Miss Elliott's Fascinating English Blog * That's 'Dr' Elliott to you, mwahahah.

Top Totty

2012-02-06T11:16:00.001-08:00

Okay, time to weigh in. Mostly because the callers on Jeremy Vine make my blood boil. It's kind of language related but not entirely.

This is, in case you've had your head buried in the sand for the last fortnight, about a beer in the House of Commons bar. Called Top Totty, it has a picture of a woman dressed in a white bikini and wearing bunny ears carrying two pints. Last week a female MP complained about it, inadvertently raising up a storm around her.

Two counter-arguments to her objections have been raised:

1) you're having a sense of humour failure.

2) 'If the position was reversed and it was a picture of a topless man, that would be fine, so you're just being over-sensitive.'

These are the usual objections to any woman complaining of sexism.

Let's deal with (2) first. The situations are not comparable! Men as a whole have not been objectified. They have not been systematically treated as less equal, less intelligent and less worthy of being a member of the ruling class because of their gender. Therefore such an image does not reinforce centuries of stereotypes and oppression.

(1) I really hate it when feminists get accused of not having a sense of humour. I especially hate it when women accuse us of that. It's another tool used to divide us. It's almost impossible to counter, and it is exactly the argument that countless bullies have always used: 'it's just a joke, what are you so het up about?'

The essential point about this particular incident is not the beer in general. I probably wouldn't have a problem with a beer called Top Totty that wasn't accompanied by that particular image. But it is completely inappropriate in the House of Commons Bar. Women are vastly in the minority in the House of Commons, and have to encounter, deal with and triumph over a vast array of sexist insults and behaviour on top of the normal bullying, ahem, sorry, debating, in the House. Don't believe me? You know that much of what is said in the House does not get picked up by the microphones? All the rhubarb rhubarb type comments. Deborah Cameron tells about one of her students' research projects that discovered the 'rhubarb' when women MPs speak is likely to be 'boobs'. Repeated over and over. Because a) that's a valid political argument and b) that's the most important thing about women. Remember David Cameron's not too long ago comment telling a female MP to 'calm down dear'? Men who react are dominant, assertive, fighting for their constituents. Women are hysterical, over-reacting and oh, suffering a sense of humour failure.

So that's it. Very tangentially related to language. But the old adage 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me' is simply not true. Words have power. Power to keep the oppressed in their place.

p.s. The race analogy - not going to go there, because that really is off-topic but 1) it's a fair analogy, ish and 2) it's not worth making because all the attention changes focus.

Literally the most important thing you'll read today

2012-01-30T05:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/jan/29/literally-a-much-misused-word

Did Coriolanus play league?

2011-11-25T13:47:00.000-08:00

Possibly one of the most surreal conversations I've had in recent weeks was in a debate with a PGCE student, naturally enough about the respective merits of union and league. (We're talking rugby here. If you didn't get that, don't bother reading on.) His main line of argument was 'Macbeth would have played league.' Then he upped it to 'Coriolanus. Coriolanus definitely played league. So did Titus Andronicus.'

Union or league is not really the question.* The real question is what position did they play? Macbeth's a hunky warrior to start, but turns out to be a bit of a flash in the pan, with power going to his head. Sounds like a centre to me. Macduff, slogger, slow to start, but makes it in the end? Classic prop behaviour. Julius Caesar, live fast, die young? Must be a winger. This is definitely my new favourite game. Along with the 'what would any given Shakespeare character be listening to on his iPod?' game.

* Because of course, the answer's union. No-one has ever seen the Aire Valley FM dancing girls in a Shakespeare play, and it's not a rugby league match without dancing girls in jewel coloured lycra and furry yeti boots.

Gendered language

2011-11-02T04:42:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick post to point you in the direction of an up-to-date reading list from Deborah Cameron herself about gendered language.

Language and gender specialists rarely now consider women and men to speak in different ways just because they are men and women - it's much more specific, localised, and contextualised. But many teachers are still drawing on the same tired old stuff from the 1970s, so Cameron wrote this list of recommendations for bringing your knowledge on the subject up to date. Highly useful. And brought to you by E magazine, one of my favourite resources for Language and Literature A level students. They have such good taste they employ me to write for them from time to time.

An almost entirely unrelated post

2011-11-01T04:28:00.001-07:00

A laugh out loud sentence from an article on the BBC News website about 'mini-figures' which are apparently the new childhood craze. The writer comments:

The grammatically abhorrent question mark in Playmobil's Fi?ures set is the clue that these toys are sold in blind packs.

'Grammatically abhorrent' eh? Appropriate for the morning after Halloween: beware of those horrifying question marks. The world seems to be dividing into those who stress about grammar ('the Grammar Snob') and those who don't know and don't care ('everyone else'). I was particularly amused to get an email this week from someone who had ranted to me on a number of occasions about the use of apostrophes by others, and referred to "Julian Barne's new book". Oops. Let he who is without sin, etc.

I'm spending a wee bit of time at the moment teaching grammar to trainee English teachers. Some of them have never really learned the difference between the colon and the semi-colon before, and so now's the time to find out. This shocks some people, that I have to teach them grammar. But actually language is one of the most frightening aspects of English (and English teaching to a lot of literature grads). And better that they should learn now, because of an accepting attitude, than try to hide it because we're judging them for not knowing what a split infinitive is.

I've written before about the intrinsic split personality of the language teacher re descriptive/prescriptive grammar. But I remained a grammar snob for a long time. I do think it's important. I still correct people, and I still teach the right answer. But I've given up on the judging. Grammar shouldn't be the enemy.

Appalling neologisms from marketing executives, however? They might just be the enemy.

The raven himself is a horse

2011-09-16T01:55:00.000-07:00

It's just a brief note, to draw your attention to an interesting opinion article, written by the head of AQA's research unit, Chris Wheadon, for the TES, discussing the results of modularisation. It's likely to be a bit of a backwater of history, since the situation has been reversed and modularisation is on its way out for GCSE.

Of course even without modularisation there is no reason why students can't be entered early for the whole qualification - it's been customary in some places for years to enter some students for the whole of their English GCSE in November, which is a re-sit session: the reasoning goes that the overall standard of the candidature is lower, because it consists mostly of those who failed, so candidates who are expected to pass will look better by comparison. Also, as with A level marking in January sessions, it is often thought that the marking is better - because only 'good' markers (and there's a whole can of worms you can read about in my DPhil thesis if you must) are asked to return for those sessions which require many fewer markers, because there are many fewer candidates. It used to be official advice from AQA that candidates for the Editorial Writing module of A2 English Language should be entered early, so they could use the January exam as a 'mock' for the summer (and let's not get into the matter of exam fees on that one, eh?).

So does it demoralise and demolish fragile self-confidence? Is that a necessary evil for those getting through it with better marks, or getting a qualification at all? Have you taken any modules or qualifications at a different time than usual? How did it feel?

Literary Endeavours

2011-07-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

Oxford may be full of literary links, but there's one that rules supreme. No, not C.S. Lewis, despite my many blogs on his garden. Not even Tolkein, his drinking mate in the Bird and Baby (memorably misheard by one of my friends as the Burning Baby, which really seems unrelatable to its official title of The Eagle and Child), famously meeting place of the Inklings for over 20 years. And certainly not Pullman, like Tolkein my fellow Exonian (and, incidentally, Will Self).

No, the one that reigns supreme also has connections to Exeter College. It was a location in the final book in a very long series, or to be more accurate, in the television adaptation of the final book. That's right. Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse casts his long shadow over so many Oxford locations it's hard to escape his influence. Walking over Port Meadow today, to Wolvercote, and then back along the canal, my friend and I constantly expected to round a corner and find another murder victim awaiting the tender ministrations of Morse or Lewis. ("It's always the joggers that find them," my friend said darkly.) It's the bucolic idylls, the domestic suburbs and the academic Cotswold stone colleges that make the detective series what it is. They colour the tourist's eye view of Oxford (I always point out the Randolph Hotel to visiting friends, which has been the scene of more arrests, murders, and murder victims' last nights than any one place has a right to). On my single trip up the tower of the university church, I looked over the dreaming spires and found myself reminded of the aerial setting shots that provide the local colour for the adaptations.

I'll miss being in this city, despite taking so long to become used to it, and even, horrors, to become fond of it. But when I'm in the countryside, ensconced in my tiny thatched cottage, I'll be able to put on a dvd and find myself right back in Oxford, solving murders and remembering walks on sunny July afternoons, chatting aimlessly about research and academics and rugby and ducks, not being pounced on by murderers.

A bloat of hippopotamuses

2011-07-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

"You haven't posted anything recently." Apparently my mother doesn't think the pressing matter of 100000 words to be written for my thesis is much of an excuse. And luckily while in the car this lunchtime the return of Radio 4's Questions Questions gave me a subject to pontificate on.

One of their listeners had rung up to ask about the source of the strange collective nouns for birds (a 'descent' of woodpeckers, for example). Tracked to the British Library, the Boke of St Albans, printed in 1486, had a compendium of collective nouns, including the skulk of foxes and the rather delightful 'rascal of boys'. The consensus seems to be that the author was making them up as he went along, and so whoever wrote the Boke, came up with most of the weird ones we still use today, and some that we don't. A 'knee of pheasants' anyone? Apparently related to the Norman French for 'nest'.

Interestingly the modern 'deceit of lapwings' was recorded in the Boke as a 'desert of lapwings' - apparently referring to the lapwing's habit of leaving its nest when it spots a predator, and feigning an injury some distance away to decoy the predator away from its chicks. At some point a misunderstanding of the etymology of 'desert' as coming from 'to desert' transferred the phrase to one which refers to the trick the lapwing is playing.

This all turned out to be strikingly relevant to the thoughts I'd been having at the weekend. Lying in bed, awake at 4am because of the (extremely loud) peacocks who live at Ellingham Hall, where I was staying for the wedding of my lovely friends David and Felicity, I was contemplating transferring the noun 'murder' from crows to peacocks. But on reflection, I think a 'throttle' of peacocks* is closer to the action that was crossing my mind.

* Of course, the Boke got there first. A 'muster' of peacocks is the canonical term, although there's a rival faction promoting 'an ostentation.'

Like, really interesting.

2011-06-29T10:47:00.001-07:00

A very brief post, just directing you to this article, which combines two of my favourite things, feminism and language. Thanks to Sarah Hutchinson, Oxford student and county councillor, who brought it to my attention. Its basic premise is that women use 'like' as a filler as a means of making themselves more socially acceptable, as it makes them sound less aggressive (i.e. assertive). Now you might also want to read Deborah Cameron on the subject, an Oxford linguist who has debunked the male/female language myth. Or you might want to consider it in the light of the research that shows that using fillers actually makes our listeners pay more attention, as they have to work hard to filter out the ums, ahs, and ers. Does 'like' count? You may not want to listen to someone who can't string a sentence together without all those little time-wasting syllables, but your brain knows better.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your words

2011-06-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, I know. You wait ages for a blog post and then two come along at once. Which reminds me of a Wendy Cope poem ("Bloody men are like bloody buses") which I won't quote in full, because really you should go and buy a book of her poems instead.

The point is, however, entirely different, and relates to Hubert van den Bergh's latest book, How to Sound Even Cleverer: he's looking for your words, as he tells us in this Telegraph article. I'm not sure personally that I would describe Pippa Middleton as Promethean, but he's got some points. Anyway, I merely post this to urge you to contribute to his quest for those all important impressive sounding words. The kind of words that people in Oxford seem to trot out all the time to keep you thinking they're clever, even though they don't really know the meaning of them. It's the way I use 'Vygotskyan' and 'Socio-Cultural Activity Theory', although I have clever friends who do know what they mean and can explain them in words of two syllables with reference to Harry Potter.

Personally, I prefer people to use shorter and less clever sounding words that they know and understand. But if being a post-grad has taught me anything, it's that the more syllables, and the more confuscated and obtuse the writing, the better, and the more clever people will think you are. Alternatively you can just use statistics. It has the same effect, since readers can't understand you either way.

The future is now...

2011-06-18T00:42:00.001-07:00

Well this is an exciting but not entirely English related post. I'm creating it on my mobile phone. It's going to take a while, given the one-fingered typing it requires.

I'm not the first to do this, and in fact Neil Gaiman has been doing it for years. And more and more people are using their phone as one of their main ways to use the internet, let alone to read e-books. Surely all this mobile reading and writing is going to have an effect? Internet writings are going to get shorter, and people's attention spans will shrink with them? It's alleged that one of the effects of the National Literacy Strategy, with its snippets-based approach to literature, created a generation of children who couldn't manage an entire book, because as far as they were concerned, English came in units of a couple of paragraphs.

I don't know. What I do know is that kids reading and writing what they want to read and write is a Good Thing (see earlier post on texting). In a recent job interview I was asked what the potential use of mobile devices in the classroom was: they have enormous potential for a school and teacher brave enough to swim against the tide of public opinion, and with students sensible enough not to abuse the privilege. Instant internet facts, or YouTube clips of poets reading, or photos for animations or recording of presentations, or even mobile blogging. The possibilities will surely increase and increase; this little palm-sized thing I'm writing on is exponentially more powerful than that first school BBC acorn computer I learnt to type on twenty years ago.

