if a tree falls in the forest....#1
As a Ph.D student some years ago, I was walking down a hallway, singing “if a tree falls in the forest, would anybody hear it”? Instead of this, the correct line from a Bruce Cockburn song, I sang “If a tree, falls in the desert…”. One of my fellow students was passing, and adroitly finished with “…that would be surprising!” in perfect tune and tempo, no less. He is now a highly successful neurologist. My error, the neurologist would tell us, was a “semantic paraphasia” (meaning the word error was a related word, “desert”, to the intended word, “forest”). That I was making such errors many years ago is worrisome, now that I think about it (see below). I digress. Why that song line now? Well, why do any of us want to blog? Why do I want to blog, and would it matter if nobody read it? In my case, in the words of Lilly Allen, it certainly is to some extent to have a “whinge [1] and a moan” in main part about the state of British Universities. (If I do get a sufficient head of steam