anabibliophobia

anabibliophobia

(n.) The morbid fear of being caught with nothing to read. [From Gr.: ana (without) + biblio (book) + phobia (fear)]

There, I finally found it! :)

As I mentioned last night, you never know what God will throw your way each day. I had planned to spend the day getting a lot of studying done but at about 9:15 this morning I had a knock on my door. It was J. Nathan, he had a bad situation at the apartment he was staying at (I can't go into detail) and was wondering if he could spend a little while here. He tried calling some other friends but one was out of town, another wasn't awake yet or something, so he thought that I seemed like the type who would be up by then so he came by my place. We spent a few hours talking about the problem and I tried to give him encouragement because he was going to confront that person and though he wanted to be firm, he didn't want to be overly angry and wondering if to treat this person as a believer or unbeliever etc. I was typing up some morning devotions for another person on a message board so we spent some time together reading and discussing Genesis 49 and 50 and I gave him an article to read that I had.

I think it was encouraging for him and I did think it was encouraging for me as well (iron sharpens iron), but my how the time went! He left somewhere between 12 and 1 I believe. Then I tried to finish up laundry, clean up the camper a bit and then did some math homework and a conclusion for last week's digital lab as well as a proposal for our group for next week. See, I offered to do the proposal myself (for the entire lab) because frankly, I don't trust anyone else to do it! I did a few other things that needed taking care of but I have not yet finished everything I would have liked to. Part of the problem is after studying for a length of time I have a hard time continuing studying for another length of time immediately after. I would like to be more diligent in that area.

I really don't have a whole lot to talk about tonight so I'll go again with another pitifully short post. Oh, and I had hotdogs tonight.

Edit:

I had to share this news story and some of the comments (sometimes these guys can be hilarious)

"Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that 'more than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.'"

Now that's pretty sad of course.

Now here's some comments:

Precisely; I was thinking that the really shocking way to have spun this story would have been: "Credit card offers are written in such complex English that they are unintelligible to 75% of college students".

And another:

Formal contracts & documents should be written in Internet slang. "If you fail to pay your credit card debt we will take your car lol"

And another guy:

I should have went to a US college. I probably could have graduated there.

And another, quoting a previous guy:

Strangely the study doesn't mention what schools were part of this survey. Does anyone know?
Harverd, Printstun, Cornale, and other I've e-leeg colejes.

I've always been tempted to dismiss that as just a "back in my day" story about walking to school in a snowstorm, but it's hard to dismiss certain facts. For example, Robert Graves tells us in his biography [wikipedia.org] that when he an ~8 year old, about 100 years ago, he was "doing ok with Latin, but having trouble with Greek".

And now people are having trouble with their own native language when they graduate from college...