Ahoy!

That was a long and unplanned interruption in my blogging. Between an ongoing lack of sleep, the start of my class, and trying to meet a deadline at work, the blog has suffered. I’ll probably post less frequently until Eidan starts sleeping through the night, which he’ll hopefully start doing when he’s about 3 months old. But I’ll try to avoid going this long without a post again.

Today’s trivia: I should explain my greeting “ahoy!” For years I’ve used it in emails and IM. It was Alexander Graham Bell’s preferred phone greeting, but it lost out to “hello,” which Edison preferred. My feeling is that the electronic medium calls for a different greeting (I don’t have a profound philosophical justification for this - “hello” in the written form just feels too flat as a greeting, especially for IM). Apparently English is the only language where the greeting used in-person and on the phone is the same, so it’s not unusual to have different greetings for different contexts. According to this NPR story, “hello” likely comes from “halloo” (also a nautical greeting) and caught on as an in-person greeting and as a phone greeting around the same time, in the 1880s (the phone was invented in the 1870s).