Meanwhile I must get back to the present and marking my final 50 KS2 reading scripts. I wonder if I could upload the marks using my phone...

Dane-jà vu

2011-05-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

If there's one Shakespeare play you can guarantee to find on stage at some point during the year, it's Hamlet. I think I've seen it on stage four times (Michael Maloney, Sam West, David Tennant (both RSC) and, last week, the Northern Broadsides). Every time I'm staggered again by the fact that so many of our everyday phrases and sayings come straight from the page. All Shakespeare plays have contributed something to the English language. Hamlet did it by the shovel-ful.

But, is it really necessary to put on quite so many versions of it? I saw the RSC production in January of last year (and it really blew me away - far and away the best production of any Shakespeare play I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot!) and then, as I said, last week I went to see the Northern Broadsides production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. And for the first time, it fell a bit flat. It wasn't a bad production - in fact it was good, and the girl playing Ophelia did a fantastic job with one of the hardest female characters to pull off, without the madness going over the top, or being too silly, or being too soppy or just requiring a good slap, which she usually does. There was a young actor in the main role, who was a lot better in the second half than the first, which might have been part of the problem. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern were creepy and practically Tweedledee and Tweedledum like in their similarities - played by real life brothers. I think on the whole. But really, it was just suffering by comparison to the clearest, most thoughtful interpretation I'd ever seen. Too soon to see it again, apparently, though I could have been to see two other versions (including Jude Law in the title role), if I'd so desired.

The reason I went to see it was the Northern Broadsides. I've blogged before about them, and their greatness, so I shan't repeat myself here. They are one of two companies whose productions are reliably brilliant. The other is Propeller - an all male Shakespeare company who always do two plays at once, touring with them, either alternating or doing one then the other for a solid block.

I discovered them last year when they were performing at Oxford Playhouse. Having watched The Merchant of Venice open mouthed, at the end of the performance I went straight to the Box Office to buy a ticket for the following days A Midsummer Night's Dream. This year just before Easter I had to traipse out to the Watermill Theatre near Newbury - a lovely and slightly surreal theatre that is basically in the middle of nowhere - to see their Richard III. Richard Clothier in the title role gave a wonderfully creepy and magnetic performance, that left the audience in reluctant sympathy for the murdering, conspiring, ambitious villain. Propeller pride themselves on the vitality (ironically) of their performances and this one was no exception - the murder by chainsaw, with spurting blood and lumps of flesh was probably the highlight of the violence in this play. It reminded me strongly of the King Lear a couple of years ago that saw an eyeball bitten out on stage then spat out into a trough directly in front of the audience. Propeller made an ultra-creepy production, with the actors not involved in the specific scene disguised with white coats and stretched white masks to act as attendants, torturers, and passersby. At the end of the interval one be-masked man craned over the shoulder of the woman at the end of my row to read her programme, coming closer and closer until she jumped a mile. If you want Shakespeare that grabs you, Propeller is my bet. I'm off to Hampstead in June to see A Comedy of Errors, since I couldn't get to it in Newbury. I hope their Pocket Propeller productions manage to hook a new generation of Shakespeare audiences. And even better, they keep doing plays I haven't seen done to death!

Promised Poetry

2011-04-24T10:12:00.001-07:00

So, having broken radio silence, I feel compelled to actually blog about poetry, as promised.

1) (Going back three days later to find this article was quite difficult - the Guardian has had five articles about poetry since then. Impressive.) This Guardian review of two collections of poetry aimed, one each, at boys and girls, was much more balanced than it needed to be. It does beg the question whether poetry is gendered. My hunch would be that more women read - and write - poetry than men (and now is not the time to get into a deep discussion on the dominance of men among published poets), so perhaps there's a case to be made for a Boisterous Boys' Book of Verse to get them enthused. And I suppose if you're a publisher, it seemed like a good idea to include a companion for girls.

But I'm in wholehearted agreement with the reviewer that soppy verse with flowers and nature is not inherently girly, while many boys would view the Charge of the Light Brigade with equal disdain.

In the Good Old Days, which, I hasten to add, were actually before I was born, the gem in the UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, which eventually became OCR) crown was something called the Plain Texts Syllabus, which was all about letting people have actually responses to texts, and tended to involve setting examination questions like 'So, how do you respond to this poem?' Great for openness, less easy for quantifying Assessment Objectives. Famously this syllabus set Thomas Hardy's anti-war poem 'Drummer Hodge' the year after the Falkland War (entirely unintentionally) and then watched the fireworks, which were somewhat more spectacular than the gentle furore over Carol Ann Duffy's 'Education For Leisure'. The emphasis in teaching it was less on learning a set of points about the language of the poem, and more about experiencing and enjoying poetry. I can't say that I've ever felt any really good poem was gendered - I think Plain Texts might be more pointful than Great Poems for Specific Group. In fact I suspect that picking poems that speak to stereotypes of gender might well be counter-productive. I can imagine the response if I'd presented my all-girls' classes with something about lambs because it was 'great for girls'...

2) I've read two things recently from organisations in which I have a vague interest, both of which are serious mainstays of British poetry, lamenting the loss of their Arts Council funding and begging for support from anyone who might be interested, in order to keep them open and doing the good work that they do. One is the Poetry Book Society, who send members 4 poetry books a year, chosen from the pick of the crop, and give them a 25% discount on other orders (and who are doing a new, free student membership, which gives you access to the online version of their bulletin, and the discount, though sadly not the free books). The other is Salt Publishing, who are one of the biggest poetry publishers in the UK, and whose Just One Book campaign managed to keep them afloat - just - through the recession so far, but who are now faced with cutting back a lot of their intended work.

The Arts Council has a lot of demands on it, and has lost a lot of central funding. It's no surprise that it's had to make hard decisions about where to spend its remaining dosh. I'm quite sad that both these organisations, both of which make a substantial contribution to keeping the poetry scene in the UK live and vibrant - the printed one, anyway - didn't make the cut. Vast numbers of people in the UK write poetry, for their own private benefit, or with the intent to try and publish themselves. Nowhere near as many read it. Some people are afraid of it or think it's too intellectual, or too snobbish. There is a poem (and a poet) out there for everyone.

In the interests of saving an endangered species, can I make a plea that you consider buying someone in your life a book of poetry? Possibly not '100 Great Poems for Car-drivers', but Just One Book goes a long way.

Useful link

2011-04-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've intended to blog several times in the past week - about gore in Shakespeare (Richard III with a chainsaw - and flying fleshy bits) or Poetry and also poetry funding from the Arts Council and even the changes to teacher training. And maybe I will do one of these days - almost certainly about poetry anyway, because it's important.

BUT.

This is a useful link to a BBC page where you can listen to dozens of interviews with authors that have been on various Radio 4 programmes over the years. What a brilliant archive and brilliant thing to use the internet for. Good old BBC.

Oh just give her a slap and get over it

2011-04-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

I'm writing notes on Wuthering Heights at the moment, for a certain well-known broadcaster's well-known revision website. I had them partly written and then someone broke into my house and stole my computer, so I had to get to work reconstructing them.

There's only one problem. I hate Wuthering Heights. With a passion. Probably a passion only matched by Heathcliff and Cathy's self-obsessed, self-regarding, entirely selfish and completely destructive passion for each other. And if writing about it the first time was hard enough, the second time it's purgatory.

At the same time I am drawn into a kind of grudging admiration for the book. Because in the past knee-jerk hatred has made me throw it across the room in a Becky-Sharpe-in-Vanity-Fair-throwing-the-dictionary-out-of-the-coach-window kind of way (Speech and Drama exam Grade 4) and that is not conducive to examining its finer points and therefore understanding the book or the characters any better. But teaching it last year and writing notes this year has forced me to re-read the wretched thing and - horrors - to think about it. So for the first time I'm realising that the fact that Hareton regards Heathcliff as his father makes more meaningful and precisely parallel the fact that his marriage to Catherine is the happy ending that was denied to the first Catherine and Heathcliff himself. I still don't see how anyone could love either Catherine and Heathcliff, who are both badly behaved and selfish people - especially Catherine - but I do see the careful crafting of the novel, and its thoughtful exploration of the Romantic ideal. (I still prefer the rather more sedate exploration in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, but I can bear to be in the same room as Wuthering Heights now).

There are two lessons to be taken from this. One is that even if you hate a book, author or character, there's no reason to reject it outright and not find something good about it. Even if you hate it, figure out why, and look at why the author has done that thing, because presumably they weren't aiming for their work to end up in your compost heap/ recycling bin. Especially because one day you might be able to make some money from tutoring someone about it or writing notes on it for a certain well-known broadcaster. And the second is that if there's one thing writing notes on GCSE texts makes me do, it's blog.

The BBC says it best: LOL's in the OED.

2011-04-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

There's been a little concern over the last few days from various sources, both individuals I know, and internet articles such as this one from BBC News, about the fact that LOL has made it into the dictionary. Before I add my ha'penn'orth, the real reason I was moved to blog is this opening paragraph from the BBC article:

"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"

If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet "noob". Let me start again.

Golly gosh! The popular initialism LOL (laughing out loud) has been inducted into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. Blimey! What is going on?

What I find interesting is that they are happy to print 'OMG' but can't bring themselves to write it out in full, because that would be offensive. Presumably if you're young enough/ l33t enough to understand what OMG stands for, the thinking must go, you wouldn't be irritated by the blasphemy. Very strange.

Anyway, LOL. The Oxford English Dictionary is a record of all the words in the English language. In its full version it runs to twenty odd volumes, I believe. The Shorter OED is two vols. So there's plenty of room for a new word, which isn't even very long. It's a record of how we use language. And LOL gets used a lot (although when I used it on Skype to my trendy young sister the other day - well, okay, trendy from my point of view merely by virtue of being young - she thought it was hilarious that an old fogey was using the term). It's not as if the inclusion of LOL has meant that some other word has been forced out. The English language is not a nightclub. We are not operating a one-in-one-out door policy. Although it's a thought. Votes for what to get rid of so LOL can be used? I'll start you off: how about 'abaft'? It's not as though we use it much...

Hope triumphing over experience

2011-04-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've blogged before about adaptations of favourite books (here) so I won't rehearse those thoughts again. I'm quite surprised to discover that I haven't mentioned Lucy M. Boston, however.

The adaptation in question is From Time to Time, adapted by Julian Fellowes from The Chimneys of Green Knowe, which is the second book in the Green Knowe series.* A little history lesson follows: in 1988-9 I was in Group 2 at St John's College Choir School in Cambridge. Two things are pertinent: one is that Diana Boston was my history teacher and the second is that in my English exam I wrote a story about a child who made friends with an escaped leopard (I think - the details are sketchy). My form teacher, who taught us English among other things, was Mrs Cairns, a termagent of the first water and one of the two most inspirational teachers I've ever had (Mrs Gadd is the other one, and the reason I became an English teacher. If someone reminds me, I'll blog about the reasons why another time.). Mrs Cairns suggested that my story had been heavily influenced by a book called A Stranger At Green Knowe (the link is to the cover I remember - it's in print in a different edition); what book? I asked.

One week later I'd read all of the Green Knowe books, by Lucy M. Boston. They were magical, and whimsical, and best of all, they were written by a local author, whose daughter-in-law just happened to be my wonderful history teacher and the woman who ran the school stamp club. Mrs Cairns showed Mrs Boston my story. I was very unusual among John's pupils in not having heard of the Green Knowe books because Mrs Boston was one of the Transition teachers, and usually arranged for that year group to visit the Manor in Hemingford Grey, which was the house in the books. I joined the school too late for this privilege. So that summer, Mrs Boston very kindly arranged for me, and a child who'd missed the trip because of chicken pox, to make the visit just the two of us, instead of as a school trip.

It was one of the most magical experiences of my life. Lucy Boston was a tiny, white-haired, bent over old woman, with the brightest, most alive eyes you've ever seen. She was 97 when I met her, and died a year later, but she was incredible, as was her house and gardens. Diana Boston now keeps the house open to show Lucy's quilts as well the extraordinary objects of her collected life. I went back there last year, with my mother and sister, to see Diana, and revisit the house, and see if I remembered any of it correctly. You too can visit the house - check the websitehttp://www.greenknowe.co.uk/index.html . Read the books first. Every object in them is also in the house.

This is Emily with the yew deer in the garden of the house.

This has all been a very long prelude for the fact that last week I watched the film. It was most odd seeing a story that I knew so well, so firmly located in a real place in my head, moved to a much larger and very different house. And then suddenly one would be transported back to the Fens, as Timothy Spall rounded a corner and walked past the statue of St Christopher which rests against the Manor wall.

This is my mother with that statue last summer. The film wasn't so bad, in fact it was pretty good, though it wasn't quite right. But very satisfactorily, Diana Boston was an extra, playing a dinner guest in a very spectacular feather, and escaping through the window, leading to shouts of 'there!' and then rapid pause and rewind of the DVD to let everyone get a look in. I do recommend the film, which features Dominic West as the dastardly butler, as well as Hugh Bonneville being lovely, and the wonderful Maggie Smith as Mrs Oldknowe, who in the books is clearly just a cipher for Lucy herself. Buy it from the Green Knowe shop (for that matter, buy the books from there too) and help keep this wonderful building, and its dual life of fiction and reality going.

