Away, away

It's t minus 60 mins until I brave the train on the beginning of my trip...train to Spencer Street (currently known as Southern Cross station - YUK) then Skybus to Tullamarine...online check-in and away...

Will this trip change me? Does travel change you/one/us? How can I measure it? I guess my ideas about spain will change since it'll be the first time i've been there...

And thinking about change...can/does writing change you/one/us? can we change each other with writing or words?

Some words that changed me:

• "placate" - my only good high school teacher Mrs Hollensen used to say to me when I'd try and have my linguistic way with her: "Don't try to placate me with your words"...


• "simon" - this word marked the end of my only child status and opened up a whole new universe of possibilities...good and bad (for both of us...)


• "alison" - a word that i say every day both inside and outside myself...aww, shucks...


• "dad" - very nice to hear and a work in progress to say


• "rosebud" - another cataclysmic shift


• "matthew" - the way special people (mostly women) have said it and do no more since they've disappeared (in Italian you say that people have "disappeared" when they die) - my two nans and my mother-in-law...


• "ava" - this means bird and it also means that you can get it right twice


• "make me young" - Kurt Vonnegut's eternal mantra which stabs me in my gemini heart

Right, next post from foreign lands...gotta buy batteries for my toothbrush (white teeth = youth)

What does the title of this blog mean?

It's an homage to what I (am meant to) do most days as well as aspirational coz who wouldn't want to write all the time???...here's a bit of what I've written today in my capacity as doctoral researcher:

Camilli summarises his view on monosyllables as follows. In general, monosyllables which end with a “vocale sillabica”, here he seems to indicate final stress, trigger RS. Where this final “vocale sillabica” is followed by h or an apostrophe RS is absent. Similarly, those terms which can elide their final vowel before another vowel (eg. di, the definite articles - eg gli and le, and pronominal and adverbial particles such as ci, ne, si, vi) as well as their variants not used with initial vowels (the article i; the particles ce, se, ve, etc.) do not trigger RS. Finally, vocative o and the preposition pro do not trigger RS either. Camilli notes that “le monosillabe derivate da troncamento tendono a passare tra le monosillabe forti” (1965:138-9) and that exclamations “quando non sono allungate” (1965:139) or “quando siano pronunziate in tono secco e vibrato” (1965:139, n. 213) can trigger RS.

What do you think?

Blogging on take 2

Ok...i tried to start my blog on myspace but it was too labyrinthine...so I've moved! Here's what i said over there...So blog is the abbreviated from of "web log"...I'm trying to think of other words that are combined and then decapitated...there's ezine which i guess is e-magazine (is it?)...it's a funny process really...maybe it's an internet phenomenon? I guess the net and the web are both decapitations...usually, though, linguistic amputation occurs at the end of compound words: mobile (for mobile phone not *bilephone* - but phone comes from telephone), tv or telly (for television not *lv* - could this mean lavatory; or *lesion* or a francophonic *le vision*), remote (for remote control...although in my house we call it the "controller", well maybe that's me that says that)...are there other examples??