Decisions and Questions

I wake up shivering. Or sweating. Perhaps I’m sick, but it seems to me we’ve been having somewhat erratic weather. I like fall, it has all those cliché perks so many people love, like pumpkin flavored everything. But there’s something difficult about always questioning my choice to wear or not wear a jacket. Maybe this difficulty choosing what to wear is a reflection of my difficulty deciding where exactly to go forward with my studies, where to study abroad, and all my other indecisions. Or maybe I’m just bad at dressing.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about a lot of random questions lately. For instance, I was waiting for an elevator at Hunter the other day, along with a number of people. As we were waiting, another person joined us and pressed the already pressed button to call the elevator. While I see this behavior quite often, I began to question what makes a person feel the need to press that button even though its been pressed already? Is there a thought-process in that person’s head that deems other people’s button presses invalid, inferior, or something like that? Does that person believe their press will be more effective? Or that the person needs to personally press the button because they are personally riding the elevator? I don’t know why this interested me so much, I’m probably crazy or sleep-deprived, but I’m curious what other people think. So I encourage you to comment if you’re interested!

Words are Friends!

As I’ve written earlier, I’m taking a course on the Greek and Latin roots of English, which involves learning a lot of etymology, something I love.

I recently examined the word myriad and found it noteworthy. As you may know, myriad is commonly known to mean a great number of things. However, I’ve always found it weird that myriad can be either a noun or an adjective. I just learned that it comes from the Greek word myrias, meaning ten thousand. Through this, I realized that technically, the English noun myriad still means ten thousand while the English adjective myriad has the more modern definition meaning a number of things. So while we use the adjective and noun interchangeably, we should really be using it as an adjective if don’t want it to mean ten thousand. Exciting, right?

Bonus word! The word of the day on October 11th was snollygoster. It refers to a “clever, unscrupulous person.” I challenge you to use it in a sentence one day.