Showing posts with label that's so meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label that's so meta. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Meta-Blog II: Phonetically Speaking

Time for some more meta-blogging! I consider this a good time to do so because I believe myself to be drained of all inspiration. Perhaps you, or you, or I, deep down in the damp and verdant understory of my soul (yes, I did learn about the rain forest in third grade), have some ingenious idea to discuss on this blog that would have eliminated the necessity for such blatant tomfoolery as meta-blogging, but I am frankly too tired to come ask you (YES, YOU) to provide me with your idea or to descend into the lower depths of my tropical being.

To be even more honest than I already am in my self-exalting position as an upstanding citizen of the interwebs, I don't really have much to discuss about my blog. Instead, I shall talk about the phonetic structure of the prefix /mɛtə/. The thing is, Standard American English speakers rarely, if ever, pronounce prototypical /t/. SAE speakers will instead make use of the tap [ɾ] because of laziness--why put all the effort of keeping your tongue in place and exploding lots of air when you can minimize the time between the two vowels and just tap your tongue against your alveolar ridge? S-r-s-l-y! So /mɛtə/ is often realized as [mɛɾə].

By the way, if you're not familiar with phonetics and you think what I wrote sounds moderately technical and/or esoteric, it's not. I don't really know what I'm talking about, to be honest. It's mainly pretension, and pretension sounds a lot like a medical condition.

This has been a meta-blog post!!

Friday, January 7, 2011

Meta-Blog

Last night I had an enlightening conversation with one Andrew P. I told this Androop about my blogular aspirations, which he promptly and tragically quashed. Apparently, he says, I will not make any money or fame unless I have some sort of "focus." Focus is not my middle name. My middle name is Anne. Focus is not even a family name. My family names include Alan, Michael, and David. Hold on! Why are there no family names of women? My family is sexist. It's probably because we're Jews. That's my blog's anti-Semitic comment number #1. That seems like a worthwhile thing to keep track of.

As I was saying, or, should I say, typing, since I usually don't say what I type (with one exception, because I dictated my blog post yesterday to Forrest Sinclair and Asiya), I have abandoned all hope that I will ever have more than four readers, unless Asiya and Patrick have stopped reading my blog and my parents never figure out how to find it, in which case I will have 0-1 reader.

This has been a meta-blog entry. Now it's time to put on socks and put in breakfast.