That's etymology, not entymology

So all my writing efforts have shifted toward the diss, so I thought I'd offer up one my favorite paragraphs so far, from chapter 1. It's exactly the kind of paragraph that might get cut, but I hope it doesn't:

"'Genre,' like 'invention,' also has roots in both science and literature. What words like these give us is not an excuse to do interdisciplinary work, but a directive: if the words we use to categorize idea and things within our separate fields are shared by other fields (genre), and if the words we use to describe our procedures and methodologies are also shared (experiment, invention, etc.), then we must assume that this sharing contains more interest than the kind provoked by etymological kinship. It is not that etymology is not important; rather, the interest provoked by etymological kinship, which is a kind of pleasure in finding origins (and which is supposedly a question for a linguist and not necessarily a literary critic), is a pleasure that threatens to make us forget the serious nature of what is at stake when we search out the genealogy of words. If we assume that language plays a key role in ordering experience, and I certainly do, then we must take the pleasure of etymology very seriously. For when we search out the history of a word, especially a word like invention, and when we track its historical shifts in meaning, we are also tracking the history of an idea, the history of a practice, a whole range of circumstances that both prompts the change of a word’s meaning, and the circumstances produced by that shift. There was never a time when “invention” was more pregnant with meaning than in nineteenth century America; this tells us something about this particular word and this particular nation which we would not understand without understanding them together."

Still here...

Man, I have been terrible about keeping up with this. The good news is I've been writing my diss at a pretty steady pace, and have been quite happy with the quality as well. I should have the first draft of my first chapter done by late April, at the latest.

My parents are coming in next week. My dad and I will be playing golf on Saturday morning at the Golf Club at Vistoso, which is a beautiful desert course north of town. We'll surely hit up our favorite cigar shop as well. Then a spring training game next Sunday. If Ada is in an ok mood tomorrow, I'm going to take her to watch the M's play the Diamondbacks.

Hopefully I'll have some interesting pictures to post soon. As of now in Tucson, it's warm, we've just picked the last of our fruit, and the orange and grapefruit trees are blossoming, which means bees and hummingbirds, too.