Back in the days when I was in tenth grade and the dinosaurs roamed free, our English class was assigned to read the novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, an author who, by employing literary tools such as elliptical phrases, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and a wide array of punctuation marks, was able to somehow, amazingly, develop the art of creating a rather involved pattern of sentence structure which could, ostensibly, stretch a sentence out in such a manner that it could, if he chose, ramble on almost indefinitely — for paragraphs and even pages, actually — which, as I was a young and impressionable student of the English language, presented a particularly appealing challenge to me in that, having been exposed to the wealth of verbiage contained in this novel, beckoned for me to put forth effort in creating similar sentence structure in order to attempt to equal, if not exceed, the intricate and prolonged passages presented by Thackeray in his work and, therefore, to construct (mostly in my journal, at that time) an almost infinite compilation of words and phrases that could meander from paragraph to paragraph and page to page, much like a babbling brook winds from rock to rock and bridge to bridge in its journey downstream, gurgling and splashing in carefree glee as it travels on its merry way, reflecting the frivolity of the writer (in this case myself) and carrying the reader along on this adventure, this consummate challenge to chatter on in one hopelessly connected (yet, perhaps not-so-connected) endeavor to manufacture an incredibly long and contrived sentence in tribute to the prolific author of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray; therefore, insomuch as having written the above, it is this author’s (in this instance, my) sincere hope that the gentle reader (yourself) will come to understand, in some profound — or, perhaps, merely perfunctory — way, why it is that I babble.