* I am aware that I spend most of my time blogging about children's fiction. It happens to be the thing I like best. Deal.

If anyone was a Chrestomanci, it was her.

2011-04-02T14:35:00.001-07:00

A week ago, on March 26th, Diana Wynne Jones died. She was one of the best and most influential children's writers of the 20th century, and she will be sadly missed.

Diana Wynne Jones is probably my favourite writer, and certainly the author of my best book, Howl's Moving Castle. I thought I first discovered her aged about 18, but then as I read my way through her canon I kept finding books which had been treasured childhood favourites, that I'd never known were by her. Archer's Goon (also a brilliant BBC tv series that couldn't match the brilliance of the book); Dogsbody, in which Sirius, the dogstar, was confined to the body of a Labrador here on Earth (school bookfair purchase); The Magicians of Caprona (children trapped as Punch and Judy puppets, at one point - scary scary); and Fire and Hemlock - I'm not sure anyone has ever managed to figure out what was going out in that one. And of course, the wonderful, magical Howl's Moving Castle. And the ones which I hadn't read still felt like old friends - her writing had that quality that tickled some deep-hidden ur-fiction sense, tapping into the leylines of stories.

And there were more of them! And grown-up books! Deep Secret, so much a favourite that when I lent my copy to someone and they failed to return it in a few weeks, I had to buy a new copy. Neil Gaiman, who knew Diana Wynne Jones well, revealed in his blog this week that the breakfast scene with Nick in Deep Secret is based on him - a neat little in-joke that made me laugh while I cried at his memorial for her. It's odd to be upset when someone you don't know dies - but sometimes you feel like you know someone through their writing, and especially when it is writing that has been a companion for so long. On a purely selfish note, I'm sad that there will be no more new books to read. And I'm sad that there is a little less magic in the world, but so so glad that she wrote so much and created so much happiness in book form.

If you haven't, read her. If you have, reread. Buy the books for your children, your friends, your relations, for strangers on the bus. Give a little magic.

Ruby Slippers

2010-03-02T02:50:00.000-08:00

Naturally, I'm drawn to blog because I'm supposed to be doing something else - in this case writing notes for a well-known revision website about some of the poems on the new GCSE syllabus. The new syllabus doesn't just draw on four modern poets, but mixes and matches instead, and I've been introduced to a number of poems - and poets - which I'd never encountered before. One poet who has struck me deeply is Dorothy Molloy.

Molloy had her first collection, Hare Soup, published in 2004, her second in 2007 and her third in 2009. Well, yes, so what you say? She died from liver cancer ten days before the publication of her first collection, and the two further collections have been compiled by her husband from the poems she left behind. The poem I'm analysing is called 'Les Grands Seigneurs' and it's precisely the sort of poem that appeals to me - black humour, playing on the relationships between men and women (it starts out as a courtly love poem and finishes: 'But after I was wedded, bedded, I became/ (yes, overnight) a toy, a plaything, little woman,/ wife, a bit of fluff. My husband clicked/ his fingers, called my bluff.') But it's the sadness of Molloy's story that appealed most of all.

Hare Soup was hailed as a great 'new voice', as debut collections occasionally are, and I felt tremendous sadness for a woman whom I envisaged as youngish, cut off in her prime, and a great talent whose further work was not to be. As it happens, Molloy was bron in 1942, and I only knew about the first collection when I was imagining her life. But the reality doesn't seem to have made a difference. One of the amazing things about poetry is that occasionally you meet a poem - or a poet - that connects right to you, and then empathy does everything it's supposed to, and you don't need to worry about reality, because the words and the fiction have become a permanent part of your imaginary world.

I think when I'm paid for these notes I might spend the money buying Dorothy Molloy's collections. There might be another gem in there.

Txt spk gr8t for splling lol

2010-01-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

The debate is over. The British Academy published a report today on a longitudinal research project which looked at children's phonological ability and their use of texts.

There were two amusing parts to this:
a) John Humphrys on the Today programme reciting this piece of doggerel:
Mary had a mobile.
She texted day and night.
But when it came to her exams
She'd forgotten how to write
He didn't know the source, but he also quotes it in this Daily Mail article from two years ago about why he hates text speak.

b) the fact that in the web announcement/ press release the British Academy felt the need to gloss all the text speak they used so that the older generation would understand. I mean, come off it, who doesn't know that xxxx is 4 kisses? (That's the number four, not the word 'for'.)

The general line goes like this: using text abbreviations is for people who don't know how to spell, and you get out of the habit of using correct spelling and punctuation and then in your GCSEs you accidentally use text language, not because you don't know better but because you're used to using the other. Well, says this report, actually children (and we're talking about under 10s here) who can manipulate text speak have a higher phonological awareness, which makes sense if you think about the fact that they are replacing sounds with appropriate symbols other than the letter combinations usually used. The researchers who compiled the report point out that this is the natural extension of the current emphasis on phonetics and phonology in teaching children to read.

But I'm afraid this isn't carte blanche. For starters, the report also shows that there is a negative correlation between mobile use and literacy ability: ie high levels of use are associated with lower literacy attainment. This isn't as contradictory as it sounds; it's the sophistication, not the quantity. Secondly, it only applies to phonology. It doesn't apply to grammar or punctuation, which excuses and upholds my much-maligned tendency to use semi-colons in text messages.

But I'm afraid you have to be very confident that your approach counts as sophisticated: I've met more than one person who used a text abbreviation in an English essay because they genuinely thought that was how the English word was spelled.

Anyway, there you go. Child Language Acquisition and E-language in one small package. Now to reduce it to 144 characters....

gd @ txt = gd @ fonology, BritAcademy shw.

And space left over for a hundred kisses.

'promise to forget this fellow - to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory'

2010-01-17T11:22:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with being a fan of Restoration Comedies is that they are staged all too infrequently. So when the Daily Telegraph listed Southwark Playhouse's production of The Rivals as one of their must-see productions of 2010, I was sold before I read as far as 'Celia Imrie playing Mrs Malaprop'. When I got to their website and discovered that due to 'airline style pricing' I could get tickets for just £8, I was over the moon. (Although, to be honest, even full last minute prices of £16 are not exactly prohibitive, particularly in London.)

Southwark Playhouse is a bit of an industrial place. Situated under some railway arches near to Tower Bridge, every so often the actors' words were echoed by the rumbling of passing trains. It's a tiny, intimate venue, with sooty redbrick walls and vaulted ceilings. It is not exactly the image of Restoration Bath. Yet it worked amazingly well. The set was simple, and played wittily on the idea of the written word - the young heroine, Lydia Languish is determined to marry a penniless suitor for love, having read too many novels - with side tables covered in book pages, and four 'bay trees' created beautifully from the same material. The white and ivory set provided an excellent backdrop for the heady whirl of intrigues and love affairs. And the heady whirl of dancing and singing.

It was probably foolish of me to be surprised, given that the play is set in Bath, that the rural lads and lasses were speaking in broad West Country accents. The truth of the matter is, that most of the similar stuff I've seen in the last fifteen years was done by Northern Broadsides, which means that 'country bumpkin' = Lancastrian. Also surprising was the excess of comely young chaps, larking about in breeches, but that's to do with the play - the 'rivals' in question being the various men competing for the hands of a very limited number of ladies. The unreserved seating meant we got to sit on the front row, and at one point the leading man scooshed me up to sit down, and gave my knee a little squeeze to say thanks. Pleasant as it was, it was just one of many ways in which the cast made this production a little more interactive, a lot more fun, and a jolly good way to spend a soaking wet January afternoon.

But it's a 235 year old play, I hear you cry. Chaps in breeches are all very well, but is it relevant; is it up to date? Well, it's the play that gave us the word 'malapropism' for Mrs Malaprop who has an extensive and badly applied vocabulary. It has a lot to say on the battle of the sexes, and how men and women relate, which doesn't seem to have changed a lot. Exactly how little was demonstrated by the opening song, which got the whole audience in the mood. It's astonishing how tuneful and appropriate Single Ladies was to the play. Can't identify it? It took me a while, until they got to the chorus. The subtitle is 'If you liked it you should have put a ring on it' and it's by Beyonce. Boys, you have been warned.

Edited to add: Read someone else's review in The Guardian.

In which our narrator spends rather a lot of time in bookshops

2009-12-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

It's now a fortnight (three weeks?) since Borders went into administration, and the Oxford branch is rapidly losing stock. It was always a bit bright and brash to be a British bookshop, but I'm going to miss it all the same. I used to love it particularly as an undergraduate, when at about half past nine I could think 'oh dear, I don't have anything to read in bed', nip out and spend a happy twenty minutes browsing the shelves. It lost some charm over the course of the last decade, as the closing time reduced to nine, then to eight. Although, of course, until two years ago I was living in a little rural town, rather than a massive city, so had no access to it whatever the time of night.

The thing is, bookshops make me happy. Whenever I'm feeling a bit down, I go bookshopping. I don't even have to buy anything, although often I do. I just feel at home there.

Today I have been to practically every bookshop in Oxford. I went to Borders, but felt that it was virtually impossible to find anything except by complete chance, and also that strangely many things were more expensive than previously... I went to Waterstones, in a passing through kind of a way, and to Blackwell's where I bought one book as a Christmas present but it was in a three for two so I bought two more that I wanted, restrained myself from buying another couple that I thought looked good, and which turned out to be the same price on Amazon, so I may have to go back. I dropped into Oxfam Books on Turl Street, where I didn't buy anything, but then I did buy three books from Oxfam Books on St Giles on Tuesday.

Then I came home and went by car into Headington, one of Oxford's satellite residential areas, home of the Headington Shark, and also home to about a hundred charity shops, including not one but two Cancer Research shops, one on each side of the road... From various places here I acquired a handful of Christopher Isherwood books, some PG Wodehouse, and a couple of other things. I came home to find an Amazon delivery (Christmas presents) had been chucked over the back fence, but since it hadn't rained, the books were undamaged despite their dissolved packaging. I may have rather gone overboard on the book buying today. But, to paraphrase, if it makes me happy, it can't be that ba-a-aa-ad. And between the three for two and the charity shops, it wasn't that expensive either. So here's to time in bookshops, and the calming whispers of a million books :)

Kings of Style

2009-12-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

So, you may have noticed very little action on this blog recently: my other life seems to have been crammed to bursting with work, work and more work. And very recently, some rugby as some people have noticed. But things are beginning to calm down a little, and an incident yesterday made me think 'if only I had a blog vaguely related to reading and writing where I could talk about this. Oh!' So here I am.

One of the things I have been doing over the past couple of months is 'digitising' core readings for the Masters courses at the department where I study. This involves photocopying chapters of books, scanning them in and putting them through text recognition software and then proofreading them, for the highly amusing bloopers it can create. It has taught me a great deal about how many mistakes are actually in place in the printed texts! As well as exposing me to many, many examples of sociological research related to sex, because they pick the salacious ones to get your attention.

But this is all in the way of introduction: one of the best things about this job is in fact getting to hang out on the main library/ reception desk - for many reasons. One of them is the banter of the two male librarians, who are both quite snappy dressers - and one of whom considers himself to be 'the most stylish man in Oxford' (I'm not disagreeing, or reporting this sarcastically - I'm just quoting). Yesterday they were discussing style icons: the most stylish men about. They had me in hysterics. As far as I'm concerned, there's only ever been one male style icon: Beau Brummel (and if you don't know whom I'm talking about, go read some Georgette Heyer!).

And then they challenged me. 'Go on then Velda,' they said. 'Whose style do you admire?'

And there, they had me. As far as I ever think about my 'style', I tend to aim for 'inoffensive, with a bit of emphasis on exciting boots.' I couldn't think of a single person. But then, I went off to the photocopier, which is good for mindnumbing activity freeing the mind to think, and some names started to float in on the aether.

Neil Gaiman
A.S. Byatt
Diana Wynne Jones
Simon Armitage

But I wasn't thinking about their dress sense (to be fair, they all do look smart in person (Byatt and Armitage) or in photos (Gaiman (stylish rather than smart - his hair is famous in its own right!) and Jones). I was thinking about their writing. For me, style is in the turn of a phrase, the mot juste, or the patterning of language. This leads me into delightful digressory thoughts about what exactly a winklepicker would look like in the form of literary device, or what the equivalent of a red leather glove is (a yellow suede one would be Byronic excess).

I didn't go back and tell them that. I stuck with my first answer 'I've really never thought about it'. I did try to think of people whose fashion sense I admired, but I really can't bring anyone to mind. There's good outfits and poor outfits and that's about it. But writing style, now that's something that sticks with you. And for that 'inoffensive, but with occasionally exciting boots' doesn't really kick it.

