Semester 2 has been off to an entirely less turbulent start than semester 1, which is nice- especially having taken on a 3rd subject. Apparently a 75% course-load counts as full-time so I was worried about holding up but it’s already midterms and somehow I’m still alive.
Winter subject results have been released and, aside from the general relief of having not failed, it looks like I actually did quite well and am looking forward to completing the later units further down the line!
In preparation for study abroad my enrollment has been adjusted a couple of times to accommodate for appropriate credit approvals. Currently dragging myself through email and paperwork hell, but things look promising from this end- which is actually starting to get kind of stressful? Is this actually a terrible idea? Every body just keeps letting me fill out paperwork and then approving it and I’m scared.
Semantics has quickly become my favourite subject this semester. The lecturer gives me the impression of a man who has been studying language so long words no longer mean anything to him and the shit he says is pure fuckery every single week. No idea if he’s messing with us on purpose or if he’s just Like That™ but it’s a wholeass vibe in either case.
Early on there was an exercise about semantic categories and I got. Invested. To a genuinely stupid degree. Specifically on whether or not newspapers count as a type of book. A lot of people disagree with me. Some of them got angry. Me personally? I got definitely, genuinely, way too emotional about it. To the point that I’m still thinking about it weeks later. Please let me explain my reasoning I guess?
Hi. Categorising items is very fun for me. There’s joy in organising things in convoluted ways so semantic categories is kind of a vibe, right?
Meanwhile, we have different words for different things because that’s how language works. Things get very confusing very quickly otherwise.
These two concepts can coexist, they are not mutually exclusive:
- Two items can exist within the same category. They may be standard or non-standard.
- Two items within the same category can be very different from one another.
A picture book is different to a dictionary, to an encyclopaedia, to a comic book, to a novel. But they are still standard forms of books.
Many people agreed that a magazine is more of a non-standard book, while audio-books and e-books would also be non-standard books. But not newspapers.
Nobody can provide me with a compelling reason why.
If somebody told me they collect books, and took me to their house to show me their collection of books, and their entire collection of books was just. Hundreds of newspapers? I’d be a little weirded out, for sure, but I’d 100% accept it as a non-standard collection of books.
Contrasted with, say, e-books. If somebody said they love books and have a huge collection of books only to whip out a Kindle™? I absolutely would not accept that as a collection of books. Amazon® owns those and may revoke your reading privileges at their own discretion. Even if you collect Kindle™s, that’s a collection of e-readers, not books. Maybe if you’ve illegally downloaded a whole lot of books as .PDFs and keep them safely tucked away on an external storage device I’d tenuously accept it, but you’re on some thin fucking ice.
In conclusion: this is the hill I’ve opted to die on and I hate it up here.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.