach in Leicester, and then I have some more contract work to do before the end of June. And maybe at some point I will have time to mow the lawn and do some shopping!

(no subject)

I've just finished Rhinegold by Stephan Grundy, after a couple of weeks (it's pretty long, and I've been busy). It's a novel-style retelling of the Nibelungenlied/Volsunga Saga, and I thought it was awesomely good. In particular, I couldn't fault the linguistics of it. TBH, though, I'd have been surprised if I could, since the author credits "Paul Bibire for his matchless friendship, inspiration and philological assistance". Paul Bibire taught me Old Norse language and literature and Germanic philology for three years when I was an undergraduate here at Cambridge, and he was matchless, IME, in his dedication to learning for its own sake, to the point where he gave complete lecture courses and sets of language classes which bore absolutely no relation to the exams which he himself set, invigilated and marked in the same subject. He was often reduced to tears in lectures and supervisions by discussion of the First Germanic Sound Shift and i-mutation, which he confessed to finding "profoundly moving". Even I'm not quite that into historical linguistics...