Fiction to sink your teeth into

2009-08-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

There's a bit of a trend happening in Young Adult literature at the moment and, frankly, I've had enough. It seems to me that about ninety per cent of the books in the teens section of Borders, Waterstones, Blackwell's and elsewhere have black covers, dramatic titles and some variation on the Gothic palely interesting girl/ ominously thorny rose/ big dark castle/ moon theme of cover illustration. They're all about vampires.

Now don't get me wrong - I loved Twilight as much as the next girl - and possibly more than she did. I've read them all several times. But I pick up these books and everything inside me goes "meh." Vamps have just become too damn safe. It didn't used to be like that.

In the original European legends, Nosferatu is violent scavenger, more animal than man, with no higher intelligence, certainly no appeal for his victims, merely seeking the blood it requires to survive. More modern werewolf than vampire.

The sophisticated, attractive vampire is a reinvention when the myth hits the English language, but the credit for it does not belong to Stoker. Instead we must trace the origins of the English vampire back to that near-legendary night in the summer of 1816 when Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary and Byron’s personal physician John Polidori took shelter from a thunder storm and challenged eachother to create the best ghost story. Ironically this challenge, supposed to be a showdown between the two famous poets, threw up Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the original English vampire story: John Polidori’s The Vampyre.

The ‘vampyre’ was Lord Ruthven, and he was a very different creature from any predecessors. He is a tall, pale, attractive aristocrat at whom ladies throw themselves from all sides. Many believe that Polidori took for a model his employer Lord Byron, who was not known for nothing as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. As a result the English vampire is often known as the ‘Byronic vampire’: the model which was taken by many subsequent writers including Stoker. ‘The Vampyre’ begins like this:

It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman more remarkable for his singularities than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him.

He's already got that sexy bad boy vibe going, and it's only the beginning of the nineteenth century. Leaving aside Dracula, and all that goes with him, we really have Anne Rice to blame for the current crop of vampire fiction. She turned the genre on its head by giving us a vamp's eye view in her Interview with a Vampire and left the field wide open for the moodily interesting vampire victim, the unwilling biter bit by destiny and trying to resist his inner nature. A bad boy who wants to change, but who is always going to look good in black.

But they've lost their edge. The vampires have gone domestic, and it's not doing the sense of narrative danger any good. Get rid of all these Twilight clones, people. Start thinking some new storylines and definitely some new cover designs. Let's get back to books that bite.

Adapting to circumstances

2009-07-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

Today I did something I've been dreading. Something I've put off and put off, contemplated and pondered over. Should I, shouldn't I? In the end I did and I survived. I watched The Secret of Moonacre, which claimed to be the film of the Elizabeth Goudge novel The Little White Horse.

The Little White Horse is a book that every child should read. It's an integral part of my psyche, and one of my favourite books (and incidently, one of J.K. Rowling's, which is why it has been re-published). And I was frankly afraid it was going to be murdered. In the last few years I have deliberately avoided watching The Dark is Rising adaptation, mostly on the basis that Lovejoy as Merriman Lyon was likely to end in tears. I just couldn't face it, and the reviews told me I was right.

Getting the film adaptation of books right is very difficult, especially books which are well loved. Films are different from books: they are structured differently, you can't afford as long to set up characters or plot, and you often can't include the details which make it loved. The Harry Potter films (and I haven't seen the latest one yet) have a particularly fine line to tread. It's more common than not to watch a film of a book you've loved and come away disappointed. I'm thinking of Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker (book I liked, rather than loved), or The Ninth Gate which was nowhere near as good as the original novel, The Dumas Club, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

There are exceptions to this. The BBC Pride and Prejudice for example, but then that had six hours of screen time and stuck almost word for word to the novel. The film of Louis Sachar's Holes is different from the book to an extent, but brilliant with it. But then the screenplay for that was written by the author himself. Stardust's screenplay wasn't written by Neil Gaiman, and it introduced a whole new character, but it stuck to the spirit of the novel, and mostly to the words too. Plus the casting was perfect. But in general, the ground is a bit shaky.

Being this dubious of adaptations, how come I wanted to watch this one? A couple of factors. Tim Curry's presence as the villainous Coeur du Noir wasn't hurting, and what stills I'd seen suggested that the aesthetic of the film was at least in the right ball park. Which it turned out to be, just about.

So how was The Secret of Moonacre? Well, it wasn't terrible. As a film, that is. It wasn't much of an adaptation of The Little White Horse. Characters were changed, omitted, the plot was mucked about with, almost beyond recognition, the main boy character was made to switch sides and his mother became his sister and there were some generally unnecessary magical overlays (because aside from the hundreds of years old lion and the unicorn, this isn't really a story which relys on magic). Plus for some reason they switched from having a hare to having a 'magical Moonacre rabbit', although with hindsight the reason for that was probably the lack of available stunt hares. It was okay, as a film, to fill a boring Sunday afternoon with little else in it.

But it wasn't the film it could have been. It wasn't the scenes that play inside my head every single time I read the book. So you can watch it if you want, and even if you love the book, it won't make you shout and throw things at the tv. But you'd be better off sticking to the words on the page.

Only really very loosely related to English

2009-07-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

But it made me chuckle.

Fabulous fantasy author Neil Gaiman (Stardust, American Gods, Good Omens (with legend Terry Pratchett)) was interviewed in today's Sunday Telegraph on his loves and hates. One of his loves was Katherine Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies. Which is entirely reasonable. Looking for it on the internet, I could only find the second hand copy on Amazon.com which the title will send you off to look at.

And then I scrolled down to the product description which proudly tells us that the book:

"Also covers Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and other Supernatural Creatures. "

Good to know.

How many words do you know?

2009-06-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

The average oral vocabulary that an average 18 year old has access to and uses on a day to day basis, is about 20,000 words. They will have a much larger latent vocabulary that they understand but do not use.

The average university graduate has a working vocabulary of 50,000.

The average academic/ specialist has one of 100,000.

By the end of school the average person has read 600,000 paragraphs.

You are explicitly taught 300-400 new words a year at school, most of which you will already know.

Just a few interesting facts, courtesy of Tom Landauer, who is an American academic, and a pioneer of Latent Semantic Analysis, a technique which allows a computer to learn to read what you write, and work out if it's grammatical and sensible. Scary huh?

Post script:: a Narnian turtle

2009-06-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

Presumably turned into tree root by some relative of the White Witch (she preferred stone...)

An Inspector Calls

2009-06-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling: the one where you've spent weeks working yourself up about an event - Christmas, say, or your birthday party, or the first date with the boy of your dreams - you've been waiting for ages, perhaps even months, or years for this very special, particular event, and yet you know, deep down, that it can never live up to your expectations, and you're a little worried that come the day it's just going to be too disappointing and that it's all going to end in tears?

I've read An Inspector Calls a dozen times, taught it four or five, and watched with longing the Channel 4 Schools documentary that featured snippets of film of Stephen Daldry's iconic 90s production, lamenting I would never see it. Then I learned that there was a new revival tour. And that it was coming to town. I ordered tickets, months in advance, to avoid the disappointment of a sell-out. And last night, I finally did.

And you know what? It was even better than I'd hoped. I thought I was innoculated against Inspector Calls: certainly enough exposure that I shoud have been. And yet it hit me like a tonne of bricks. It's simply brilliant.

This is the production which has a whole house on stage. On stilts. In the middle of the first scene the house opens up to reveal the Birling family, and gradually as the Inspector questions them, they move down, out of the house onto the stage, coming down to equality, and then eventually destroyed, they crawl in the gutter as the house comes crashing down above them - quite literally, they must go through hundreds and thousands of plates.

There were elements I wasn't sure about - the Inspector's sing-song intonation, for example, with its odd stresses of volume in places, was a little unsettling at first, until I realised that it was designed to do so, and later saw the poetry of his speeches brought out by it.

I sat enthralled, spellbound by something I already know back to front and inside out. My first reaction on leaving the theatre? I wanted to go see it all over again. Unfortunately the national tour has only a week to go, and that in Leicester, but there will be a West End production in September, at the Novello, and if I can scrape together the cash, I think I might try and go. If you can, you should too.

Afternoon sun and A.S. Byatt

2009-05-31T11:17:00.001-07:00

***EDITED TO ADD: WARNING - MILD SPOILERS****

This afternoon, courtesy of the Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, I sat in the shade in her lovely garden, overlooked by the Sheldonian and the Museum of the History of Science, with a group of other Exonians, listening to A.S. Byatt answering our questions.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favourite novelists. I devour her books, with a passion. But there are two things which have always niggled at me. Well, to be accurate one thing which has always niggled and one thing which niggled when I read her new book, which has been out all of a month. They are the same niggle, essentially. In The Shadow of The Sun the main character is a girl, the daughter of a famous novelist, in the D.H. Lawrence mode, who cannot really decide what to do with her life. In trying to free herself from his shadow, she goes to study at Cambridge, tries to write, starts an affair with the man who tutored her, who is also her father's greatest admirer and explicator. As is the way of things, she becomes pregnant, and the book ends with her decision, which is to have the baby and enter into domestic un-bliss with this rather unsympathetic older man. Her decision was the bit that niggled.

In her most recent book, The Children's Book, one of the main characters - of whom there are many - commits suicide. It's a character to whom I had become somewhat attached - of them all, that character had appeared to be the 'mainest' at the beginning, and the most sympathetic. I was cross about this too.

But when I asked about The Shadow of the Sun earlier today, A.S. Byatt's reply made me think. She talked of historical imagination, and said that it was a novel very much of the 1950s and 60s: one that in effect could have had no other end. The character, as she pointed out, was not as strong as she was herself, a rather battered girl, who took the only way open to her. I think that this is what makes A.S. Byatt a great novelist, rather than merely good: she takes hard decisions on behalf of her characters, that are true to who they are, rather than bowing to sentiment or desire for the world to be other than as it is. It rather fits The Children's Book niggle too - even before the suicide, when reading I had wondered how on earth this character could escape the corner into which their (used as an impersonal pronoun to avoid revealing the gender) personality had driven them.

So, hang it all, I think she's done for both those niggles. Byatt is a brilliant and intelligent writer. I cannot recommend her work highly enough.

Just a passing thought...

2009-05-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many of you heard the interview with the Tory MP Anthony Steen, but you can certainly find it on the internet if you didn't. He claimed that the public interest in the fact that he had claimed £18,000 of expenses to spend on tree pruning on his estate was 'jealousy' because he had a big house that 'looks like Balmoral'... He also said the Freedom of Information Act should never have been passed and that the public had no right to interfere in his private life. Steen also claimed David Cameron had been 'surprised' when he said he would be retiring at the next election, and that he thought Cameron had been a little disappointed.

The cynic in me suspects that it was this bit that really annoyed Cameron, leading to his response when being interviewed for Radio 4, saying that 'another squeak' from Steen would lead to him being 'out on his (2) hoof.' Anyone else think that's a slightly odd expression? The pause shows that he's stopped what he was originally going to say, to substitute a different word. Now, to my mind, the phrase is to be 'out on your ear.' Which isn't offensive enough to swallow on Radio 4. So I suspect that the Right Honourable Mr Cameron was in fact going to say 'out on his arse.' Sometimes English Language study gives you that little bit of insight...

And a small postscript to my earlier rant. I got final approval on the review after about seven or eight rewrites, from the senior editor, describing it as a 'fantastic peace [sic].' Vindicated, moi?

Reviewing Rant - Just getting it off my chest!

2009-05-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

This is a rant, and unashamedly so. I’ve been doing quite a lot of reviewing lately, and while some of it has been a delightful experience, one particular publication has made it difficult beyond belief. It is, naturally, the one run by amateurs, graduate students at my university, who are taking the opportunity afforded to be as dictatorial as possible, demanding multiple rewrites and frankly abusing the already frustrating Microsoft Word Track Changes. Bearing in mind that I have an editorial job on another publication myself, I know what thereof I speak. Of course, I would dislike them – they didn’t like my review! In fact, I accept that the editors have the right to ask me to change my writing – they are in effect the people who commissioned it. But I have a few specific ‘niggles’ to use their phrase:

1) People who have not read the book rewriting my sentences to be more to their stylistic taste and thus making them factually inaccurate.

2) People who bring up grammatical ‘niggles’ which they are wrong about (‘their is not a gender neutral third person pronoun yet’ (well, yes it is – it isn’t singular, it’s true, but I was using it to refer to a group of people some of whom were female and some of whom were male)) , and then changing my correct relative pronoun ‘which’ for the incorrect/ American, but preferred by Word, ‘that’. (I refused to bow to that one. Just call me a rebel.)

3) The same people reviewing my review and making directly opposite comments on the two drafts – eg, I like this sentence/ paragraph in the first draft, and then saying they don’t like it and it’s unnecessary in the second draft….

There, I feel better now. And it’s better to get it off my chest here, than to send it in an email to them!

Reading Between the Lines

2009-05-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

I had intended to blog today about the wonderful fact that Carol Ann Duffy is our new Poet Laureate. It's a poignant joy given that U.A. Fanthorpe died earlier this week, but I think she's probably smiling right now, anyway.

