greetings from tashkent

so in the true spirit of guest blogging for JFW, i’ve been functioning on uzbekistan time for the past week or so, working on the dissertation at all hours of the night, with insomniac or reno 911 playing in the background. i hardly ever see amy anymore. we occasionally cross paths and give each other a familiar nod.

hey, speaking of the dissertation, here’s something. i just did a word search on my now 102-page single-spaced proposal*. betcha don’t know what i found.

bling: 0
deplane: 0
edutainment: 0
Foucauldian: 0
guesstimate: 0
impact: 3 (as a verb)
irregardless: 0
linkage: 19 (whoops)
signage: 0
synergistically: 0
touch base: 0
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actually, linkage and links have two different meanings.

really?

yeah, linkage means “a series of links.” so there are times when “linkage” is more appropriate than “links.”

give me an example.

i don’t know. i can’t really think of one right now.

why couldn’t you just use “links” to refer to “a series of links”?
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okay, so i am now kneeling before the great JFW confessional. what should be my penance? i could say the world “linkage” 1,000 times. or i could go back into the document and replace all 19 of the “linkages” with “links.”** better yet, i could take one of the words from JFW’s enunciation candy and insert it into the title of my dissertation. it would have to be subtle, of course. see if you can pinpoint my placement of the enunciation candy word in this version of my dissertation title:

The World as System or Society?
Introducing the (Epi)Phenomenal Cultural Dimension to
Chopsocky Network Analysis, 1980-2000***

* it is still technically a proposal, i suppose, given that there are no findings to be found anywhere in the document. it’s still all lit review and methods at this point. hats off to my committee AND AMY for wading through this monstrosity for the proposal defense.

** by the way, i also did document searches on link (2 hits), links (3), linked (5), and linking (2). even when adding all these together, i still get a number significantly lower than the 19 i found for linkage. nineteen!

*** i know, i know. there’s no colon to be found anywhere in this title. just like my master’s thesis. this is perhaps even more unforgivable than any egregious use of a JFW despised word. similar to my master’s thesis, i keep coming up with questions to serve as the first clause of my title for some reason. luckily, i’ve been able to avoid publishing anything from all my work at IU, so i’m still eligible to say that all my publications will have colons in them.****

**** okay, i actually do have one publication, and it actually has no colon in the title. but i’m the fourth author and i used an alias (Rob J.***** Kroska) as a silent protest against the de-colonized title. amy still thinks i was operating under some sort of egalitarian logic. thus, despite the fact that my vita consists of three things in which i’ve had an authorship role (master’s thesis, dissertation proposal, and a publication), and none of them have colons in the title, i still insist on being the world’s strongest advocate of using colons in titles.

***** J is not even my real middle initial. my real middle initial is V. i took amy’s middle initial to symbolize an even more silent protest against the lack of colon(s) in the publication title.