- Dear Coauthor. Two weeks before a major deadline is NOT the time to decide to try to go caffeine free cold turkey. And seriously, boys are wusses. All the women I know in this field would work through that kind of headache. So don’t give me crap about pregnancy decreasing productivity.
- Dear journalists, working papers put out by the NBER are working papers. They’re not published! And they’re not published by the NBER. They’re just part of a working paper series by people who belong to the NBER. The appropriate way to refer to an NBER working paper is by calling it a working paper and giving the author’s names, or at least the name of the lead author. So, “According to a 2011 NBER working paper, Card and coauthors found…” These papers weren’t commissioned by the NBER and nor were they paid for by the NBER and the views of the authors do not necessarily represent those of the NBER.
- When I was a freshman in high school my Spanish teacher was Italian. My Italian accent annoyed my mother so much that she made me sit down with pronunciation tapes and practice until I sounded like I was speaking Spanish and not Italian. The problem with this extra practice was that my accent was far better than my actual skills, so when I went to Spain for a summer I kept inadvertently offending people in ways that my fellow American classmates did not. (Though it was also fun how people at markets kept trying to guess my nationality and NEVER guessed American.)
- The longer I spend on the internet, the more perfect I feel. It’s kind of disconcerting.
- Even though having a messy house doesn’t stress me out, paying someone to clean the house and them doing a piss-poor job stresses me out. So maybe it’s best not to spend.
- I’m totes hooked on Pilot G2 pens.
- ARGH. I need more bras. But I have no idea what size I am. And I hate spending large amounts of money on something that will no longer fit in a month.
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RBOC
April 11, 2012 — nicoleandmaggie27 Responses to “RBOC”
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April 11, 2012 at 4:52 am
The problem with this extra practice was that my accent was far better than my actual skills[.]
For some reason, I am really really good with foreign accents, even for languages that I only know like five f*cken words and have never formally studied. Whenever I visit a foreign country, I make it a point of learning a few words of social convention–please, thank you, pardon me, etc–so I can at least be polite to people in their own language. The hilarious thing is that when I use those few words I know, I sound totally fluent, so people just start talking me in their language, and then I’m all like, “Uh. Wut?”
April 11, 2012 at 6:10 am
Spanish + Italian accent, you should have gone to Argentina. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but my accent is Castilian, which annoys my students who have previously studied with teachers of Latin American Spanish.
April 11, 2012 at 6:14 am
It wasn’t really an Argentina accent though… if it were my mom probably wouldn’t have been going crazy. Maybe I should have just added the differences between Italian and Argentinian.
The Casthetilian accenth is kind of hard to get used to.
April 11, 2012 at 7:51 am
You should have exaggerated manierism and the accent, and then you had the Argentinean accent. Myself, when I am not teaching, and I am interacting with somebody in English, they want to know where I am from. I always ask people to guess. And they say different countries from Eastern Europe (seriously, once somebody said I was from East Germany. I wanted to ask what is the different in the accent in English between people from East Germany and people from West Germany). Nobody ever thinks I am from Latin America
April 11, 2012 at 8:00 am
IIRC, there’s some consonant differences as well btw Italian and Argentinian. It has been a while though.
April 11, 2012 at 9:46 am
Having the distinction between the seseo and ceceo aids in spelling, especially since the /s/, /z/ and sometimes /C/ can have the same /s/ sound. [Don't get me started on misspellings in advertisements in the USA (e.g. "pollo azado").] If I were to say “cerveza” as “ther – bé – tha,” and I have never seen the word written before, I could eliminate “cerveca” [ther - bé - ka] or “cervesa” [ther - bé - sa] as possibilities. (I’ve seen the latter spelling around my neck of the woods.)
April 11, 2012 at 9:52 am
Spanish Prof, ¿qué decís vos? (Shaking my rotated hand with lightly curled fingers back and forth at the wrist.)
April 11, 2012 at 10:15 am
When my Italian husband speaks Spanish, non-Argentineans (or is it Argentinians) think that he is from Argentina. However, Argentineans themselves don’t think so. They do think he might have studied Spanish in Argentina. Plus, there are also regional variations of accents in Italy but his pronounciation is pretty non-region specific.
April 11, 2012 at 11:45 am
My husband has carpal tunnel syndrome. The doctor said he should learn to be “less” expressive while using his hands for gesturing. I told him that was BS, that otherwise Argentina would be a nation of people with CTS, and that was not the case
April 11, 2012 at 6:48 am
I always counted it a victory in Mexico when they wouldn’t guess I was American. But at the same time, I got the feeling that they were *hoping* I was from somewhere more exciting (aka, since we were only 2 hours from the border in Monterrey, the local Mexicans thought they knew everything about the USA and it was boring.)
1) get a different house cleaner. The lady my mom gets does an amazing job – scrubbing the moulding on the walls and along the floors and other things I would never even think to clean.
2) do you really need more bras? can you just get cheap ones from walmart to last you the last few months?
April 11, 2012 at 6:57 am
We don’t have a house cleaner. Finding people is a PITA. Last time we needed one (our house needed to be spotless for prospective tenants), the person started out great and then started turning our countertops yellow (she forgot bleach does that to cheap countertop several weeks after we explained) and scratching our wood floors (from using the same swiffer-like mop too many weeks in a row).