Instead, I'm very very cross. The reason is this BBC News article which is naturally based 'on figures published by the Conservatives.' It's all about dropping numbers taking English Literature GCSE. The fact that 37% of those on Free School Meals (used as a proxy variable for socio-economic status in education research) do not take the subject, compared to 28% overall, is seen as 'evidence' that the 'poorer pupils' are missing out on 'our country's cultural heritage.' I imagine that the Daily Mail will be reporting this story with the tag question 'has the world gone mad?'

The answer is no, it hasn't. Nor are those pupils who do not take English Literature GCSE missing out on Shakespeare and other great literature. Near the bottom of the article, in a quiet sort of way, the BBC does manage to put in Schools' Minister Jim Knight, who rightly points out that English GCSE contains elements of both English Language and English Literature study. (Incidently this is the reason why anyone who claims to have a GCSE in English Language is lying. There is no such thing.)

Lots of people don't take English Literature for good reasons. Such as the fact that they are struggling with English in the first place and need the time to make sure they get a good grade in the subject which is going to be an essential qualification for them to get a job, get into sixth form, get 'five good GCSEs.' Most schools teach English and English Literature in the same space of time that Maths gets to do one GCSE. It's a squash and forcing everyone to do English Literature will in fact have the effect of disadvantaging, not advantaging some pupils.

Then there's the fact that some pupils do Media Studies instead. (Cue shouts: Has the world gone mad?) Actually, studies have shown that for some pupils doing Media Studies instead of English Literature boosts their English result. Studying something that is both of interest to them and ties in with their strengths makes them better learners of allied subjects.

It might seem an odd stance for an English teacher to take, but honestly, the Conservatives are just being lazy in declaring this 'shocking.' They're looking for cheap shots, but like the good critical reader and media student that I am, I can read between the lines to tell you... don't believe everything you read!

March's Poet: Leontia Flynn

2009-04-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

So, as promised, slightly out of the month, the first poet, who is 35 and Irish, and certainly female. Leontia Flynn's Drives is her second book, and the title encapsulates many of her themes. There are poems about literal drives, journeys taken at home and abroad, and about the personal ambitions and needs which drive us on, interspersed with poems about the driven - authors and artists explored through the first person voice.

I liked this book, liked the poems in it, but I didn't love it, or any of them. There's no individual poem which leapt out and grabbed me, demanding to be revisited when needed. My favourite, and the one which came closest, was a poem on Rome:

Rome wasn't built in a day. 'Rome?
We will take the lot in one short afternoon.'

There were others that came close too. 'Song' which can be found online here and an ironic poem about parodies of country songs which ends with the abandoned narrator quoting 'if the phone doesn't ring, baby you'll know it's me...' For me, the strongest images were the ones from her own life - the domestic heartbreak of a father suffering from dementia, or the aftermath of his death, and the glorious triumph of the poem addressed to her unborn child, a note of hope on which the book ends (rather like Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife). The sonnets about Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf all resonate too.

And, I have to say, there are moments when you really like her. The idea of a 'pastoral' being a Sunday morning with the papers, cds and coffee; Ozymandias mixed with the White House, and a Christmas poem that likens Christmas to cholera. Reading the book again, to write about it, I find myself warming to the poems anew, and thinking maybe I've been too damning with faint praise. Perhaps these are drives which need to be familiar journeys before you can really see the details of the countryside as it whizzes past.

A post which takes longer than expected to get to the point

2009-03-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I came up with a new New Year's Resolution. A bit late you may argue, so maybe I should just call it a March Resolution.

I was browsing on guardian.co.uk, as I do from time to time, when a blog article caught my eye, entitled 'Why we need a female poet laureate'. It all seemed eminently reasonable. And there are a nice selection of eminent women from whom to choose. But not as many as there are men. So naturally I started looking around, and I found that in general male poets are more likely to be celebrated. The Guardian's own 'great poets' series included only one woman: Sylvia Plath. Their critic Frances Leviston, who is also a poet herself, wrote to justify this.

Now, I'm definitely a proponent of people succeeding on the basis of merit, but I thought about the poets that I read, and specifically the poetry books that I own. A good half of them are dead, and of them all but Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop are men. I do better with established poets: Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope are three of my favourites, along with Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney (or 'Famous Seamus' as Mrs Greenwood would say in her broadest 'Norren Irish' accent), Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard etc etc. The list goes on. Unsurprisingly my collection shows a bias towards poets who have appeared in the AQA Anthology, although I'd like to plead that Armitage and Duffy were on my favourites list before that anthology existed, and that nothing on this earth would persuade me to buy a book by Gillian Clarke.

But when we get to emergent poets - people who you won't necessarily have heard of, or of whom I hadn't really heard, people just starting out, most of those kind of poets are men. Michael Symmons Roberts, for example, whom I heard reading jointly with Simon Armitage and loved. The books of poetry sent to me when I was a member of the Poetry Books Society were all by men. I do own a book by Lucy Newlyn, called Ginnel, which my mother bought me, because it's about a childhood spent in the same places we grew up, but I'm afraid although it's a first collection, Lucy Newlyn herself is an established academic, a good few years older than my imagination painted her on reading her poems.

The thing is, it's quite hard to get ahead in poetry. You need to have had plenty of poems published in journals and magazines, and ideally to have won a few competitions. There's only a few outlets for poetry publishing in this country, although Bloodaxe Books are doing a marvellous job (and in the North too!) and I urge you to support them. But without support, these young poets aren't going to get anywhere. They're going to give up and stick to the day job, or spend fifty years writing their first collection.

So this was my new New Year's Resolution. To buy and read one book of poetry per month written by a woman under forty. How to find books by women under forty turned out to be a whole new challenge. I had intended to use this post to review the first one, but it turned out that the introductory justification was much longer than I'd intended. So I'll leave you for now with the suggestion that you think about whether you want a world with poetry in it, and that if you do, you're going to need to support something which is not so much an industry, and more a service to the community.

An Inkling of another world

2009-03-08T13:28:00.001-07:00

This morning I went to Narnia. Sort of.

C. S. Lewis bought a house in 1930, jointly with his brother and the mother of one his friends who was killed in the First World War, with whom he had lived ever since. The house in question was 'The Kilns', in Risinghurst, a suburb of Oxford which now stands immediately outside the ringroad, about ten minutes' drive from where I now live. The house then stood at one end of an 8-acre garden, which included a large pond or lake, which was a water filled clay-pit, with a number of brick kilns scattered around it, and a wooded headland. Five acres of this garden are now the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve, administered by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust, and open to the public to wander around at will.

Local lore* has it that this woodland is the inspiration for the Narnia books, written after Lewis moved to the Kilns. This morning it was quiet and empty, despite the sun. A couple of coots were making desultory circles on the lake, although a few ducks emerged later on. The trees were ankle-deep in dead leaves, and there were more than a few muddy holes, some of which were bridged, some not. Behind the lake the hillside rises steeply and there is a slightly clearer patch of woodland, with seats. It's only here that you really escape the feeling of being in a town - albeit at the edge, because you are away from the lower edges which abut people's gardens and are overlooked by the roofs of houses.

I didn't feel that it was Narnia, for that very reason. It was too close to this world to be in another. And to be fair, I suspect I may have had too high expectations of the place. I expected to walk in and suddenly recognise the places where the Pevensies met the Beavers, or where the Marshwiggles pitched their tents. And that was never going to happen. Narnia is not a real place, or not one on this planet: it exists more in a kind ur-imagination to which we all have access, but which we perhaps see in slightly different ways, complicated further by the television and film versions, which took our minds' eyes to Scotland and New Zealand, both a far cry from Oxford.

But when I'd released that wish to see 'the real Narnia', leaving myself open to just enjoying the woodland, things began to fall into place. This woodland isn't Narnia; it's the Wood Between the Worlds. It's the place from which you can get to other worlds - the place that Lewis leapt off from. And here and there I began to see where Narnia had crept in. In the clearing at the top I saw the place where Caspian encounters the mythic inhabitants of the forest dancing and vows to restore their country to them. Around the place lie round sandstone boulders, covered with lichen and mushrooms, known as 'doggers': a board tells of the legend that they were used as marbles by the giants who used to live in the mediaeval forests of England. The Silver Chair sprang to mind, and stayed there as I saw a series of stone pillars, diminishing in size, which looked like they had once supported a crossing over a stream, or the ravine that Eustace and Jill cross with Puddleglum, in the eye of my imagination.

And the best thing about it being the Wood Between the Worlds? It's not just Narnia you can get to from there. There's a forest full of other worlds just waiting to be discovered. I'll be going back to find them.

* I have to point out that it is only local lore, no matter how bandied about on the internet. It seems more likely that the inspiration for Narnia was the Mourne Mountains, located in Northern Ireland, near where C S Lewis grew up, at least when he wasn't away at school.

Happy World Book Day!

2009-03-05T03:06:00.000-08:00

Today is the day dedicated to books: the day that it's okay to bunk off work and bury your nose in a book*, the day that is specifically designed for you to go to a bookshop or website and buy a book - any book, the day that you should spend asking other people what they've read recently and enjoyed, and telling them what you've read recently and enjoyed. Change your facebook status to tell everyone you know the title that changed your life. Spot a stranger reading a book and ask them about it. See someone in Waterstone's looking at a book you hated and tell them that: then recommend a better one.

I love reading. I love bookshops. I may have mentioned this before. When I'm feeling low, visiting a bookshop is practically therapy. I don't have to buy anything - in fact I frequently don't - instead, I just browse and let all the pages and covers calm me slowly, tell me of the thousands of other worlds I could enter if I chose. That's the best thing about books: inside any one could be the portal to another world, a parallel dimension, an ideal place.

The books that keep me coming back for re-read after re-read are always those ones which do capture me and transport me bodily. I'm not just talking about the books which I can fall into and switch off completely from the outside world - I'm pretty talented at that. Easy to stop up your ears when your inner ear and eye is so completely concentrated on the object in your hand. I'm talking about the books which are a perfect mix of big ideas and tiny details, that contain characters I can identify with, that recreate that sense of magic I got from my first hit of fiction all those years ago. It's like heroin only without the fatal side effects or fall off from the intensity. I can re-read books like these instantly - have been known to - and still get the magic.

Books like this usually fall into one of two categories for me: children's fantasy (The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce, practically anthing by Diana Wynne Jones, to name but a few) or books about books (I'm talking things like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, things which Middeke and Huber call 'biofictions' that create their own intertextuality). I know not everyone likes the same things, and not all the books I go back to time after time are like this, but a good proportion are. (To my shame, the other major category is Dick Francis novels. I re-read all thirty odd of them every year or so. But then that only takes about a fortnight!)

I find that I have this strong emotional reaction to books less often nowadays though. When I was six or seven I saw my mother putting aside some books to take to Oxfam. "Didn't you like them, Mummy?" I asked. "Yes," she said, puzzled. "But then why don't you want to read them again?" I couldn't conceive of the idea of liking a book but not wanting to go back to it. Now I know there are so many books out there that I won't have time to read, that it's sometimes not worth going back to them. I'm trying desperately to reduce my holdings of books at the moment: I don't have room to store all of them on bookshelves as it is, and I'm expecting to have to move to a smaller place in the summer, and to have fewer shelves still. I've got a shelf which contains only books which I haven't read yet but which I expect to get rid of when I do. So far only two out of seven have escaped the cull: Q&A, the novel which Slumdog Millionaire is based on, and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, even if it made me cry. I regret a little letting The 19th Wife go, but since it was a free book anyway it probably won't kill me.

So the only question is: do I celebrate World Book Day by buying a new book? Or by reading one I've already got? There's just so much choice!

*subject to terms and conditions: namely your boss's attitude...

To bleed or not to bleed, that is the question...

2009-03-02T10:32:00.001-08:00

So this year I've already seen three Shakespeare plays - a total I'm extremely pleased with, especially since two of them were ones I'd never seen before, and one of them I'd never even read (Hadn't read King Lear, hadn't seen Othello, and I've read and seen Hamlet at least twice before.). Two of them have been in London, and one, as I may have mentioned before, is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. One had realistic but restrained amounts of blood (Hamlet), one had no blood at all, despite quite a number of fatal stabbings (Othello) and one had copious amounts of blood and a scene where someone bit out someone else's eyeball, rolled it around in her mouth and then spat it out into a trough at the front of the stage (Lear).

So which makes for a better production? I honestly don't know. The audience was revolted and horrified by the gore in Lear, although the eyeball almost provoked a laugh of disgust. There was no question that the violence in Othello was highly believable. Lack of blood didn't wake us from the suspension of disbelief. Strangely, these two, representing two extremes, were also the two set in venues where the stage and seating are intimately collocated, so that you are very very close to the actors. Sitting in the front row of the WYP, I had to uncross my legs at one point to bring my feet in for fear of kicking the actors dragging off the body of Roderigo.

You could argue that the difference lies in the plays. Lear is a play which revels in its violence, as the country descends into a bloody mess. But then, Othello can equally be seen as doing so, creating a sea of blood surrounding the central murder - the symbolic smothering of Desdemona, whose husband is deaf to her voice. The point is, you don't need the prop. The theatre is essentially a place of artifice, as someone much more knowledgeable than me says, and it is not realistic. Yet if we can believe that the same basic set is several different castles, or in different countries, if we can accept that the same actor can play several roles in the same play, and yet see the characters not the actor, why would we need realistic blood? Lear went one step further with a real rain storm on the 'blasted heath' (yes, I know, that's from Macbeth) which was spectacular, and fun, but fundamentally unneccesary. Maybe that's the answer: you don't need the blood, but sometimes a ketchup-splattered stage is just plain fun.

