Ah, the ubiquitous End of The Year post.

There are so many things I could do with this. I could reflect on a year well spent, full of accomplishments and personal growth. But I could also write about a year completely devoid of any attainment, and my failure to reach any of my resolutions from last year (the ones I could remember, anyways). I suppose there's the possibility for a middle-ground approach, too, for the insistently apathetic.

I personally don't like all this checklisting business at the end of every year. It's too depressing, especially if you look at the way this year has turned out. Bank failure? Check. Bailout of failed banks? Check. Soiling of America's international image? Check.

Slate's The Big Money has helpfully compiled a video montage of The Five Worst Days of 2008.

I could always just give a general summary of the past year, but it wouldn't really be a first-hand account coming from me. Another year of watching Life, and aside from a few interesting commercials it hasn't changed much. I'd like to get up from my metaphorical couch, if anything just to tap on the metaphorical glass and see if anything new happens. But being a metaphorical couch potato, the act of getting up from my metaphorical couch doesn't seem worth the effort. I could continue this poorly spun metaphor, believe me.

I've kept at this blogging thing for over a year now. And people are still reading it. Which fact is more pathetic is hard to determine.

This year I'm "going green," which as far as I understand is just another American excuse to do anything. You've crashed your car again? Well yes; I'm going green, you see.

This year began my last year of high school. It's interesting to see what the shock of reality does to a person during their senior year. It came so suddenly that I barely had time to think before deciding to try my chances at being a musician. Time will tell if it was the right choice, although I have a nagging sense that it wasn't. My plan is basically to hide behind my twelve-tone convictions until somebody finds out that I'm no more creative than the pencil I write music with. I checked all of my music theory books: apparently they don't come with musical talent in the back cover. Just a lame old CD.

This past year has seen a more liberal side of me, and as anyone who knows me will verify, I place all blame on public radio. Evolution doesn't seem so wrong, and I'll be damned if all Democrats are godless heathens. It's ok to talk to atheists, and even take their opinions seriously. And I don't mind terribly if someone makes fun of my faith, because God knows we deserve to be mocked as we mock everyone else.

2009 should be interesting. We lump all this possibility and wonder on what will probably be no different. Then again, Americans everywhere were promised Change. I hope mine doesn't get lost in the mail.

I must be on an English high. But blame this post on my paranoid use of Facebook, not my linguistic ardor.

This post actually has more to do with AT&T, who posted the following ad on Facebook:

I'll admit it's just a little bit cute that a cell phone company would try to intellectualize itself with all this high-brow language stuff. Especially when their fan base of greasy teenagers so enthusiastically shares their zeal for academia. (Oh, I forgot...they provide the iPhone. So that also takes in the faux intelligentsia with their coffee-shopping veneer of nonconformity.)

For those who still use dictionaries*, phonetics are those parenthetical jumbles of characters that help with figuring out how a word should be pronounced. It's especially useful for figuring out which of English's numerous vowel sounds to use for a certain word, which is where the guys at marketing apparently dozed off. The character used in their advertisement, ā, denotes a long "a" sound, as in the words day and pray. AT&T seems to have thought that it denoted the more nasal sound found in aqueduct and, well, swagger. If we went by the phonetics provided in the ad, we'd actually be saying SWAYger.

Besides the phonetic mistake, they also didn't seem to have bothered with reading one of the possible definitions for "swag":

swag (n.) - money or goods taken by a thief or burglar

Courtesy New Oxford American Dictionary

*Papery thing with words and their definitions (deprecated; SEE TXT-ING).

I've been a proud patron of Half.com for quite some time now, for the mere fact that I no longer have to wait for books to come out in paperback for me to even consider buying them. My latest purchase was American composer John Adams' memoir, Hallelujah Junction. I don't know why, but something possessed me to actually read the order confirmation from Half.com. It reads:

Thank you for your purchase on Half.com. The sellers whom you have purchased your items from have been notified and will be packing and shipping your order shortly.

Did you see that? Did your grammatically tuned bowels turn?

Alright, I'll explain. Take a look at the second sentence. Their use of the word "whom" almost makes you think the sentence must be grammatically correct, because only learned scholars use "whom" anymore. But look again, and you'll find that the preposition from is used after the pronoun whom. A corrected version would read:

The sellers from whom you have purchased your items have been notified and will be packing and shipping your order shortly.

So I've lost a little respect for Half.com. But in the end, money talks, even if its grammar sucks.