I encourage you to follow my travels via twitter, if schadenfreude possesses you so. See right for the latest updates.
Additionally, if you call any time between 9AM and 6PM PST, June 26th through July 15th, you’ll almost certainly catch me on the road, a mere buttonpress away from answering your call, all too eager for human conversation(, adjective clause promising gratitude)*.
As some of you know, in my final quarter at Stanford I initiated and co-taught a course about the programming language Scala, entitled “Cross-Paradigm Programming with”—wait for it—“Scala.” My expertise was dwarfed by that of my co-instructors Jorge Ortiz and Julien Wetterwald, but I learned enough to give a couple of lectures. In case your appetite is whetted by the following anecdote, check out the course website, which is still operational, though I have no idea how long it will remain that way.
Let it be agreed that the synonyms “columnar” and “columniform” rank among the finest adjectives in all of Anglophonics. Their quality owes especially to their suffixes, of course, but while other words may boast of similar ends (planar, cuneiform, &c.), I can think of none so fun to utter:
kuh-luhm-ner
kuh-lumn-uh-fawrm
Perhaps you wonder, as I have often wondered, why there are no corresponding adjectives for rows. I have my columnar data, and my row data—or is it my row-based data? my row-form data? Anywhere you take it, boredom sets in immediately. Why must this asymmetry be?
Well, I gave it some thought so you wouldn’t have to, and the reason’s reasonable enough: a “row” is always a concept, never a physical object (a spatial association of physical objects, perhaps, but not itself an object). A column, by contrast, can be a discrete physical object (Corinthian, Ionic, Doric) as well as an abstraction. While “columnar” and “columniform” are sometimes used in the abstract case, this usage is imprecise, as only physical objects may be truly “(shaped) like a column.” It conveys no information to say that something is shaped like a row, since no one has any idea what a row is shaped like.
Don’t miss next week’s declamation on the distinction between “overtone” and “undertone.”
