20140629.0808

One of the things I sometimes do to find what I will write of a morning is to look back over what I have written. There are times, such as yesterday, when I leave a stub of a piece for myself. I am not always of a mind to pursue any individual stub, of course, to build from any one toothing stone, but I sometimes am, and it helps to have such a thing from which to work. Indeed, my upcoming presentation at the South Central Modern Language Association conference is such an outgrowth; I had a nascent idea as I was writing the dissertation, footnoting the possibility, and I have returned to it for the conference paper. Or I will return to it; I have a few other projects that require attention before I get to that one.

Sometimes, though, what I find is less fortunate. I admit that the writing I do in this webspace is largely unpolished. I do not review it closely before releasing it into the world, checking over it only lightly before clicking "Publish" and releasing my words into the digital ether of the Internet. (It occurs to me that ether is a good term; the online environment does wonders as a sedative.) That means that errors of usage occasionally escape even my eyes, and when I look back over what I have written, I am vexed to find them. When I do, I correct them, of course, but that does not mean that evidence of my mistake is not available. After all, once information is on the Internet, it is nearly always on the Internet, through being shared and through being archived. It is likely that I have escaped notice, but I may not have done so; there are many people who spend much time online, and I might have been seen and copied so as to be ridiculed by them.

That I should not worry about such things, I know. In truth, I do not worry about them in themselves; catching someone with a terminal degree in English in occasional spelling errors is embarrassing but hardly harmful. Catching other people in moments of weakness when they have exposed far more damaging things, however, is far worse, and it happens more often than it ought to have. It is in part because I do worry about such things that I share myself in text rather than image in this webspace and elsewhere. I have had the unfortunate experience of teaching a class with my fly down (entirely accidentally); I know whereof I speak. Fortunately, it happened without so many cameras available as has since become the case. Were it to happen now and to be taken out of context--which is easily done--I could be subject to disciplinary action and perhaps litigation or prosecution. None of these suggest themselves as desirable; each would be enabled by a sharing of error.

I suppose I need to take more time to look over what I write, even here.