In Which I Imagine I Attend a Wizarding School

First, a blog PSA: I've learned that some of you who are reading my exploits have been unfairly silenced by the default blog setting that privileges those with specific online identities.  In seeking a more liberating environment for us all, I've turned on Name/URL and anonymous commenting.  Thanks for reading, now you can say stuff too!

The wizarding school idea keeps floating around in my head.  Partially, because blog commenter Jona poked fun at me for distinguishing the grad students here as "first years" and "second years" just like in a certain British series about wizards, and partially because so much of what we do and say in English seems to require a certain amount of magical thinking.

Consider words.  We can break them down and discuss phonemes and morphemes and usages, we can consult the OED for history, and we can pretend that it makes sense that through simple arrangement, words take on vastly different meanings.  But it isn't a science.  People write dissertations on why a particular writer's choice of arranging and choosing words makes their work last for centuries, and yet there's no formula to it, otherwise we would utilize the formula and all of us would be brilliant writers.  But you ask any editor, and that arranging of words is more than just art, too, because if one does not follow certain established forms, you have a hot literary mess at the end.

So I like to pretend that it's magic.  Then, if I just choose the right combination of words, something wonderful will happen, suddenly and with seeming spontaneity, because I have cast my spell effectively.

In fact, I think that the link may be one that's ripe for fiction, because we've all seen stories about wizarding schools, but I'm not sure we've seen a story about the equivalent of wizarding grad students teaching wizardy freshmen.  And if it's anything like our experience with freshmen so far, the resulting rains of frogs and accidental transmutation of textbooks by people who couldn't bother to show up for all their lessons would make simply grading papers seem tame.

Yes, I have an overactive imagination.  I have to do something to amuse myself during office hours.

In other news, it's fall here.  It crept up on me, because I'm used to our section of about a week and a half of real autumn that separates summer and winter, and the season happens much more gently here.  But now there's grey sky, changing leaves, and chill wind, so I think it's safe to say we're well into the season.  Which is nice, because I love fall.

I'm sorry there are no adventure tales right now.  I really need to have some more adventures.  I'm open to suggestions!