You plan something. Every element points to success. You put all your effort into it. But your gut says it will fail. That is premonition. The Oxford dictionary defines it as a feeling that something is going to happen, especially something unpleasant. It is not based on any evidence or experience; it’s just a feeling in your gut.

This can be illustrated with a scale. One end, premonition. On the other, hope. Sitting in the middle as a neutral word, presentiment. All three can describe the inner, non-logical, evidence-free gut feeling about the future. The only difference is the outcome they expect.

So they share everything except the outcome. How can we show that? Linguists have always believed that no two words can have the exact same meaning. One tool they developed to illustrate differences between words is componential analysis also known as feature analysis. You take related words and break them down using +/- features marking whether each word has that particular feature or not.

A classic example often used can be seen below with the set man, woman, boy, and girl.

The four words describe humans [+HUMAN]. They are different in the other two features. Man and woman are both [+ADULT] but differ in [MALE] feature. Man and boy are both [+MALE] but differ in [ADULT]. Same core, different features. Componential analysis is a bit more precise than this, but as a tool it can be fun, especially with abstract words as shown below. Note that below is by far not an academic approved analysis but my own interpretation of these words.

These six words are all used daily to describe love-type feelings. They are different in four features. [INTENSE] refers to the strength of the feeling and whether it’s strong or gentle. [LONG-LASTING] is the feature for whether that feeling endures or burns out quickly. Sometimes that feeling blinds people which makes it [-RATIONAL] or doesn’t affect their clear judgement [+RATIONAL]. Finally love can be harmful to some making it [-HEALTHY].

Returning back to premonition and related words. They are all feelings about something that will take place in future [+FUTURE] and are a baseless gut feeling [-EVIDENCE-BASED]. They differ in whether that expected feeling is good or bad.

Last week when I planned my progress tracker and this social experiment, I had a dark negative sense that I would fail in keeping up with the challenge I set for myself, a premonition. This week, the feeling shifted. It’s hope.

Premonition that this social experiment would fail was there from the moment I started it. The idea of the blog as a social experiment to keep me motivated and work each week is something that I have done before. For example, when I wanted to exercise I tried Apple Watch Activity Rings Sharing and even Whoop Teams feature. When I wanted to write my research I joined a focus session that was held at the library from 7 PM to 9 PM where students sat down and just started writing after a long day of supposedly researching and notetaking. In each one of these community or support groups I did succeed. But those were groups. This time it’s just me and a blog and a potential reader or two. Maybe that’s where the premonition came from. Or maybe it’s because two years of doing nothing in a governmental job slowly killed every bit of motivation I had.

Still, if there’s one thing left in me, it’s persistence. So here’s my progress report for week 1.

In reality I set myself to start an online course on Statistics using Python. However, I was building the tracker above which uses HTML and CSS only so I revisited an online course I did a while back and rewatched some parts. I also watched a lot of WordPress tutorials online to help me understand some settings regarding the creation of the tracker page and other pages I will be adding soon. Therefore, I did zero hours of online course but I calculated the videos I saw and it’s around 2 hours.

Reading is also the same. I had a reading list but read nothing from it. Instead I read introductions from books on natural dyeing and reread some sections from Reimer’s
Introducing Semantics which discusses componential analysis. So the three pages I listed are a last-minute-before-I-write-this-post thing I did to make the tracker look better.

I continued my failure in not doing any exercises, both mind and body exercises (language and maths quizzes). This would explain why I didn’t lose any weight.

On the bright side I did create and complete a project. You can see it on My Progress page. It’s basically a progress tracker that I built from scratch. It can tell you what I did each week with my six targets. I will update it as we go along to keep track.

Thus, the premonition was correct about Week 1. But for Week 2, I have something else. Hope.