So this has been an interesting week. My roommate (as I'm sure you've all heard until you're ready to vomit) is in medical school, and last night was her white coat ceremony. It's basically an intro to the medical profession where they're ceremonially presented with the white coats they'll be wearing on their clinicals and other such doctory events. It's a BIG DEAL and so I dressed myself up and went to it. It must be very meaningful to the participants, but to everyone else it was very much like a college graduation: long, pompous, and boring.

On my way home after the gala (which lasted until ten or so, then there was a reception and drinks) I was so darn tired that I called up Mr. Shenlongbo since he lives a few timezones west of here and I was pretty sure he was awake. I needed a good conversation to keep myself from falling asleep. Fortunately, he wasn't busy and as we often do we were soon having a lovely chat about grammar.

I'm a grammar nerd.

Anyway, let me run this by you and see if you find it as silly as Shen and I did. Apparently there's a new part of speech in use by the US military... or rather, a new name for an old part of speech. Remember those things called adverbs? You know, the ones that often end in -ly and give a more precise flavor to verbs? Yeah, those. Apparently the term "adverb" is too difficult to understand, since they've been redubbed "modified verbs". Modified verbs!? wtf? I could see modifiers of verbs, since that is after all what adverbs do... I could see modified adjectives even, since if you take off the -ly suffix most adverbs become adjectives. I'm not sure how you could spin "quickly", "neatly", or even "expeditiously" into verbs of any kind--modified or otherwise. Bah. Silly military.

In other news, it's been pointed out that one of my trigames.net reviews is quoted on Wikipedia! I feel like a fancy pants reviewer... like someone who gets paid, but without the paid part. See here, here, and here. You know you wanna.