How a hiss can drive you mad

Yesterday night, around 1 am, while watching a movie, I suddenly heard this hiss in my ears. I didn’t know where it came from, I didn’t know if it would go away, and I didn’t know what to do about it. The hiss lasted for about 10 minutes, after which it vanished, but later returned once more to not go away.

It was, as you can imagine, pure torture. I was ready to go to sleep but couldn’t because of the hiss and… well, thoughts churned in my head: it was while watching a movie, so this has to do something with the noise. The volume was presumably too loud, so it somehow must have damaged my ears. A quick Google search revealed that, in that case, no real treatment was available. Wikipedia says that exposure is the most common cause – about 90% of those sorts of hisses originate from too loud noises. The words kept spinning in my head: irreversible – no cure – living like this forever – how am I going to explain this to anyone– it’s in the brain, which is pretty much terra incognita as far as science is concerned – I don’t wanna be a cautionary tale – people have committed suicide over this – I wouldn’t even dare to think about the technical term Tinnitus – and so on, and all the while, the ringing in my head wouldn't stop. It was really depressing, something I don’t need right now, especially because I have exams in a couple of days. You can't scare me that easily, but I got to say, I was scared shitless at that moment. I stayed up for hours thinking these thoughts. It really was torture in its purest form.

This morning, the hiss was back. It came and went and came and went, over and over again. Sometimes it would leave me alone for 30 minutes, other times it would plague me for an hour straight. The only thing that seemed to help was swallowing: then, the hiss lowers its volume. You can imagine the tower of chewed gum sitting next to my desk! As I’m typing this, I’m putting the last piece of the pack of gum in my mouth and making a mental note that I need to go get some more.

Long story short: I just came back from the doctor’s office. He quickly examined my ears, throat and nose and explained that it was still the flu I had about two months ago (!) (I even mentioned this illness in a previous blog). The infection simply lingered and just now caused this problem because, apparently, I’m still sick, and have been all this time in-between: my sinuses are as blood-red; and due to pressure in the Eustachian tubes, my eardrums are turned inside out, banging against the insides of my ears and creating the hiss (or something to that effect, I wasn’t really paying attention anymore after he said ‘you’ll be fine in a week or so’). It’s pretty much the same as when you’re in a landing airplane – only slightly worse. With a prescription for a drug and a spray he sent me on my way, and I was very happy it wasn’t anything more serious.

However, due to the hiss still being in my ears (it's goddamn annoying!!!), I’ve come to reconsider some things. From now on, I’m going to better protect my ears and wear protective ear coverings (or what are they called again?) more often when I go to concerts and clubs. I’m going to lower the volume of the TV and MP3 player – and I strongly urge you to do the same. Take it from someone who’s been there: it’s not fun at all to have malfunctioning ears! You only have one pair, so I do implore you to protect them well!

Dutch spelling...

Those of you who either don’t know me or haven’t read my introductory post don’t know that I’m a Belgian student majoring in languages. One of my compulsory classes is Dutch Linguistics, and a large part of this is the spelling. Even though I’m a native speaker of Dutch and I’ve always been fairly good at spelling, this thing is driving me crazy. I’m taking the exam in a couple of days (the first of many - wish me luck!), which also means I won’t be updating this blog quite as often. Oh well.

As an example of how crazy Dutch spelling is, I wanted to share one word with you, with all the rules and explanations of how to correctly spell it. That word is Spanjaard (in English Spaniard), and today, I’m going to correctly divide it into syllables for you, something that is paramount if you want to spell correctly. I won’t bore you to death with the intricate details, but I just wanna point out some weird things in the spelling.

First off, Spanjaard has, as in English, 2 sets of vowels, which are a and aa. So we have to divide somewhere in between. But where? The general rule says: if there are 2 consonants between vowels, divide between them. So we get Span-jaard, right? Wrong: there is an exception: you don’t have to divide between vowels but between sounds; and nj is pronounced as one sound (it sounds like the ñ in mañana). So it should be regarded as one consonant, and in that case, the rule is: divide in front of the consonant: Spa-njaard. Unfortunately, there’s another exception: a number of consonants require you to split in-between, like sc, nh and our beloved nj. So it’s Span-jaard. That’s it, then? Nope, not at all.

Spanjaard is, in fact, a derivation, which means we’ve done this thing all wrong so far! It’s derived from Spanje and -aard. The same is true in English: Spain and -iard. This has quite some consequences: the general rule for derivations is: divide between the source word and the pre/suffix; so we get Spanj-aard. How’s that for size? Unfortunately, there is again an exception: if the suffix starts with a vowel, you should follow the normal rules, which leads us to Span-jaard (see above). Right? Wrong. If the suffix is -aard, you should split between the source word and the suffix (again!). So do we end up with Spanj-aard? Nope! As you may guess, there’s yet another exception to the exception to the exception! Some words on -aard are split with the general rule, among which, you guessed it, is Spanjaard.

In the end, the right way to split Spanjaard is Span-jaard, and you have to know all the rules above to come to that conclusion. And if you think that this is a one-of-a-kind example, guess again: I could give you scores of other examples that are equally fucked up and which I have to learn to pass this exam. See why it’s driving me mad?