The good news is that my vocabulary disorder has been cured. For essay writing this is, indeed good news, as by midnight last night the situation was critical. I had lost the entirety of my vocabulary apart from the words "furthermore", "hence", "therefore", "the", "a" "derived" and a solitary noun "context". That it was an acute case is evinced by the fact that I had also invented a new word "theretowithin". The strange thing was that conceptual clarity was maintained, but I'll leave it to neuroscientists to investigate the intricacies of this. My whole essay was hence (notice I am not fully recovered)reduced to a series of future postulates entirely dependant on the proceeeding argument. But as the proceeding argument was entirely a future postulate, dependant on the proceeding argument, the prognosis looked grim.
Urgent times call for urgent measures, so I called at the local firework/liquor store for remedy. The phrase "only in ..." is one often used to attribute specific, unique characteristics to a locale, but in this case it is not a cliche. My experience is that it is only in Hull that a licensing authority grant a license to a store that effectively resulted in a direct link between purchasing cheap booze and obtaining, on a year round basis, massive amounts of explosives. Nevertheless, it is the case - our local liquor store sells "The Devil's Revenge" next to "The Devil's brew". I opted for the brew, and, by dint of a self induced unconciousness, woke up this morning with a vocabulary fully restored, albeit that there was a physiological resistance to reproducing any of it out-loud.
The Nickson are made of stern material though, and an inability to speak was not going to stop my ultimate goal - that of completing the essay ahead of schedule. This was accomplished tonight approximately twenty minutes into a soccer match - the FA cup semi-final - that saw Manchester United unceremonisously dumped out of a major competition. Buoyed by this, and sseing it as sign of good fortune I reviewed my essay. Vocabulary-wise, it is brilliant. I have used words like 'pursuant' and 'eclectic' in the right places. I have used words like "obviate' and "tenacious" surgically, and even managed to minimize the frequency of "this finding means". But there is a problem, and this is the bad news. I have developed a new condition, namely "Conceptual conjuntivitus".
"conceptual conjunctivitus" is a little understood, (although in one variation, sadly too frequent) condition, whereby the sufferer's conceptual frameworks meet at a conjunction. The conditions of conceptual conjunctivitus are Type A, and Type B. I have Type B, the unfortunate one, where tragically, an essay writer will develop two beautiful, connected themes,towards a working hypothesis that they interact. Unfortunately, in Type B, the themes do interact, but they nullify eachother. So when the bit of the essay (technically known as 'the conclusion') is reached when you tie it all together, a sufferer of Type B will discover, to his or her, horror, that one idea that has been beautifully developed disproves the other. For me,this manifested itself in the discovery that I had been simultaneously arguing against determinism and advocating cultural development as only possible by application of the same.
So it's back to the firework store. I'm not buying booze tonight, I'm going for the fireworks.
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When you have finally finished this epic save it as HTML. Fire it up in Google Chrome.
There is a smashing little add-on for Chrome called "Find & Replace for Dummies". For any word found, it gives you a multiple choice replacement. Find "semiotic" and for every instance it gives you "semolina". Similarly "postulate" can be "prosthetic".
Thus the finished work can be enhanced and those short strawed to read it will never know.
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