beswitched

(cartoon panels taken from an issue of Peanut Butter and Jeremy and deployed on the JF@UW website as a warning about the mercurial character of the Jeremy responsible for the site)

Yesterday's unveiling of the new JFW template is followed today by the closing of my professorly website for remodeling. That website fell into disrepair coinciding strangely with the launch of this weblog. Changes in my teaching responsibilities over the last two years have much reduced the potency and pressingness of its earlier principal purpose, as a repository for class materials.

I moved the "Enunciation Candy" part of that page over here, as a way of immediately increasing the scrollular size of the sidebar. Some of the odder materials formerly housed on JF@UW may make a linked or other cameoeval re-appearance here, although I can already hear Dorotha bemoan my even raising this possibility.

The "Enunciation Candy" list began one bored afternoon with my typing up a mental list of words that I could then recall at one time or another being especially pleased by their sound, and since then I've occasionally added other words to the list on a strike-my-fancy-by-strike-my-fancy basis (newest additions: chopsocky, rarebit, chirpy). When I was moving the list over here, I found myself to be frankly embarrassed by some of them, which seemed either freshmanish-to-love (onomatopoeia), stupid-and-pretentious-to-claim-to-love (pièce de résistance--ooh, not only do I get to pretend like I actually know French, but I get to show that I know it's spelled with one grave accent mark and one acute one), or weird-that-I-had-ever-thought-to-include-it-on-a-list-of-words-I-love (retronym). But then I decided to stick with my rule that I should just add to the list and never subtract. It's weird how many of the words evoke very specific (and usually positive) associations with various periods or people in my life: I could almost have ordered them biographically instead of chronologically, which I suppose is what John Cusack does with his album collection in High Fidelity, but these are just words. Then again, I've been also struck in the last couple months about how I associate particular fonts and beverages with periods of my life--these being the Georgia and Diet Pepsi Twist years, respectively--so the whole thing perhaps speaks mainly to my wildly wide sentimentality streak.