Wendell Berry

Oh, how I love Wendell Berry. For your enjoyment:

The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic "profession" of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly "revolutionizing" itself in pathetic imitation of the "revolutionary" sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, "publishable" but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity.

Lava Lady does Linguistics

Tonight we were eating spaghetti. We got out the parmesan cheese and a debate began between Heulwen and Ella. Yes, they can get into it about literally anything.

Ella, who can read, said it was "parmesan cheese". Heulwen, who is not quite literate yet, declared that it was "Farmers an' Cheese". (Ew.)

"Heulwen," I said, "that's folk etymology."-- not thinking she was listening at all. Why would she?

A triumphant cry burst from her corner: YAAAY!!! FOLK ETYMOLOGY!!!"

I guess, for her, that inkhorn term settled it. Heulwen one, Ella nil.