🐅 🐅 🐅 ultimate January — would this awful month never end? — so in leap the valedictory tigers (paving the way for the sweet introductory rabbits of February, who in turn herald the fabulous, fortunate, and beneficent dragons of the new lunar year); but the near future looks dark, with at least a week of cold rain, predicted to begin any minute now (I look out my window into the gloom of 9 am and can barely discern my winter-flowering cymbidium orchids — four cultivars now in bloom, more to come soon, all beautiful memorials to my long-dead man Jacques)
And yes, this is another posting serving as evidence that I’m not dead yet. I have projects that are taking much longer than I expected, I’ve been hampered by crippling pain (which you don’t want to hear about, but there it is), and I took most of a day off to welcome visitors (an extraordinarily big thing; I get visits from friends only every few months), who came bearing a small carload of really fine sushi and stayed for a couple hours of amiable talk — giving me the balm of good company. So this morning, as a diversionary tactic I will shamelessly extract bits of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (see my play on its refrain in the header for this posting), just to get the one line that appears to be of relevance to linguists:
