Third Day And Counting

Sooooo, today was the third day of this semester. Whoop-de-doo. No calculus today, just the boring classes. The day was, however, enlivened slightly by Lion Alerts of a manhunt in downtown Florence by the Florence police department. Fortunately, the hunted man never came to campus. If he had, as the teacher in human geography (I suppose we are to call her Mrs. Phillips) pointed out, we were probably safe. You'd have to be pretty stupid criminal to enter the ROTC building...

However, stupid people exist. And they are stupid. And do stupid things. Lots of stupid things.

Then there was history. Fortunately, Dr. Makowski stayed more or less on topic today. WHY does he write half of a word on one white board and half on the other???? It makes no sense. It annoyed Olivia too.

Also, the students help with his whole getting sidetracked thing. Freshies. Pretty sure I wasn't blurting out stuff about Alexander the Great and Cleopatra in Dr. Bibbee's class. Oh, and *snerk* it was Marc Antony, not Alexander. He lived about 300 years beforehand.

I also got a review of a bunch of stuff I just covered in geography with Dr. Mikey and some other stuff I'd heard in Dr. Bibbee's class. Felt very sleepy. I am in the corner of the room so maybe I could doze off without anyone noticing...

Then again, I'm pretty sure Dr. Makowski was looking right at me while I was pretty bored. I have no poker face whatsoever and so my boredom was probably apparent. Apologies, but it's not my fault you're all 2/3 of a semester behind.

An interesting linguistic point was brought up when Dr. Makowski mentioned that the words in modern Greek for various things related to the sea do not have the same origins as the rest of the Greek language; instead, they are remnants of the language spoken by the people of the Aegean peninsula who were conquered by the invading/migrating Greeks. Someone asked for an example; he admitted he didn't have one. I sort of absent-mindedly said, "Thalassa," (which means, "sea"), which prompted Dr. Makowski to tell me I was going to get an A. Protests from other members of the class that he said something like that every week sort of lessened the honor, but the thought counts.

What's rather amusing was that I found that word in a really pathetic dictionary that I keep in my room. (Honestly, the thing doesn't even have, "psychosomantic"!) I looked up "Panthalassa" (which, for your information, was the global sea that covered the Earth at the same time all the continents were lumped together into Pangaea- which is also a Greek word). Pan, of course, means "all", and thalassa was glossed as "sea", with the disclaimer that the word was not of Greek origins. So there you have the story, folks.

Yes, I'm a world-class nerd.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse