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Showing posts from April, 2011

Can you hear me now? "Big" and "Small" Economics

I went to college with a guy, M, who was homeschooled and had nearly perfect elocution.  Bizarrely perfect, in fact, since he came from Winchester, Kentucky.  To be precise M didn't have elocution, he had diction--his voice was distinctive and every word was measured.  He also spoke, as Peter Egan would say, as though he was holding a pencil clenched in his back teeth. One day he was describing the next course in his Business degree.  I swore he said, "Mmmmkro". Being the insufferable know-it-all that I was/am, I knew it had to be 'macroeconomics' or 'microeconomics'.  I probed on, "Uh...M, did you mean 'Macro' or 'Micro'".  He repeated, this time with more urgency, "MMMM-kro".  He might've shoved a schwa sound in there; I don't know.  In any case, I still couldn't discern his target economics class. This went on for some minutes, with increasing levels of M's consternation and increasing emphasis f