With the extreme heat advisories and warnings throughout Arkansas this week, it should come as no surprise that my summer crankiness has cranked up a notch or three.

There's the usual summer misery of humidity (Michael Storey's/Otus the Head Cat's humidity pod columns were funny then, but now it feels like the pods smack you in the face as soon as you leave a building), which makes staying anywhere without air conditioning dangerous and will have you soaked to your underwear within 15 minutes. Then there's the heat which, when combined with storms, makes your yard into a jungle (though according to National Weather Service meteorologist Justin Condry, per reporter Daniel McFadin's story last weekend, we're not expecting rain for a while ... so maybe the yard will just be crispy). Should you have to get out and tame that jungle, you risk heat exhaustion or heatstroke (been there, done that, and it is not fun).

Add to that my IBS and being overweight, and yep, I'm pretty much over summer and would like it to be autumn right now. Plus, little things keep annoying me.

Longtime readers know I'm a word nerd, and a descriptivist when it comes to grammar, focused on how words are used, not how they're supposed to be used (prescriptivism) according to grammar rules (which are mostly a collection of others'........

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