P.S. On another but related matter, I wrote an article for The Oxford Student earlier this term wondering about the current trend for celebrities taking on Shakespearean roles. I excluded David Tennant and Patrick Stewart because they were well-known Shakespearean actors before they became famous on television, but did mention Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear and Lenny Henry as Othello. Luckily, they both came through, with Lenny Henry in particular proving that he is indeed capable of acting his socks off. Pete Postlethwaite was slightly hampered by a production that only worked in places (blood being one of them). However, I have to admit, I'm not going to rush to see Jude Law as Hamlet...

"The world is broad and wide"

2009-03-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

If you've had even half an ear on arts news recently you will know that Lenny Henry has been making his Shakespearean debut as Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. What you may not have known is that he is doing so under the auspices of a company called Northern Broadsides, whose USP is the just that - they perform Shakespeare's plays, and occasionally those of other people, in broad northern accents. This is not just regionalism. It makes more sense than that. The poet Jackie Kay talking about this production for Front Row, the Radio 4 arts programme, was most taken not by the transformation of Henry from comedian to tragic hero, but by the sheer accessibility of Shakespeare when uttered with a northern twang.

I could at this point attempt a long and linguistic explanation of how the vowels of the northern accent are phonologically closer to those of the sixteenth century and how the Great Vowel Shift created a problem for us, but frankly it would all be rubbish. I suspect that it has more to do with the cadences of the accent, and also that the stressed syllables of Shakespeare's lines are closer to the natural stresses of the north than they are to the south, or rather, to RP, which is what Shakespeare tends to be performed in. With the exception of the comedic characters of course. They get regional accents because regional accents are 'funny'.

I've been to see quite a few Northern Broadsides productions since we first saw them in my teens. They're always excellent productions, clear and mostly quite traditional. The Wars of the Roses plays make much more sense done in Lancastrian and Yorkshire accents... it's easier to tell who's siding with who. Pity the two middle aged ladies on the row in front of me during Richard III (my first Broadside); one turned to the other in the interval and said, without a trace of irony, in the most posh accent you can imagine "It's very good, but I do wish they'd speak properly. I can't understand a word they're saying." I think she'd missed the point.

So if you get the chance, go see Othello. It's a very good production, with almost nothing out of place. And Iago was BRILLIANT....

How many have you read?

2009-02-01T06:26:00.000-08:00

During January The Guardian published a series of booklets under the title 'One thousand books to read before you die'. The idea, explained in this introduction is that if you read one book every four weeks, beginning when you're 8, and finishing aged 85, you'll manage to pack in a whopping 1,000 novels (providing you don't read any twice!). The definitive list can be found here.

Well, this of course presented something of a challenge: I am nothing if not list-oriented. So, combing through, I came up with a grand total of 126/ 1000. Which is not too bad (especially if you consider that some of these 'individuals' were Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (circa 30 books); the Narnia books (7) and the Lord of the Rings (3). So really, that's 163/1037. But who's counting?

The more worrying thing was that many of those hundred books were ones that I could remember only vaguely, or knew I hadn't liked that much. Some of the ones I hadn't read were ones I have made conscious decisions not to. The Guardian sensibly didn't stick to the classics - there was an astonishing range of books represented, although I was surprised not to see a section of children's fiction - especially in a list we're supposed to start on at age 8. Which is where putting my achievement into context comes in: twenty years at 13 books a year, and I should have read at least 260 off the list. Aargh - I only have another sixty years to read them all. Luckily, as you will have read below, I reckon I pack in a few more than one every four weeks. Although possibly not off this list.

Jamuary

2009-01-04T05:12:00.000-08:00

A typo in an email was all it took to rechristen the first month of the year: Ja-n-uary becomes Ja-m-uary, and there will be jam related fun for all. So, wondering what exciting jam related activities I could undertake this month, apart from making and eating the stuff, I googled 'jam related activities'... An amazing 271,000 entries popped up. [At this point my mother said, 'you really don't have enough to do. Would you like to make lunch?] Who knew there was so much Jam in the world. There is for example, the minaret at Jam in Thailand. Or jamming with jazz musicians. Or jam as an abbreviation for 'jamboree'. Or 'JAM'NASTICS' which is presumably some form of gym related activity for toddlers. Jamming the printer. Preventing the enemy from jamming your communications (anti-jam, which sounds like it should be something you take away from a picnic, or possibly a brand name for peanut butter).

These are of course homonyms: words which have the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings usually because they come from different origins. Unfortunately the origins of the word jam do not appear to be easy to define. The main guess seems to be that the meaning of jam 'to press together or squeeze tightly' is the original one, which led to the name being applied to crushed fruit. The jazz noun is tenuously suggested to be a metaphor from jam being 'something sweet'.

So a little jam to begin the year. Jam as many jam-related activities as possible into the month. Happy New Year.

Got to go. Have to make lunch :)

A very short post

2008-11-30T05:35:00.000-08:00

Wandering through Blackwell's Bookshop the other day a rather large display caught my eye. On two large bookcases were laid out almost every volume in the OUP's 'A Very Short Introduction' series, in alphabetical order.

This produced some wonderful juxtapositions: The Quakers and Quantum Theory; Game Theory and Gandhi; The Crusades and Cryptography. It also brought our attention to gaps in our knowledge base: what, for example, is Pre-Socratic Philosophy? Do we know enough about Choice Theory?

I quite like the Very Short Introductions: for one thing they're very pleasing physically, with nice thick covers which pretend to be dust jackets, and lovely white paper. For another they're full of serendiptiously interesting topics.

Competing for my money available for ridiculously short books, however, are Penguin's 'Great Ideas' series, released in three 'issues' each of twenty volumes, each of which contains an extract from a longer, famous work, like Clauseowitz's On War, or a complete work in itself, like Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, or a selection of essays by someone famous like George Orwell. The charm of these books is that while they are all small and palely green, they have the most fantastic raised designs on their front covers, which are terribly terribly tactile. Their inner pages are not as pleasing as the Very Short Introductions, being less sharply white, and more fuzzily beige. But still worthwhile - especially in introducing you to some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers.

So not strictly an English post - more of a share. And it did start in a bookshop, at least...

What makes a heavy reader?

2008-10-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Too much to eat, of course.

No, sorry, bad joke, couldn't resist. I read somewhere this week that the British book industry defines a heavy reader as someone who buys eight books a year. Naturally, when I went back to find the reference, I couldn't. This academic article does, however, cite a European study which used 8 books a year as the definition of a 'keen reader'. It also cites a number of other studies which tend to use 20 to 30 books a year as the measure of a 'heavy reader'. This seems more like it to me.

Eight books a year is one book every month and a half. That's not a whole lot of books. Especially if they're thin books. Although, having said that, I am very aware of some people among my own acquaintance who would be struggling with that. I think Gareth has been attempting to read The Stand by Stephen King since about Easter. I'm pleased to say that Emily, having managed to read a book a month in 2007 has already exceeded that target as of last week, and has in fact lost count. Twenty to thirty books is approximately a book every two weeks, which seems like it would be more of a challenge.

I think I can safely claim to read that number though. In the last week, I have read: Wicked by Gregory Maguire; The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor and The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge. And I have to say I've been feeling a little light on the reading lately. So, assuming that I read at least two books a week, that's a minimum of 100 books a year, and I think that's exceedingly conservative. So what kind of gradation can we decide on for the heaviness of readers?

I like heaviness because it gives us more scope for an inventive scale of measurement. I present to you, Miss Elliott's fascinating scale for the heaviness of readers.

30 books per year = 'overweight'
50 books per year = 'obese'
75 books per year = 'morbidly obese'
100 books per year = 'sumo'
150 books per year = 'Great White Shark'
200 books per year = 'Volvo estate'
300 books per year = 'elephant'
400 books per year = 'double decker'
500 books per year = 'blue whale'

Frankly, if you're over that, you're too keen a reader even for me! So what are you? As I said, I'm somewhere between 'sumo' and 'elephant', which is quite an achievement. In my prime (gapy year working in Oxfam books) I almost certainly did reach the dizzy heights of 'blue whale'; now such heftiness is beyond me.

And a little factoid to finish: 500 books is about a quarter of a tonne. Which is easily light enough for the 150 tonne blue whale to slip into its pocket.

Has the world gone mad? I'm so angry I'm willing to sound like Richard Littlejohn.

2008-09-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

AQA have removed Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy from the syllabus. Because someone complained that it promoted knife crime. Which it doesn't, if you actually read it.

Much has been written about this so I'm not going to rehash it all here. But I just wanted to be able to say that I object to this blatant censorship - prompted by a complaint from someone who told The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/06/gcses.poetry.carol.ann.duffy) that she thought all of CAD's poetry was a bit 'weird'. Glad to know it's coming from an informed, eloquent, well-reasoned view point. And I wanted to say that CAD herself, as we should have expected, has said it better than anyone else, with her response:
Mrs Schofield's GCSE

And frankly, the idea that the GCSE poetry is going to inspire anyone to murder, commit acts of terrorism, etc, apart from the teachers who have to teach it, year in, year out, is ludicrous. Like when they wanted to ban video games in the early nineties. Which let's face it, are far more violent than the AQA anthology, but don't have the articulate expression.

It's the end of the year and we know it....

2007-12-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

As happens at this time of year, people begin to create lists which are supposed in some way to sum up the year that's passed. One such list is that created by Merriam-Websters' dictionary in the US, which is roughly equivalent in standing as the OED is here. Their top ten words of the year, as voted for by visitors to their website (a completely useless grading criteria - I mean, who visits dictionary websites? oh, yeah, me) are:

1. w00t (interjection)

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

w00t! I won the contest!

This comes from 'l33t' speak. ('l33t' is short for 'elite' and is an annoying online game-player language used to exclude people who don't understand it. It's a form of e-language, supposedly quicker, whose features include the replacement of 'e' with '3' and 'o' with '0' (that second one's a zero in case you can't tell from my font). W00t is also an acronym (what a feast for language change enthusiasts) standing for 'we owed the other team' - see the l33t roots?

2. facebook (verb)

As in 'I facebooked her'. It can mean, variously, looking someone up on facebook, messaging them through facebook, etc etc etc. If you don't know what facebook is, you're sooo 2006 ;)

A tribute to the rise of the social networking site - so language change because a new phenomenon requires a new name, with facebook itself being a new compound of... face and book. Starting off as a noun, it has rapidly moved word classes to become a verb - another common mode of language change - can you think of any others?

3. conundrum (noun)

There doesn't seem to be a particular reason why this is a word of the year - I think it's just been someone's favourite word. According to Merriam-Webster, the word has been around since 1645. It can merely be a difficult problem, or a question whose answer is purely conjectural, or a riddle whose answer is or involves a pun. Countdown conundrum anyone?

4. quixotic (adjective)

Again this has been around for a while. It comes from the name of the eponymous character Don Quixote (pronounced Key-oh-tay but the adjective is pronounced as it appears), and describes people who are like the hero from this 1718 novel. It suggests one who is foolish and impractical in the pursuit of romantic ideals, or likes to behave like a knight of the round table. Here's another good way words are brought into the language - via eponyms. I bet you know at least two more, though these are nouns. One you'll have in your cupboard at home and use to clean the floor, and another you'll have in your pencil case.... yes, that's right, give it up for Messrs Hoover and Biro. Interestingly I heard a discussion on the radio the other day about the use of names as brands. The ideal is to get to the point where everyone identifies the name and brand, but not so far that they become everyday words for the genre of object, because at that point you lose your trademark.

5. blamestorm (verb/ noun)

This is not totally new, but it's fairly recent and will be familiar to anyone who has looked at 'management speak' in Language and Occupation. The definitions given by Merriam-Webster are:

(verb) : Gathering around in a group to discuss why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who is to blame or responsible.

All the managers were locked up in a meeting for the all day blamestorming about the lost contract.

(noun) : A meeting held in order to come up with a name of a person to assign guilt to a certain incident.

The board of directors where exhausted after a four hour blamestorm which finally resulted in two names for the chopping block.

It's obviously formed on analogy from the now-considered-politically-incorrect 'brainstorm' and has the advantage of internal rhyme with the base word. It's a piece of jargon which is becoming more widespread, from the ever-growing middle management/ business type environment.

6. sardoodledom (noun)

This was an entirely new one on me so I offer you Merriam-Webster's entry in its entirety. Goodness knows why this was a word of the year, but I quite like it's alliterativeness and it illustrates another method of lexical change.

