At 11:38 PM, Brian glanced at his bookmarks.

Urgh, I forgot all about blogging today. Too many other things on my mind, I guess. I've been feeling lonelier than usual. Happily, I've got some stuff set up this weekend: a ball game with my dad tomorrow, and with any luck an interview on Sunday. But for today I have twenty minutes to write a blog entry, which means either I take a pass or I write something half-assed about something I happen to be thinking about, like Go or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. And frankly either there's a blog entry in those topics or there isn't, and if there is I'd prefer to wait until I have time to write something full-assed about them like usual. So I'll take the pass.

There is a topic I've been meaning to write about that I can say something about in the remaining thirteen minutes, though, and it's not something I feel is especially expandable. It's my tendency to begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions. The last three sentences of my previous paragraph all began with conjunctions, and I didn't do it on purpose. My AP English teacher always jumped all over me for that. He said it subordinated the sentence to the previous sentence and turned it into a fragment. Syntactically he's probably right if these conjunctions are treated as the same words as the ones that are used with commas to tie sentences together. But that's just how I think. Each thought is tied to the previous one with a statement about how they're related. Do they contradict each other? Does the second expand on the first? Am I drawing a conclusion? There are no better words than the conjunctions for invisibly guiding you as you try to reconstruct my thoughts from these symbols on a computer screen. I could say "however" and "furthermore" and "consequently," and sometimes I do that too. But those are big words that connote big ideas. Some days my ideas are small, and on those days my words should be too.

This, obviously, is one of those days. So that's today's post. And you see, I did end up talking a little about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after all.