In just a few minutes the greatest rivalry in all of organized sports will begin the year anew, as the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees are scheduled to meet on the playing field for the first time since Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. I hear tickets for this Spring Training matchup are selling on eBay for $500 a piece! Let's just hope no fights break out down in City of Palms Park between the Boston and New York retiree communities (a.k.a. the Bloods and the Crips)...
Meanwhile, I'm battling laryngitis here along with a pesky head cold. Not sure what kind of shape my voice is going to be in for my classes this week, but if I have to croak my Plato, Homer, and New Testament, well then I'll just have to croak!
(Hey, ever wonder why its larynx, but laryngitis and not larynxitis? It all goes back to Greek - I know, what are the odds! Words that come to us via Ancient Greek that end in -x are the result of a combination between the actual root of the word - which ends here in -ng, from the Genitive form laryngos - and the Proto Indo-European Nominative ending of -s. Although in Greek the final -s tends to disappear from Nominative forms, sometimes when it drops out it leaves a trace of its presence, such as compensatory lengthening of the final vowel or in this case the double consonant x or xi in Greek. I guess if we didn't believe in double consonants - and by and large English doesn't, the x being an anomalous entity in our version of the Roman alphabet - we could spell the word laryngs. But that looks as ugly to us as it did to the Ancient Greeks, hence the invention of the letter x!)
Damn, now I have to cross-post this to Full Metal Hoplite!
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