Monthly Archives: February 2011

The Month of Interminable Winter

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Why is it that February, the shortest month of the year, always feels like one of the longest?  This year, February has been the month of interminable winter.

Just this past Wednesday, we were hit with a snowstorm.  Foolishly, I chose to disbelieve the forecast and to defy the promised snow by wearing my better black flats to work.  This was a mistake.  I also chose to wear my less-warm coat and failed to include mittens in the outerwear ensemble, which made brushing the snow off my car after work even more delightful than that particular chore typically is.  By Thursday morning, we had about a foot of snow, and the temperatures had plummeted to truly frigid depths.  When I left for work on Friday morning, it was four degrees:  sunshine, blue sky, and four degrees.

I’ve been meaning to enliven the blog with photographs, and while the sunshine and the snow was quite pretty — picturesque, even — I just couldn’t bring myself to photograph snow in late February, especially not in four-degree temperatures.

One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost talks about a reluctance to yield to “the drift of things”, the inevitable passage of time and the changing of seasons; but I don’t know that he really meant it about winter.  I think maybe about the time February reached its middle, Mr. Frost might have been just as ready to see the end of winter as I am, right now.

My principle on principal.

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In my free time, I go to library school.  Since I have a full-time job, this means that my evenings and weekends (and whatever paltry social life these might have included before) are generally consumed with doing schoolwork.  But I’m not complaining.  I all-too-frequently find myself shirking responsibility with various distractions — the array of the internet (my new blog, for instance), and (of late, most popularly) sleeping.

However, I find that my patience for lectures, and schoolwork in general, is increasingly diminished by the presence of grammatical or spelling errors in professors’ lectures, or other class materials.

For example.  In one of my classes this quarter, we have been discussing the foundational principles of cataloging.  One of these principles is the Principle of Principal Responsibility.  In the lecture materials, this has been alternately referred to as:  the principal of principal responsibility, the principal of principle responsibility, and the principle of principal responsibility.

Really.

In the interest of venting my intolerance in a medium more appropriate than class discussion, a primer:

principal: 1) noun, person who has controlling authority or is in a leading position; 2) adjective, most important, consequential, or influential

principle: 1) noun, a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption

Definitions from http://www.merriam-webster.com

In other words, principal, which can be either a noun or an adjective, and thus modifies responsibility, indicating chief responsibility; and principle, referring to a fundamental assumption, in this context a fundamental assumption of cataloging related to chief responsibility.