Main Entry: sar·doo·dle·dom
Pronunciation: sär-ˈdü-d^əl-dəm
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): sar·doo·dle·doms
Etymology: sardoodle- (blend of Victorien Sardou died 1908 French playwright criticized by G. B. Shaw died 1950 English playwright for the supposed staginess of his plays and English doodle) + -dom

: mechanically contrived plot structure and stereotyped or unrealistic characterization in drama Sardoodledom -- John Mason Brown>

7. apathetic (verb)

Again an old one here, from 1744, meaning having little or no interest or emotion. It's typically used of students about politics. Interestingly, if you look at its formation which is the prefix a-. meaning 'not' or 'no' with 'pathetic', it throws some light on the way in which 'pathetic' comes to mean what it does.

8. Pecksniffian (adjective)

Similarly to quixotic, this is based on the name of a character in a novel - in this case Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. It means 'unctuously hypocritical' - doesn't sound very nice. The kind of word you could use when you don't want someone to know you're insulting them.

9. hypocrite (noun)

You know who you are.

10. charlatan (noun)

This is someone who pretends to have knowledge or ability which they do not, usually conning people in the process. Interestingly the etymology of this is the Italian ciarlatano, alteration of cerretano, literally, inhabitant of Cerreto, from Cerreto, dated 1618. I'd really like to know what they did to annoy their neighbours!!

So, a list, and lots of ways that language can change, or form, or be used in different ways. Keep an eye out for the OED's list - their annual 'language report' by Susie Dent is usually worth a read and quite funny.

P.S.

2007-12-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

ps. no sestinas yet? you disappoint me. ;)

Eggcorns and mondegreen

2007-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

All you lovely people out there are undoubtedly sick and tired of your English teachers correcting spellings or even (heaven forbid) sniggering at particularly amusing howlers. Those of you in A2 English Language may even have tried arguing that it's 'Language Change in action.'

And here's the good news - sometimes, sometimes, you're right. Only when it makes sense, though.

Mondegreens are the more traditional form - coined by the American writer Sylvia Wright - and the term itself is a mondegreen, that is to say, the hearing of a word or phrase as a homophone or near-homophone in such a way as it acquires new meaning. It usually involves reanalysing where the word divisions are. The term comes from an article in Harper's Magazine where Wright wrote:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]

And Lady Mondegreen.

The fourth line should in fact be 'and laid him on the green' - it's a 17th century ballad. So next time you make up a really bizarre line to a song you've only partially heard, you know what to call it.

However, eggcorns are slightly different. You all know what one meaning of 'eggcorn' is - it's those little things from which great oaks grow. Yes, that's right, acorns. Someone not quite sure of how to spell acorn came up with a reasonable spelling which - crucially - sounds as though it might be etymologically believable or explicable - at least if you're not an etymologist. Other examples might be 'restbite' for 'respite' where you appear to be having a 'rest' from your troubles 'biting' you. The point is, you have to be able to come up with a defence of why your spelling is correct in terms of a folk etymology or metonymy. No simply trying to palm off they're/there on your teacher.

So, two words of the day and a small excuse to argue with your teacher.

Do you know a sonnet from a sestina?

2007-12-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

So, Ofsted have managed to offend government and teachers once more as they complain that all this preparing for examinations teachers unreasonably do means we're not getting enough poetry in classrooms these days. Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate, leaped to the attack as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7131133.stm

The thing which worried me most about the whole report was the way no-one seemed to notice the contradiction between their criticism that pupils were only encountering 'relatively easy' poems - ie fun modern ones - and their desire that poetry teaching should be about kindling a love of poetry. Now, personally, I think shoving a load of 'classic' poems down people's throats is a sure fire way to lose them forever.... However, far be it from me to disagree with Schools' Minister Lord Adonis (who seems to be more commonly known as 'Andrew Adonis' now, in a nice, socially equal kind of a way. He said: "I want to see a generation of young people who know their poetry from Auden to Zephaniah and their sonnets from sestinas."

Well, I am sure you know Auden (W.H. Auden - wrote 'stop all the clocks' from 4 weddings and a funeral? aha, yes I thought you would) and Zephaniah (Benjamin, fabulous dreadlocks, well known for writing in dialect - great poem about being kind to your turkeys at Christmas) and a sonnet (14 lines - Shakespeare wrote a LOT of them) but what about a sestina? No, well, I am surprised. Or not, actually. It's a 39-lined poem. Fairly impossible to do a lot of those in an hour's English lesson and the chances of you being able to write one for homework, also fairly slim. But because this blog is good for you, here's what one is.

Definition of the Sestina
--from the Encyclopedia Britannica (Britannica.com):

An elaborate verse form employed by medieval Provençal and Italian, and occasional modern, poets. It consists, in its pure medieval form, of six stanzas of blank verse, each of six lines--hence the name. The final words of the first stanza appear in varied order in the other five, the order used by the Provençals being: abcdef, faebdc, cfdabe, ecbfad, deacfb, bdfeca. Following these was a stanza of three lines, in which the six key words were repeated in the middle and at the end of the lines, summarizing the poem or dedicating it to some person. The sestina was invented by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel and was used in Italy by Dante and Petrarch, after which it fell into disuse until revived by the 16th-century French Pléiade, particularly Pontus de Tyard. In the 19th century, Ferdinand, comte de Gramont, wrote a large number of sestinas, and Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Complaint of Lisa" is an astonishing tour de force--a double sestina of 12 stanzas of 12 lines each. In the 20th century, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden wrote noteworthy sestinas.

Did you get that? Well, basically, all the lines end in one of six words, in varying order. There's an example below, by Ezra Pound. And because it's Christmas time, a competition for you. Try writing a sestina of your very own, submit it via the comment button and I'll put you up in the main body of the blog... Fame, adulation, wealth... well, moral wealth anyway. Good luck.

Example of a Sestina

Sestina: Altaforte
by Ezra Pound

Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born. Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife. Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug him up again? The scene is at his castle, Altaforte.
"Papiols" is his jouleur. "The Leopard," the device of Richard (Coeur de Lion).

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let¹s to music!
I have no life save when swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair,purple,opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howel I my heart nigh mad rejoying.

II

In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When tempests kill the earth¹s foul peace,
And the light¹nings from black heav¹n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven God¹s swords clash.

III

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour¹s stour than a year¹s peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there¹s no wine like the blood¹s crimson!

IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears throught he dark clash
and it fills my heart with rejoycing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might Œgainst all darkmess opposing.

V

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But it is fit only to rotin womanish peace
Far from where worth¹s won and the swords clash
For the death of sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

VI

Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There¹s no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle¹s rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges Œgainst "The Leopard's" rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"

VII

And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for always the thought "Peace"!

Goodbye to all that

2007-10-05T09:19:00.001-07:00

There is an interesting article about the extinction of languages here:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/healthscience/19language.php

For the languages these researchers are worried about, extinction means the death of the last speaker, since most indigenous aboriginal languages are not written down, only spoken, so when the last speaker goes, that's pretty much it for the language. But how do we define extinction more generally? Is Latin, a so-called 'dead' language, extinct because no-one uses it as their mother tongue now? Or do the thousands of people reading, writing and speaking it (yes, speaking - go to the Vatican website if you don't believe me) mean that it is not extinct, just sleeping? In any case can we call a language which is no longer extant mainly because it evolved into other forms (in this case Italian, French, Spanish etc) extinct?

Perhaps we should count the language as dying out when the last native speaker dies? There is some definite fun to be had here: reportedly the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1984 and was not a person, but a parrot! The last human speaker of Cornish was the parrot's owner.

A few years ago the Irish were very worried that Irish Gaelic was going to die out: fewer and fewer people were learning it at their mother's knee, and the prevalence of English was increasing. Determined to protect their heritage the Irish government made the learning of Irish compulsory for all school age children, a strategy which has reversed the downward trend, and is widely held to be an exemplary way to save a language. There are now even 'second-gen' native speakers - that is children whose first tongue is Irish, but whose parents are Irish learners. Which raises the question whether any language which is written down (or which has been recorded comprehensively on audio tape or digital media) can ever be truly extinct? If second-gen native speakers are native speakers, then any language could be rescued.

Related to this, but not quite the same, is an argument I was having the other day with a linguist. We all know that English is the most widely used language in the globe. Likewise we mostly all acknowledge that this is not because Britain is best, but because one of our little colonies has done rather well for itself (some place called America, I believe) and exported the language worldwide. The linguist was arguing that if you measured where a language belonged by the number of people who spoke it, then you could see English as belonging to India, or China and therefore that the 'standard' should be set by them. One of the reasons that 'English' is said to be dominant is its use on the web; however, large parts of that 'English' use are in fact world English dialects, such as Chinglish, which, while they are based on the language we use, would be virtually unintelligible to someone in, say, Newcastle. So maybe English will develop all over the world into new languages based on it, similar but not overlapping, and English will be like Latin, a dead language. Well, it's a thought.

Um, well, ah, if you actually, er, listen

2007-09-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

Now this is a fascinating thing which someone emailed me with:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/philip_hensher/article2996123.ece

It's a very interesting finding, especially because it's the opposite of what you'd expect they would have found. It also makes me feel much less bad about the number of fillers I use when teaching.

It's been well known for a while that fillers are very important in Child Language Acquisition - because using them is one of the tools which allow children to extend turns and begin to take a fuller role in conversation, as well as filling the syntactic gaps in their knowledge. But it's quite astounding that our brains process and retain information which is, er, broken up by fillers more.

This is, by the way, something that might make a very good investigation topic, if you also looked at the ways in which we use fillers to support syntax, or to correct syntax, etc etc. The original research paper may or may not be found at this link, but it's an interesting and related paper even if it's not the one to which Philip Henssher is referring:

http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/martinc/offprints/cs03.pdf

Goodbye to good-bye (Hymn to the Hyphen)

2007-09-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

Well, first of all it turns out that the hyphen is dead. Prescriptivists among you may want to shed a tear as the new ed of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary is dropping a load of them because, basically, we're all too lazy to be bothered with them. Some words are losing the hyphen and becoming compounds (eg 'bumblebee' rather than 'bumble bee') and some are becoming noun phrases (eg 'ice cream' rather than 'ice-cream'). Do not expect any English teacher to take that as a reasonable excuse any time soon. There are other dictionaries.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2172733,00.html

However, it is a bit of a trend, as this article from The Times four years ago shows:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article880290.ece

So why is this happening? Well, as usual we could probably blame e-language. We're typing, we're going speedily, we can't be bothered to move up an extra line to reach the hyphen on the top row. And it's way down the menu on predictive text. Also possibly search engines have got more sophisticated so they recognise the word whether or not it has the hyphen included. And then it asks 'did you mean...' and really annoys you.

And it could just be regular language change - we all know levels of punctuation have gone up and down according to fashion, just like hemlines. Perhaps, en masse we've all just decided to go for the easier option, without the hyphen.

Smiley Birthday to you

2007-09-21T02:06:00.000-07:00

Gosh this feels like a long time since I posted. Which it is. Well, if anyone is still out there, then here is a tiny link relevant to Language and Technology:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/19/smiley_birthday/
which is in fact, just a nice thing to know. :-)

You will all, of course, be thinking to yourselves by now that Language Change has also taken place in the smiley arena and reduced the original design to :) for ease of typing and speed. Is this a mark of degenerating standards, or does it merely show that e-language, like all language tends to change towards the easier and the more useful for speakers. Except when it doesn't.

Some Language Change articles

2007-06-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, it's been a while, I know, but the blog is back with links to two very interesting articles on language change. Worth a look, anyway:

Philip Hensher on trendy additions to dictionaries http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/philip_hensher/article2614566.ece

Joan Bakewell on taboo language http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/joan_bakewell/article2600452.ece

enjoy
:)

ENB1 Retakes

2007-05-20T11:52:00.001-07:00

Ok, I've got some A grade answers and some advice sheets for anyone retaking - come and see me Monday if you want it!

Blair's Linguistic Legacy

2007-05-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph listing 100 words which weren't in use before 1997:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/10/nblairdec310.xml

What I think is interesting is that there are many more than 100 words which have come into use in the last ten years - how have they chosen these? It seems to be quite politically motivated; there is a definite Telegraph readership bias evident here. It exemplifies attitudes to language change, and how that attitude can be disseminated with no coherent sentences at all. Semantically these words are just words, but pragmatically as a list they say 'Blair is bad' and 'Bring back the good old days', and 'political correctness gone mad!' (a favourite Telegraph reaction!).

Also at least some of them were in use before 1997, but they may not have been widespread. Institutional racism for one. Have a look, see what you think.

:)

FAO Year 12 Lit Poetry: form and structure and other things which overlap

2007-05-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, to clarify the issues of form and structure in poetry, or rather, not to, since as I said the other day, they do overlap in a major way and most of the places you can read about them reflect that.

In general, it seems that you will be safe in talking about the 'form' things we talked of yesterday, plus named structures or forms, such as the sonnet, or free verse etc. There are two places which have some interesting reading matter for you on the subject. One is a handout from a university:

http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/handouts/?q=node/34

and the other which is a blog entry written by a literature student, and has some interesting thoughts even if I wouldn't rely on it for absolute truth:

http://renegadesblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/on-poetic-structure.html

Enjoy :)

School for Scandal study guide - fao Year 12 lit

2007-05-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the study guide is on the intranet in the public section of the English folder. Open the file marked 'Miss Elliott's Fascinating School for Scandal Study Guide Navigation Page' and you can navigate from there.