Given my expanding breast-line, yes, I need more bras! The ones from 6 years ago are succumbing to elastic fatigue and broken latches. Also I look dumpy. Getting cheap ones from Walmart would require going to Walmart…
April 11, 2012 at 7:32 am
Oh, the pregnancy bra thing sucks. Could you get by with a strap extender on the ones you have? You can get those at fabric stores. Or maybe even online….
On the accent thing, we had a hilarious experience in Tahiti. Neither me nor my husband has very much French- we both did high school French and that is about it. (I also did a quarter in college.) But his accent is waaaay worse than mine. So he’d say something, and the person he was talking to would look at him blankly, so I’d repeat it and they’d understand. It drove him nuts.
This experience may be a large part of the reason we’re so keen to get our kids language instruction early!
April 11, 2012 at 3:44 pm
No… the ones I have are either waaaay too small or in really bad shape.
April 11, 2012 at 8:25 am
After going round and round trying to find a housecleaner that was reliable, I finally went with a service. I went with a local company (rather than one of the big national places), that uses eco-friendly products. (I know it sounds cliche, but I have animals whom I don’t want walking on nasty chemicals and 2 of us have asthma, which is not good when smelly cleaners are used.) My recommendation is to find a service, and let them deal with the hassle of training and finding people. Also, if someone is doing a crappy job, you can tell the manager, and they get to deal with telling them there’s a problem. (Actually, the woman who owns the service calls me every other week or so to make sure I’m happy with things and need to see if anything needs to be changed.) It makes life SO much better.
Pregnancy bras – when I upgraded, I went to nursing bras so that they would be useful after pregnancy. Of course, the pragmatism of this will depend on whether you plan to nurse after small fry is born.
April 11, 2012 at 11:30 am
Or we could just not spend the money or time (on a housecleaner)…
April 12, 2012 at 9:22 am
I wish that was an option for me. It was getting bad before we got our dog. After we got her, the house cleaning duty doubled, and I had to give up. My poor husband was almost giving himself an ulcer trying to keep up with it (and my trying to help when I could). It’s made us both much saner people. :-)
April 11, 2012 at 10:33 am
Just buy one new bra. That’s what I’ve always done when I was actively changing sizes. If you go to Nordstrom (or another “specialty” bra store), they’ll measure you for your correct size. I did that once and now I just order online and stick with the same size and brand consistently.
When I was in France, people would think I was from England. It amused me. Apparently me being from North America just didn’t make as much sense, even with the accent I had when I spoke English? What was even more amusing was when people would speak to me in really bad broken French asking for directions or something, then I would respond in normal English. Hah. Or the time someone asked me where McDonald’s was with the French slang… That was the most amusing I think.
April 11, 2012 at 11:32 am
Yeah, I think that’s probably what I will do. Last time I ordered packs of 3 online from ebay of cheap bras and it worked out pretty well, but I can’t figure out where I got them or if they’re still in business.
Inglaterra was generally the first guess for me, then Alemania second. Part of it was no doubt how I dressed and how I look (I do have some English, some German, etc.).
April 18, 2012 at 11:56 am
I bought bras after getting fitted at a store (pricey!) but once i figured out size/needs, I ordered several online at an online retailer called breakout bras. Great for nursing bras. Much better prices and they probably have coupon codes.
April 18, 2012 at 11:57 am
I will check them out. Right now I’ve gotten one bravado and it’s working pretty well. But things they be a changin’
April 11, 2012 at 6:15 pm
^Inglaterra. My apologies but I walk around with a red pen attached to my hand.
April 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Sure sure. Fixed.
My accent may be good, but my spelling isn’t!
April 12, 2012 at 6:31 am
Good suggestions re: bras. New ones will make a *world* of difference. Definitely go get fitted if you have a dept store nearby. After finishing nursing BabyT I *had* to have new bras even though I was nowhere back to what I thought should be my goal weight. Just doing that made me feel so much better and was totally worth the $$$ I paid at Nordstrom, even though I’m getting to the point where they’re not going to fit anymore :(
Macy’s and Nordstrom both have strap extenders if anyone is looking.
And yes, I <3 Pilot G2 pens. Target sells an amazing pack of them in a rainbow of colors. I couldn't resist, even though my fave is plain black. They work great with my pretentious Moleskine notebooks.
April 12, 2012 at 9:48 am
Moleskines are pretentious? But oh so fun to write in.
@Focavista- have you ever read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman? She has an awesome essay in there about people who have to edit everything. My dad was one of them, and although I can hardly remember the details of the essay now, I remember thinking she got it perfectly right.
April 14, 2012 at 5:43 am
Yeah, there are plenty of blogs/whatnot decrying how Moleskines are overpriced, pretentious, blah blah blah. Doesn’t stop me from having a whole stack of ‘em, though, and now that they sell them at Target, it’s DANGEROUS for me. I’m sad Borders went out of business because they had a knockoff Moleskine called ‘Piccadilly’ that was less than half the price, and I actually think they’re better quality. I stocked up while I could but am running low now :(
April 16, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Ooooh I just got my first Moleskine and then my second was gifted to me a couple days later. SO stoked to be part of the pretentious crowd.
April 16, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Bras. Rgh.