About

My name is Mike. I teach high school English.

Formerly, I lectured in English and writing at the University of Waterloo. My thesis is/was about metonymy in the works of Charles Dickens and George Gissing. Metonymy is like metaphor, but super cool and subtle. Metaphor shows up in poetry, but metonymy shows up more in realist novels. Whereas metaphor discovers or reveals a similarity between two totally different domains of experience or knowledge, metonymy enacts a subtle shift within a single domain. We also use metonymy in performative speech acts (think J.L. Austin) and conversational implicature (think H.P. Grice), such as when you say something like, “Hey, do you think you could maybe clean your room?” when you really mean, “Please clean your darn room.”

I have this blog on the internet now because I like writing things, and I also like organizing my thoughts by writing things.

I don’t have a good answer as to why I chose “Refined Robot” as a name or a domain. Sorry.