I'm off to ballroom dancing again tonight (having finally invested in a pair of proper dance shoes). One thing that's struck me while doing the classes - there's a lot more flexibility in the steps than I'd originally expected. I thought that each dance would be completely choreographed (like the musicals I did at school). However, it's more like the idea of giving a blindfolded person directions around a room, i.e. "forward", "back", "left", "right", except that there's a wider choice of steps (each one being a more complex manoever, e.g. "spin turn"). But the theory is that if both people know all the relevant steps, the man can basically make up the dance as he goes along, and the woman should be able to follow his lead. So, there's some scope for creativity :)
An indication of my changing frame of reference (due to people I know) - the lecturer in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) course was talking about "slash" and "pron" yesterday. My immediate association was with slash fiction (e.g. Legolas/Gollum in fanfic), and porn (pron and pr0n are commonly used as deliberate typos, presumably to get around filters). However, they do actually have "legitimate" meanings here - slash is when you skip the object of a transitive verb (e.g. "who does John like?" as opposed to "John likes Mary"), and pron is short for pronoun (e.g. "he", "she").
And I'm now getting bids on my Ebay items, which is good - looks like I'll be able to shift at least 5 of the 10 tapes.
