Words

I have a strange, friendly relationship with an anatomy and physiology professor I had taken a couple of classes with while I was in college. At some point he noticed my artistic abilities and suggested that I look into anatomical illustration as a career option. I never did head in that direction, obviously, but I appreciated the attention and encouragement. He ended up being my go-to professor for letters of recommendation, even after he moved out of state to a different university, and somehow we've managed to keep in touch at least once a year emailing random hello's and exchanging art clips or playing Draw Something. This year he was reminded of comics I used to draw by one of his student's doodles:

I used to have a crush on him (I might have been 18 or 19 at the time), even though he's not particularly amazing looking and is also perhaps 10-15 years older than me if I could guess. That happened to me a lot in college, though, with a bunch of my professors. I think it's the intelligence I'm attracted to, it kind of outweighed everything else. Nowadays, I still hold some adoration towards him just for remembering about me, one of thousands of students he's probably had over the years. That's pretty unusual...

But there was a potentially embarrassing moment one lab class when everyone was taking each others blood pressure. Mine was elevated, which raised some concern, so my professor performed the test on me himself. I got nervous from his proximity, so it went up even more. Haha. Oh god.

Changing the subject!

As I attempted to drift off to sleep last night, I had a recollection about an idea from the beginning of a book I once started reading and never finished. The plot is hazy in my mind, but the main character got himself into a situation where he was required to define words utterly and without holes. It started off with small words like "gate" or "tree", but then he was challenged by abstract nouns like "courage" and "liberty" which as you could probably imagine would be a lot more difficult than describing concrete nouns.

Anyway, all of this made me think about words having to be defined by other words, which are defined by other words, and I wondered if there is like a first word that is so self-defined that it was able to describe another word, which could describe another, and so the tree of words developed.

That's silly, though. I'm sure people just started defining words by pointing at things and giving it a name.