My name is Ryan McIlvain. I am an English student at Brigham Young University. I am happily married on most days. Enough? Enough.
If I can appropriate (steal?) a joke I once heard: When I was a kid I kept a diary. The other day I re-read it. Check this out:
Day 1: Still tired from the move.
Day 2: Everybody talks to me like I'm an idiot.
And so forth...
No, on second thought I'd rather discuss the weirdness of the word weird, that bane of the i-before-e-except-after-c rule. Why are we so rule-crazy anyway? Why not out and say it: Our language is seriously messed up. (Blames ze Germans, it's all the rage nowadays.) As a Mormon missionary in southeastern Brazil, I, my country, and my country's language was much maligned. One of my favorite jabs was about English's school-kid simplicity. I've always attributed this story to a guy name Ze Ramalho, but in truth I can't remember his name.