Disappointing Factoid

A few years ago, for my birthday, a friend sent me a link to a website. You could put in your age, and it would report a list of people who had accomplished more than you could ever hope to in your lifetime, by the time they were your age. While poking around on wikipedia, i was just reminded of that feeling.

The voice actors on the simpsons are comparatively young. Much younger than I was expecting. Harry Shearer, the voice of Smithers, Flanders, Burms (and Handsome Dan from Wayne's World 2) is 63, about what I was expecting. But Dan Castallanet and Nancy Cartwright are 49 and Hank Azaria and Yeardley Smith are 43. They've beeing doing the Simpsons for 20 years. Which means they were in their 20's when they started doing this.

This is just a distressing notion.

been, uh, blog-slacking

guess I didn't have much to say. Or I was processing. Or both. Here's a neat little abstract I ran across while reading (one of the only cool things I've found in my assigned readings, I'm disapointed to admit):

Abstract
The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating
what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these
announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding
what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes
from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their
speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they
formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach
it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in “and-uh”), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that
uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just
as they would any word. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.