Choosing the right word
Topics/tags: Language, short
A month or two ago, before we heard about the new tenure-line position in CS, I was reflecting on the current situation in CS. A colleague said that they were surprised that I was not more upset about the situation. What is the situation? There are some negatives: We could certainly use more tenure-line faculty [1] and I’d like us to be able to offer more courses [2]. But there are also some positives: We have a strong core of faculty and we hired some good visitors who I look forward to working with.
So I replied that I was relatively sanguine about the situation. As is too often the case, I sent the email without verifying my language.
But something made me check. I looked up what I’d written. Here’s
a definition from Google:
optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult
situation
.
Yeah, that’s about right. I love it when my subconscious chooses the right word.
Too bad it doesn’t tell me how to pronounce the word correctly. My mind
says sang wine
, but it’s really pronounced sang gwen
. I’ll just
have to remember that the pronunciation is the singer, not the subject
of the song.
[1] That was certainly the case at the time. I still think we could use another one, but we’ll muddle through for the time being.
[2] I’d also like to teach Tutorial some time soon [3].
[3] I keep hoping that if I keep writing about my desire to teach Tutorial, I"ll find a way to do so.
Version 1.0 of 2018-06-09.