Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo is a sentence where the same word functions in four different roles. Adjective-subject-verb-adjective-direct object. It is probably possible to distinguish the roles played by the two adjectives, but that would take the skills of a greater grammarian than I.
‘Go Buffs!’ – Ralphie and Chip were the CU mascots when I was a graduate student in Boulder. I lived there for almost 3 years in the late 1990s. I haven’t been back since 2000 when I went for my best friend’s wedding. It’s been such a long time since I lived there, but those years burn so bright in memory. There was a beautiful intensity about that time.
People tell me Boulder has changed. They say I wouldn’t recognise it anymore, that it would break my heart to see how Highway 36, the corridor between Boulder and Denver, has become a continuous sprawl of suburbia. Don’t go back, they say, it’s better to remember it as it was, as you were, with the light just so on Mapleton Avenue in early autumn mornings and the snow blanketing the boulders on the Boulder Creek bike path in January and those late nights puzzling over quantum mechanics in coffeeshops attached to bookshops and those long weekend days hiking the Front Range to a bone weariness that comes from carrying your body above tree line and breathing angels’ air. Leave it all, they say. Some things are better left undisturbed.
I’m not sure I agree.
What is Present, not precious?
