Almost the Last

It’s 3:40pm. And it feels like it’s been 3:40pm for like seventeen minutes! I swear 3:38 was like a half hour ago. I know because I’ve checked my watch 30 times since then. This hour always seems to take three times longer than any other. I mean, the mornings usually go by pretty fast, and I like to take a late lunch. And the last hour of the day actually never seems to be long enough, as I usually end up scrambling to finish things and go home. But this three o’clock hour… I tell ya’! It’s not quite the golden hour of the workday, but maybe gold plated. Taunting me with the prospect of hopping in the car, cranking up the tunes, and going home to kick up my feet for the evening. But no, there’s still one more hour. This is that darn second-to-last hour of the day! That blasted not-quite-the-last hour! That dang next-to-last hour! If I were educated, I might even call it the penultimate hour.

Oh wait, I am educated. Okay, so this is the first time I’ve mentioned my favorite academic topic. Linguistics. My wife and I both have a degree in Linguistics. And we love to talk about morphology and semantics and syntax; and we’ll entertain ourselves analyzing what you say and how you say it til the cows come home. Speaking of cows, I even once wrote a paper on onomatopoeia for animal sounds in different languages. And just so you know, Dutch has a better word for moo than English, Spanish, or Japanese. I know, that’s pretty useless information. But actually my wife and I are hoping to use the disciplines we’ve learned for something much more useful. Our dream would be to work with a people group that doesn’t yet have a written language, to help them develop a system of writing, promote literacy in their ethno-linguistic community, and ultimately translate the Bible so that they can hear God speaking to them in their language.

Oh, and there’s that word ultimate again. In studying phonology I learned a really cool word, antepenultimate. That means third from the last. You’ve got to use these words when you’re talking about stress patterns. The stress patterns of English are actually pretty interesting. I think it’s cool to investigate the processes that are automatic in your mind when you create new words. I read a new word recently, problematization. It’s a little too long to be automatic, but if you just try to pronounce it a few different ways, somehow you’ll just know when you’ve got it right. It’s like your brain is just programmed with the patterns of English. Technically speaking the stress is on the penultimate syllable, and there’s secondary stress on the initial and antepenultimate syllables. Kind of like my day at work!