· Sensible · Marks · of · Ideas

Well, that would be a nice title for a conference paper, wouldn't it? But what I actually meant was something like “How Twitter screws up communication in funny ways.” I did a double-take after receiving a personal tweet from the local (Ankara) chapter of Women In Computing saying “it will be great to make it with you." I'm not sure if American English still uses “make it” in the copulatory sense (and I'm sure Turkish English doesn't) and besides, as Cicero said, “I like myself, but I won't say I'm as handsome as the bull that kidnapped Europa.” In other words, I didn't think the whole chapter of WIC wanted to jump my bones for more than a picosecond, or however long it takes for a neuron to backfire; the notion had been rejected before it even entered consciousness. But there was still a kind of blip, and that was caused by the fact that this was a message spread over several tweets: the thing they wanted to make with me was in fact a learning environment in Second Life, but the “it” had been cut off from its reference by Twitter's famous 140-character limit.

Social media pundits predicting the death of e-mail should consider that the last tweet read “Can I have your mail address for more information and healthy communication?”

I spent most of today writing vocabulary lists. The first stage (extracting common academic vocabulary from the texts I'm going to use) was easy, since I'd already written software to do that. All I needed to do then was eliminate the duplicate words, for which the obvious solution would be a little Perl script. But no, I couldn't be bothered to write Perl (largely because I haven't used it for years) and thought it would take less time to just open up a text editor and do find-replace. Silly Robin.

I am currently revising my book on how to write a term paper so as to bring the chapter on citation up to date with 6th edition APA and 7th edition MLA (for the benefit of non-academics: this translates as PITA). Citation formats are to academics what the technical specifications of the Enterprise are to Trekkies, i.e., vitally important to members of your group, and totally pointless to everyone else. People actually have heated arguments about whether MLA (Modern Languages Association) is better than CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), which is silly since Chicago has loads of class and MLA is the polyester leisure suit of academic style because normal people don't give a dingo's kidney about this kind of thing. After wading through the details of APA formatting for miscellaneous non-print sources, I'm starting to move from being an academic to being a normal person: I want to cross out "For an episode of a television series, use the following format" and write "For Christ's sake, they can look it up on Wikipedia like everyone else!"