Wednesday, May 14, 2008

What you can do today.

Ben Zimmer's new digs at the Visual Thesaurus give him a chance to do some strolling: Word Routes - Exploring the pathways of our lexicon.

Read his first installment now. It's on procrastination. [update: his related article on Slate is also available now.]

I admire Ben's work and his scholarship. He's an impressive student of language. His observations and insights consistently encourage careful attention to the discussions about language and the data informing those discussions. He adeptly identifies gaps in arguments and ably suggests strategies for filling them.

But I have to chuckle when he says that he's "been battling the bugbear of procrastination" his whole life. That's cute.

That bugbear drinks 3 pints of my blood a day. And I thank it every night in my quivering tearful prayers.

That's a problem.

1 comment:

  1. Mark Twain said, "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."

    And J.A. Spender: "'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop backwards into today's, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow."

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