Concert!

Hi, all!

I thought I would invite you to a concert this Friday. The Orpheus Singers, one of the choirs at the School of Music, is performing two Bach cantatas, a handful of madrigals, and a set by an American composer, Ned Rorem. I'm conducting one of the Bach cantatas (number 12). It is absolutely beautiful music. I'll try to figure out how to post a link to my notes.

The concert begins at 8pm and is in the Blanch Anderson Moore Hall at the SoM. The BAM Hall is one of the coolest spaces in the SoM as it is in the very basement and seriously looks like one huge bathtub.

You can get to the SoM by taking either the Northwood or Bursley bus to the Pierpont stop and walking across the street, or you can drive there (Fuller to Bonisteel, left on Murfin, left on Duffield, left on Baits) and park your car in the lot. If you'd like better directions, let me know. Like all SoM events, there is no charge for admission.

Up North

Posted on behalf of Lindsay, who is locked out of her account.

About that dessert...

I was wholly unsatisfied with the results of the sherbet/sherbert discussion last night, probably because, as a linguist from the Midwest, English teachers and east-coast dictionary editors are my sworn enemies. (As fond as I am of Wikipedia, its claims that the word is "mistakenly" pronounced with the extra 'r' drive me up the wall.)

Anyway, I consulted the OED, which lists an occurance of 'sherbert' from 1675: "We.. were severall times treated with sherbert of lemmons." If this is a mistake, it's a very old one. I had honestly never heard the word pronounced without the second 'r', at least not before last night, so my suspicion was that it's a regional variant rather than a mistake. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English came to my rescue:

Now the name of a frozen dessert, the word sherbet appeared in English in the seventeenth century, meaning “a cold fruit drink,” and developed two spellings reflecting its two pronunciations, sherbet (SHUHR-bit) and sherbert (SHUHR-buhrt). Today both spellings and both pronunciations are regularly encountered in both British and American use, to the discomfort of some purists, who argue that only sherbet is acceptable. ...

(In case you didn't pick up on it, 'purists' is code for "stuffy old English teachers and east-coast dictionary editors". ;) )

A Real High

For people who say I never share my highs, here's a literal high: being two miles above sea level at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado over the weekend. A few pictures:

Mount

Elk

Aspen

Child