If you’ve been to college, community college, university, whatever, you should know that Wikipedia is the scourge of professors everywhere. No, we may not use it as a source. No, we can’t use it for ideas, even. If we dare mention The Great Wiki in our paper, ten points will be frenchly docked. I say French, because I feel like that’s something uppercrusty/upperhanded a snooty French person would do. Let me enjoy my cliches. It makes sense to me. And I like to create adverbs on a whim.

However, as I and the significant other (I truly know the meaning of “It’s Complicated” on Facebook now) were verbally sparring last night (one of my favourite activities), I realized I may not truly know the meaning of an oxymoron, or a redundancy (verbally). I argued that a redundancy cancels itself out. S.O. told my brother that ‘overexaggerating’ was redundant. Which to me, means exaggerating means overdoing it, so using over with exaggerating is essentially too much, and you cannot really OVERexaggerate. Makes sense to me. S.O. argued that theres no canceling it. We went on to discuss oxymorons. I think he said oxymorons cancel themselves out, like silent scream. But I think they don’t, necessarily, because isn’t silent scream an actual concept, idea, that has meaning to us? Right?

You’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with Wikipedia? Well, I’m a woman. I have to tell the backstory, durr. Anyhoo, I went to The Great GOOGLE to search what we were discussing, and I was invariably led to the The Great Wiki. Hm, its almost like an internet Houdini. You know, The Great Houdini. And I remembered why I love, and we all love, I think, Wikipedia. It’s like a giant tree of knowledge, perhaps of good or evil? And I’ve spent many nights, as we all have, clicking away here and there saying to ourselves “Hm, what’s that?”, and end up being 20 pages separated from where we started. Almost like looking for high school friends on Myspace, minus the gasps of “You REPRODUCED??” and “Oh, damn, put up WET!” and “Wow, he’s still so hot…”

So, in my search for redundancy, oxymorons, and the etcetera, I learned about Self Refuting ideas, Metaphysical naturalism, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, and all kinds of goodies. And then I also remembered how much I LOVE words.

It also reminded me of how I love numbers. I am not a math whiz, but there are parts of math, the word I use for all things numerical, quantumish, strictly ruled and fascinating, that I dearly love because numbers tickle me. I had a conversation with a friend about this a few weeks ago at a bar in Irving. Now I’m having this conversation about words and Chomsky-an sentences with myself in Fort Worth, because unfortunately I am not in wordsmith company. Currently there is a dog running in circles around me looking for a possum. Oh, yeah.

But hell, whats a blog about myself for if I’m not going to talk about stuff that tickles? And I am very, very ticklish.