Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 19, "Gollum's Song."

Right, so this made me laugh a lot today. Or want to, anyway.

Picture: Our very astute medievalist, head of the English department, older professor with hair beginning to bald appropriately enough along the lines of a monk's tonsure. He had just spent an hour discoursing discursively (ah, alliteration) about the ins-and-outs of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde to me, staring into space and rambling in his soft genteel way. At the end of the hour, he was assigning my reading and writing for next week, Book V of the Troilus. "And as a critical issue, you might consider the incredible faffing about that happens throughout Book V," he said with a completely straight face.

I had to work very hard not to smile. "Faffing about" is not an American-ism, least of all parlance of a well-educated American academic. Hadn't heard it in quite some time.

And since this post is completely frivolous, it shall die a quiet death here. Good-night.