(no subject)

Hungry for a Better Life

"Food shouldn't prevent somebody from having his dreams being realized."

I just finished reading the above linked story about youth soccer in Ghana. So many heartbreaking choices, where making a team really can be the difference between a life of desperation and one of promise.

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On a related note: the United States is a signatory of the Millenium Development Goals. In difficult times, it may be tempting to reduce funding for these kinds of programs. I hope that we don't do that. Beyond the simple humanitarian reasons for striving to increase food security across the globe, doing so also creates a more secure environment for all of us--from first world to third world.

word weirdness or me weirdness--take your pick

Apparently it's spam day for me.

You know what word is hard for me to say? Well, there are many such words, but one of them is abandoning. It looks fine written. But if I say it, for some reason I find it difficult not to say "abandononing. Which doesn't really sound any righter than abandoning, but there you go.

While I'm making semantic confessions, here's another one. I was familiar with the word ethereal from a pretty young age. I'd seen it often in writing, but never really heard it said in such a way to connect the pronunciation with the spelling. Fortunately, I never really had cause to say the word out loud, so nobody ever knew that in my mind, it was always pronounced eth-a-reel rather than e-thear-ee-al. Nobody knew until now, that is.

In general, I tend to pronounce things in my head the way they're spelled because it helps me spell words right. Mostly. But sometimes I slip up and say the "spelled" version out loud. Which is how ennui sometimes accidentally becomes comes out en-you-ai. Oops.

If you're thinking that I silently pronounce paralysis and colonel as para-lye-sis and coll-o-nel respectively, you'd be right.

If you're also thinking that I might be a little soft in the head, well, I'm not sure I can argue against that interpretation right now.