My Musings

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Friday, April 23, 2004

Laziness

While brushing my teeth this evening, I overheard two guys talking in the shower about the chem test today. One of them said something that offers a great deal of insight into what kind of a school Case is:

“Yeah, I definitely got lazy for this test. I mean, I still put in four or five hours, but…”

Since when is four hours of studying considered lazy? For me, being “lazy” before a test means sitting down at my desk to study, getting my notes about 3/8 of the way out of my backpack, saying to myself, “Ah, I know all this stuff,” even though I don’t, and then asking Matt, my roommate, if he wants to play Diablo 2 for the next 13 hours. He invariably accepts, because he never studies, either. I’m so glad my roommate isn’t hardworking and studious, or else I’d have to debowel myself out of pure shame.

Right now, Microsoft Word is telling me that “debowel” is not a word. But I know for a fact that it is. If you’re opening up another browser to visit www.dictionary.com to check me out on this, don’t bother. Dictionary.com doesn’t have the word. But the Oxford English Dictionary, which you can’t get to because you’re not on the Case network ha ha ha, does. “Debowel” is an obsolete synonym for “disembowel.”

I came to know about this obsolete word thanks to Kevin and Jim. Kevin and I were doing chem homework and Kevin suggested using de Broglie’s equation to solve a problem. Except he pronounced it “De Broje-lee-aaay” instead of the way it’s supposed to be pronounced, “De Brogg-lee.” I of course was left with no choice but to point out his mistake in a snide and haughty manner, and then call him a few derogatory names. Surely you understand. Rather than accept defeat, Kevin foolishly dug himself a deep ditch of denial and claimed that his pronunciation was correct.

To settle our disgustingly dumb dispute, we visited the OED and looked up the pronunciation of De Broglie. While I was laughing at Kevin and Kevin was bitterly sulking in agony, no doubt planning a hearty vengeance upon me, Jim studied my computer screen. The OED website has a column on the left where it shows the lexicographical neighbors of the word you just looked up, and one of the words there piqued Jim’s apathy. “’Debowel?’ Is that a real word?” he mused. We all ignored him. Then I closed the browser. Then Jim got mad at me and told me to open the up the browser again and see what “debowel” was. I didn’t really care, but I learned the hard way once that if you mess with Jim when he hasn’t had any sleep in a while, he will do bad things to you. Like shove you into Kevin’s closet against your will and then close the door so forcefully that when you try to stop it with your foot, your foot becomes crushed between the door and the floor, and then you’re stuck in the dark closet with a crushed foot, doomed for all eternity to gag on the vile fumes emanating from the dirty laundry that Kevin should have washed five weeks ago. True story. Anyway, since I wasn’t sure whether Jim had had any sleep recently, I decided to play it safe and open up the OED website for “de Broglie” again. Sure enough, there was “debowel,” and it turned out to indeed be a real word.

And the moral of this story is: I’m supposed to be writing an English paper tonight, but instead I’m posting this blog entry and then going to sleep.

.: posted by Boris 12:59 AM

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