Re your cd-roms. Copy everything into one folder on your hard disk. Move the odd files into the base folders. Open the file marked 'Miss Elliott's Fascinating School for Scandal Study Guide Navigation Page' and you can navigate from there.

Otherwise you can just open a random page and navigate from there, but unless the home page/index is in the same folder it will keep being annoying at you.

Your chance to be part of linguistic history....

2007-05-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

The British Library are putting together a snapshot of 21st century life - marketed as a 21st century Domesday Book - and they need your help. Forward an email to them during the month of May to be part of a vast archive of email communication... Just think, in five hundred years time, English Language Students could be analysing that email that you sent asking someone else for help with your essay - cos obviously all your emails are very virtuous!

First link = BBC news article about the project. Second is the British Library press release. Go on, make history.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6618039.stm

http://www.bl.uk/news/2007/pressrelease20070503.html

B******* Bingo, or how to think outside the box...

2007-04-30T04:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently not everyone has been as swamped with management speak in their lives as I have, so here are a couple of links to places where you may find interesting management speak terms, or not so interesting ones... Beware, the second has a few punctuation errors, particularly in the matter of it's versus its...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2005/01/19/voices_management_speak_feature.shtml

http://wossname.thingy.com/newspeak.htm

Read, enjoy, post your own favourites in the comments section.

:)

Email etiquette and coursework bibliographies

2007-04-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Right, this is the second time I've tried to write this.

I was very excited today to find myself, in the shape of this blog, on someone's coursework bibliography. Of course, there's not a fat lot to get excited about on coursework standardisation day, so don't take this as indicative of my usual response...

Email etiquette - article in yesterday's Times at the following link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article1689442.ece

I'm sure it's worth telling you that the author of this article had her first book published aged 17. Come on, some of you have still got time if you hurry....

:)

Turning Orange

2007-04-20T05:57:00.000-07:00

I also thought that it might be worth bringing to your attention the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist which was published earlier this week. The Orange Prize is for women writing in the English Language, and has increased the status of women writers quite substantially via it's £30,000 prize fund. Perhaps one day one of you lot might win. In any case, you can always try reading them:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
Xiaolu Guo A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Jane Harris The Observations
Anne Tyler Digging to America

You may recognise the third one - it won the Booker Prize last year.

You wild child you

2007-04-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

Thinking about Child Language Acquisition revision we started talking about Genie, the girl who featured in a Channel Four documentary a while ago. Feral children are children who have been for some reason isolated from other humans; they may have been abused or they may simply have been abandoned. History is rife with stories of children being raised by animals (anyone remember Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome?) although I read somewhere that the wolf stories in particular may have originated from prudishness - the Latin for wolf being lupus, which is very similar to lupa - meaning prostitute. Anyway, I was searching on the web for interesting CLA related info and found this excellent website:

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php

Some of which is relevant to English Language and some of which is not.

So there.

And yet more on spelling...

2007-04-03T00:41:00.000-07:00

This website is set up by someone who's written a book on the subject of the English spelling system and its vagaries. Have an explore and see what you think - I'm guessing she's a little bit obsessed.

http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk

Talking of jobs...

2007-04-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

This is just a little something to help you start preparing for Lang and Occupation on ENB2:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/vocabulary/

It's fairly basic, mind you, but worth looking at some of the different subject-specific lexis... :)

And here's another: babies and civil servants...

2007-03-27T03:01:00.000-07:00

So the Telegraph is obviously interested in English this week.

First of all you don't need to be too distressed if you're they're/their/there isn't quite up to speed: civil service mandarins were given a guide to accurate writing - and given some of the government websites I think they need it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/24/nenglish24.xml

Then beware if you're planning to marry someone with a different regional accent:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/24/nenglish124.xml

So, enjoy!

Another little thing.

2007-03-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

Ok, so you're going to get this printed out in lessons if you're doing A2, but there's an interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/27/nlingo27.xml

It's about accents and movement of accents. There's also some interesting sound recordings to listen to to illustrate what they're talking about.

Uptight about Dictionaries?

2007-03-27T02:43:00.000-07:00

After a long silence, here's some stuff. The following was sent to an email list I get: I think it's quite interesting. It's also v relevant for the stuff we were discussing in Language Change last week:

I was surprised at the earliness of the first cited use of 'uptight' inthe US; I'd assumed it was a word of the seventies...Though many of thecitations do come from that 'groovy' period. Also interesting that,like 'wicked', it can be used as a term of approbation or theopposite...

uptight, a. SECOND EDITION 1989

colloq. and slang (orig. U.S.). [UP- 3.]

1. a. Of a person: in a state of nervous tension or anxiety;inhibited, worried, 'on edge'; angry, 'worked up' (about something). Quot. 1934 is an isolated early example.

1934 J. M. CAIN Postman always rings Twice xvi. 190 I'm getting up tightnow, and I've been thinking about Cora. Do you think she knows I didn'tdo it? 1966 Sunday Times (Colour Suppl.) 13 Feb. 35/4 Up tight, tense.1968 Mad LXXVII. 30 'Uptight' means, like, a bad scene. It's when you'rehung up, or wigged out, or you can't make it. We all get 'uptight' oncein a while. 1969 C. YOUNG Todd Dossier 38 He looked worried. Reallyworried. As the kids say, he was up-tight. 1973 E. CALDWELL Annette(1974) VI. ii. 137 I'd guess you'd gotten so uptight from being deniedmotherhood that you were ready to leave home. 1975 D. LODGE ChangingPlaces ii. 83 You're feeling all cold and uptight and wishing you hadn'tcome. 1977 M. EDELMAN Political Lang. v. 90 To the uptight policemaneveryone is a potential offender. 1981 P. P. READ Villa Golitsyn II. iv.112, I was afraid you might be a little uptight about that sort ofthing.

b. fig. Characteristically formal in manner or style; correct,strait-laced.

1969 Manch. Guardian Weekly 28 Aug. 18 Who would have thought that anuptight institution like the august Oxford University Press would havedone a thing like this? Here is a..spirited and spiritous piece ofautobiography..served up as a book. 1970 E. M. BRECHER Sex Researchersix. 253 They tended to swing in the same socially corrrect, formal,'up-tight' style they followed in their other activities. 1976Chatelaine (Montreal) Jan. 73/3 In the morning, the apartment lookedcuriously uptight to Meredith.

2. In approbation: that reaches the desired standard; excellent,fine.

1962 Down Beat Aug. 20/2 Jazz Gene Ammons Up Tight! 1966 [seeOUT-OF-SIGHT adj. phr. (n.) 2]. 1969 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 31 May 11/7Disc jockeys..talk in a kind of sub-English..as in 'All right babysock-it-to-me it's allright uptight yeah.'

3. Short or out of money; 'broke'.

1967 Time 6 Jan. 18/3 'Up tight' can mean anxious, emotionally involvedor broke. 1968 Esquire Apr. 160/3 The expression 'uptight', which meantbeing in financial straits, appeared on the soul scene in the generalvicinity of 1953. Hence uptightness. 1969 FABIAN & BYRNE Groupie vi. 46 The paranoia and savage uptightnesswhich comes from three such guys living on top of each other andattempting to lead very together type lives while being stoned most ofthe time. 1974 A. LASKI Night Music 95 It hadn't made him anylooser..that rigid uptightness was still in him. 1976 New Yorker 8 Mar.57/3 In [The Entertainer]..Archie contrasted the uptightness of theBritish who don't make 'a fuss' with a fat black woman he once heard inAmerica who sang 'her heart out to the whole world'.

A present from Hannah

2007-03-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

FOR THOSE WHO ENJOY LANGUAGE (OR SEVERE DISTORTIONS THEREOF)

Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.
A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
Dijon vu - the same mustard as before.
Practice safe eating - always use condiments.
Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.
A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy.
A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.
Reading while sunbathing makes you well red.
When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.
A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.
What's the definition of a will? (It's a dead give away.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
She was engaged to a boyfriend with a wooden leg but broke it off.
A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.
With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.
When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds.
The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.
You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.
Local Area Network in Australia : the LAN down under.
Every calendar's days are numbered.
A lot of money is tainted - It taint yours and it taint mine.
A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.
He had a photographic memory that was never developed.
A midget fortune-teller who escapes from prison is a small medium
at large.
Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the
end.
Once you've seen one shopping center, you've seen a mall.
Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis..
Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.
Acupuncture is a jab well done.

Waparrazzi

2007-03-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

Just been reading Susie Dent's The Language Report for last year. It's full of current linguistic trends, words coined during the year, and finishes with the OED's word of the year. Brill!
Waparrazzi - members of the public who take photos of celebrities with their mobile phones
flashpacker - posh, rich backpacker in their 30s

word of the year: bovvered! Oh, what a thing it has come to. 2005's was biosecurity - boring! But check out the following: 1982 - kissogram; 1970 - Big Mac; 1963 - Dalek; 1959 - hairspray; 1947 - bikini; 1938 - tweenage (almost unbelievable!); 1937 - hobbit; 1921 - potato crisps; 1913 - migrant labour; 1906 - muckraking. So many words have been going longer than you'd think.

Anyway, this book is great for Language Change, because it actually also talks about why words get more popular, and also for beginning to think about topics for independent Language Investigations for A2, if you're in Year 12. And I'm going to donate my copy to the library when I've finished with it. Enjoy!

Twenty first century acronyms

2007-03-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Some nice examples of language change in this BBC article - acronyms are created to describe particularly modern cultural phenomenons - and some of them are the same as earlier words. Does that make them more likely to catch on or less, do you reckon?

Anyway, there's also a bit on the end for you to add your own if you like.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6435311.stm

enjoy!

Some of these are also relevant for language and technology.

All books have genders

2007-03-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've just found an essay by Neil Gaiman on his website called by that very title:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/essays/essaysbyneil/essaygenders

I think it's an interesting point - perhaps for the people doing language and gender and perhaps for those doing literature or even just interested in reading and writing. I'm not sure, however, that I agree with it. Neverwhere, for example, which Gaiman cites as a 'male' book strikes me as having a central character who can be empathised with by both male and female, and who goes on the classic epic journey to discover himself. Also I've given up being surprised by the number of girls in Years 7 and 8 who are obsessed with the 'encouraging-boys-to-read, male-centric' Alex Rider series by Antony Horowitz. Ditto Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series.

So do books have genders? Does author gender or intention count for anything? Does it matter?
YOU decide....

Engineering - it's what we're all about you know

2007-03-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

Having just come home from the Engineering Steering Group meeting after school, and being told that we should be constantly reminding you of all the links to engineering so on the offchance that some visitor to school asks you what engineering has done for you then you know, I feel I can discharge the obligation as far as you lot are concerned by saying:

You never get anywhere in any job without English. You need English to write reports, you need English to read reports, you need English to be able to talk intelligently about why Engineering is important and you need English to get a job in Engineering. The real world runs on English. English is completely about transferrable skills.

And of course, actually I think the important thing about the Engineering status is that it makes a statement about equal opportunities, and I think you girls can conquer the world if you could just forget about the boys down the road for a moment! ...

Nobody does it better...

2007-03-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

Well, actually, I've discovered someone who has. So if you're doing a round up on the internet now and again I suggest you check out

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/

It's much more accomplished than mine. But I shall learn.

:)

Language change - grrr

2007-03-05T13:34:00.000-08:00

Amusing article from the Daily Telegraph! Unbelievable, I know...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/03/do0305.xml

or why you shouldn't complain about change...

Tele-everything

2007-03-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

Of interest to all you who are studying language change (take note Year 13) and all those interested in Language and ICT (Year12)

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/tele.htm

Read, enjoy, comment. :)

Any suggestions for further coinings on the theme, then feel free to email me or post them and I'll put a selection of our new words up. Definitions to be included please.

ICT comments

2007-02-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

Hi folks - sorry, I didn't realise it would make you sign up. Still, I suppose it's evidence you did your homework. Or even, in Amy's case, did it twice!

I have discovered that the handout I gave you today with the odd mistakes in came about because someone was reading off a pdf from the exam board, in order to make it into a word file.... I think our version is more fun though!

Language and ICT- AS level

2007-02-25T09:52:00.000-08:00

The textbook for this module - written by the chief examiner, Tim Shortis, has online support at:
http://www.netting-it.com/

Check it out and see what you think.

In particular, my AS level English Language class should make sure they've looked at 'U11 Texting IT' as their homework for this week (Tues 27th Feb). Post a comment to this blog entry to show you've done your homework and thought about it!

Something to read

2007-02-25T04:42:00.000-08:00

This article by Ursula LeGuin (who wrote the Wizard of Earthsea books) discusses why we all need to keep reading children's books.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200612180040

Let me know what you think.

First Post

2007-02-25T04:37:00.001-08:00

Okay folks, the idea is this:
I put up interesting English things for
1: English Language A level
2: English Literature A level
3: General Reading for all ages
4: anything vaguely connected which I come across.

You can send me things and I'll add them, or you can post comments to particular posts... some of these posts might be something I've asked a class to look at and comment on for homework, some of them might just be random.