On fighting the urge to bang my head against the wall

With my abstract pending and a to-do list consisting of a lit review and a historical linguistic data chapter to write before my semester break ends, I decided to read a few articles that have been sitting in a file on my laptop for who-knows-how-long. Perhaps I should have made it more of a priority to read these articles earlier. I came across a reference in one of those articles that sounded very close to my research. The reference was a chapter in book that I fortunately found in the university library this afternoon. Instead of reading the chapter immediately in my study carrel, I socialized with my friends who were also on campus.

Deciding that I needed to accomplish more dissertation tasks than knitting a second sock, I picked up the chapter. Despite years of spending the entire day reading, knitting a second sock is more exciting than a 40-page chapter. But read I did, and behold, some smart lame-o in Australia wrote an honors thesis on half of what my dissertation focuses on... in 1981. His work is older than me! And why didn’t I read about it until today? Because he used the phrase “parts of a person” rather than “body parts”, so his work never showed up in any of my searches for literature. How many other papers are there out there on parts of a person that I don’t know about?!? Ugh. And his conclusions are eerily similar to what I have been claiming all along. Double ugh! And he used historical data from 4 language families when my data only come from one (and he used the same one). Luckily he doesn’t have a cross-linguistic database with more than 150 languages in it too, or I’d really be screwed.

The good news is I found out about this work now and not after defending my dissertation. The bad news is I have a lot more reading, searching and data analyzing to do than I thought. AND I think I’ll have to rewrite my abstract.... again.

Time to find a wall against which I can bang my head. Ugh.