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April 23, 2006
selling like hot rowies...
Quick, folks, only 22 hours and 14 minutes left to get your hands on a genuine Aitken’s rowie
Current asking price is a bargain 340 pounds and 78p
B-))
Posted by Billy at 2:49 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
'practical alien linguistics could be pretty essential soon'
Yes, Suzette Haden Elgin has finally inspired me to read The Embedding by Ian Watson. It’s a linguisticsy science fiction novel in which self-embedding sentences** play an important role. The article in which she mentions it is ‘Waterships All The Way Down’ in Rebecca Wheeler’s ‘Language Alive in the Classroom’ where she passes on some suggestions for using science fiction to teach linguistics.
B-)
**like ‘fish cats dogs chase eat swim fast’ (which means ‘fish that get eaten by cats that get chased by dogs swim fast’), or, to take a comprehensible one, ‘the game those boys I met invented resembles chess’ (as mentioned in Neil Smith’s 1989 book ‘The Twitter Machine’)
Posted by Billy at 7:05 PM | Comments (0)
sharing in the library
Wow, we’re up to at least 25 cafe del mar compilations now. I know this because I’m listening to music from Saira’s computer while working in the library on the handout for a seminar next week. Sharing is great, but I need to get more stuff on this computer so I don’t feel so guilty about having so little to bring to the party. It’s also interesting to notice how similar all of our tastes are. Are there any academics who don’t like Air?
B-)
Posted by Billy at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2006
Dot Wordsworth on grammar
Telegraph - Dot Wordsworth on grammar
Marina sent me this link. It’s great material, particularly for students taking ‘Attitudes to English Language’ just now, where we look at descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language, and have also discussed Carter & McCarthy a bit.
Some of the points Dot makes about the effects of particular kinds of communication seem reasonable to me, but she makes some mistakes (e.g. thinking anyone would argue against correcting spelling mistakes or that there is much opposition these days to teaching Standard English). It would be good to get all of this sorted out a bit more explicitly as I think a lot of people who think they disagree about grammar actually agree about an awful lot. I don’t see a problem with saying you’re a descriptive linguist while still having opinions about usages you don’t like. I do think it’s time people like Dot (and me, actually) just accepted that the meaning of ‘beg the question’ has changed. It jars slightly with me, but I hardly ever hear it used in the old sense these days.
I like the bit she quotes from Carter and McCarthy (people love to find dodgy usage by people writing on language):
‘But never before have we experienced as creative a phase in language as we are now in our age of modern media’
It’s definitely clumsy style, but I’m not sure whether it’s technically ‘wrong’. I think it becomes much better if you add ‘experiencing’ between ‘now’ and ‘in’ (although I’d still rephrase it myself).
B-)
Posted by Billy at 1:18 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2006
'your pillow will need a pillow'
Guardian Education Blog - Rating the Ratings
I’m pleased the Guardian’s Education blog exists. Haven’t yet found loads of interesting stuff but I’m sure it’ll warm up.
But I did enjoy the top 20 funniest professor ratings on ratemyprofessors.com
B-))
Posted by Billy at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)