Clear as mud

I'm three days, and a very long and confusing first chapter, into the linguistics course and have that familiar 'what have I let myself in for?' feeling. Page 51 of my text book, for example, tells me:

In using ideas from cognitive metaphor theory in the

analysis of metaphor in discourse, we face the methodological

problem of labelling conceptual metaphors. Any set of connected

linguistic metaphors can be given a label that looks like a 

conceptual metaphor, merely by encoding it in the form A IS B.

Hmmm. It doesn't help that I think 'metaphor' looks wrong and I keep wanting to put an 'e' on the end. I thought I knew what metaphors were - it seems I only knew a tiny bit about them. Apparently, you can get active and dead ones. Are there any that are halfway between? Zombie metaphors? I'm going to have to give that chapter another reading because I went into a kind of a haze, where I was reading but nothing actually entered the brain. I felt like one of Mr Chaos's favourite students, moaning: 'I don't get it,' except that I'm going to have to try and 'get it' whereas she simply can't be bothered. 

So lets forget intellectual discussion and education, and talk conkers instead. Today is the Autumn Equinox. I love this time of year, but always forget the tears and tantrums over the grand harvest from the school's horse chestnut trees. 

We have two gorgeous trees on the infant playground, from which we easily fill two old steel bins with conkers. Next month, we will use some for the school conker competition (winners get a trophy and a giant chocolate bar), but until then, the infants have a fine time collecting and squabbling over the conkers. They have only just started falling, and the rug-rats don't seem to understand that the longer they stay on the tree, the bigger the conkers will be. They don't want to wait; they want them NOW (add grumpy stamp of foot here). They don't want to share them by putting them in the conker bins, either. They get slipped up sleeves and pilfered from friends' pockets. Now, I can actually understand this. A brand new conker is a rather lovely thing, and I have to admit that, if I see a particularly nice specimen, it goes into my coat pocket. (Thankfully, they don't go mouldy as I sometimes find them the following year, when the winter coats are got out again.)

No doubt, over the weekend, several conkers will have fallen, so the infants will be happily collecting tomorrow. The trees are next to the staff car park, which causes problems with dents in car roofs (I feel very wrong writing that. I learnt it was 'rooves' at school, so 'roofs' gives me the same feeling that 'mouses' would) as the conkers fall with a heck of a thump. I know, because one year, a child and I both got hit on the head by falling conkers. He cried and I nearly did...

It's funny how writing this leads me up all sorts of paths (the time-wasting peril of having the internet to hand). I had to look up the roofs/rooves thing and have found no end of forum arguments on the subject. There are similar ones on lit/lighted and that's one that really bugs me when it's used in novels. She lighted a candle?? It sounds like a child's mistake: I eated my dinner. I do apologise if I'm insulting people here, by the way. And now my spell-check tells me that 'apologise' should be spelt/spelled with a 'z'. I know a lot of it comes from the differences between the English and American spellings, and how we can't seem to agree on anything, but it all makes for fascinating reading that makes the blog take a good couple of hours to write. 

Enjoy what's left of the weekend, no matter how you spell it...