It’s unbelievable how quickly this week has gone by. Suddenly it was Friday already, and I don’t have the feeling I did anything near what I should have done in the course of a week. It seems like more people are having that feeling, so maybe it’s just the holidays that have messed up our ideas of what is a normal amount of work to do in a week?
I handed in a piece of work on Wednesday. It wasn’t anywhere near good, and there were a lot of gaps, but it was driving me crazy so I decided that handing in what I had was a better option than going crazy over trying to perfect it. LC was saying that it’s actually pretty normal to maybe not quite know what you’re doing and trying to find out which way to go. Meeting with AM next Thursday so we’ll see what we can come up with.
Honours courses are alright. Historical linguistics is nice but I’ve done it before, Linguistic reconstruction and language classification is interesting but maybe not particularly relevant and depending on the amount of work I’m supposed to do for it, I may not come to every class and only take the ones on contact. Another downside is that most of the courses seem to be turning into the DC show. Apart from the fact that I find his appearance and the sound of his voice extremely annoying, he constantly butts in with all these only distantly relevant comments. The undergrads may be impressed, but I wish he’d just shut his face and let AM and RC get on with their lectures.
Two great tutorials on Friday, especially the last one. The goal was to get some discussion going on what is a language, what is a dialect, how do you define them, etc. GT had dropped a bombshell in the lectures by saying that “English does not exist”. One girl was almost in tears, ‘cause if English doesn’t exist, how come she was studying English Language? So I went a bit ahead of schedule and explained that maybe there are no linguistic criteria to define English language, but there were social criteria and that was the whole point: English as a social construct.
The other good bit was talking about prototypes. They had to define Cockney, also by social criteria. Once they’d been told they did not have to be politically correct, there was a nice list of words associated with Cockneys. East London, East Enders, Del Boy, dodgy deals from the back of a truck, Burbery, chavs, uneducated, male, Tottenham Hotspur fans, short-fused... Good thing there weren’t any Cockneys in the group. But I think all the things about social constructs, identity conveyed by language etc. hit home. Bounce!
I did forget to tell them about this essay writing course the university is having for undergrads. Unfortunately it’s only one day before the deadline for the EL1 essay, but I may tell them about it anyway. Somehow somewhere some of them seem to have picked up the idea that vomiting out a bit mush of long words is a good idea. That’s going to bite them in the back when I’m going to have to mark their essays.
Spent most of yesterday evening online chatting to VP, which was nice. Apparently my name in Cantonese is 嵐歌 which translates as ‘the song of the wind in the mountains’. Very poetic. I also got invited to go to the cinema on Sunday but unfortunately I can’t go because there is a NS committee meeting that night. Expletives suppressed.
Only nine weeks left as NS secretary. And after saving the Annual (I hope) earlier in the week, I also saved the Student Festival cèilidh. It seems like we’re now part of Rukkus which is some form of charities’ night in Teviot. I also hope that RK managed to get us involved in that cèilidh on the Society Oscars night, otherwise we (read: RK) will have upset a lot of people and gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. I wonder how heated the meeting tomorrow will be; that’ll kind of depend on the newlyweds’ attitudes to power and leadership. We don’t have MG there to be the counter-alpha female so we’re going to have to try to fend for ourselves....
I handed in a piece of work on Wednesday. It wasn’t anywhere near good, and there were a lot of gaps, but it was driving me crazy so I decided that handing in what I had was a better option than going crazy over trying to perfect it. LC was saying that it’s actually pretty normal to maybe not quite know what you’re doing and trying to find out which way to go. Meeting with AM next Thursday so we’ll see what we can come up with.
Honours courses are alright. Historical linguistics is nice but I’ve done it before, Linguistic reconstruction and language classification is interesting but maybe not particularly relevant and depending on the amount of work I’m supposed to do for it, I may not come to every class and only take the ones on contact. Another downside is that most of the courses seem to be turning into the DC show. Apart from the fact that I find his appearance and the sound of his voice extremely annoying, he constantly butts in with all these only distantly relevant comments. The undergrads may be impressed, but I wish he’d just shut his face and let AM and RC get on with their lectures.
Two great tutorials on Friday, especially the last one. The goal was to get some discussion going on what is a language, what is a dialect, how do you define them, etc. GT had dropped a bombshell in the lectures by saying that “English does not exist”. One girl was almost in tears, ‘cause if English doesn’t exist, how come she was studying English Language? So I went a bit ahead of schedule and explained that maybe there are no linguistic criteria to define English language, but there were social criteria and that was the whole point: English as a social construct.
The other good bit was talking about prototypes. They had to define Cockney, also by social criteria. Once they’d been told they did not have to be politically correct, there was a nice list of words associated with Cockneys. East London, East Enders, Del Boy, dodgy deals from the back of a truck, Burbery, chavs, uneducated, male, Tottenham Hotspur fans, short-fused... Good thing there weren’t any Cockneys in the group. But I think all the things about social constructs, identity conveyed by language etc. hit home. Bounce!
I did forget to tell them about this essay writing course the university is having for undergrads. Unfortunately it’s only one day before the deadline for the EL1 essay, but I may tell them about it anyway. Somehow somewhere some of them seem to have picked up the idea that vomiting out a bit mush of long words is a good idea. That’s going to bite them in the back when I’m going to have to mark their essays.
Spent most of yesterday evening online chatting to VP, which was nice. Apparently my name in Cantonese is 嵐歌 which translates as ‘the song of the wind in the mountains’. Very poetic. I also got invited to go to the cinema on Sunday but unfortunately I can’t go because there is a NS committee meeting that night. Expletives suppressed.
Only nine weeks left as NS secretary. And after saving the Annual (I hope) earlier in the week, I also saved the Student Festival cèilidh. It seems like we’re now part of Rukkus which is some form of charities’ night in Teviot. I also hope that RK managed to get us involved in that cèilidh on the Society Oscars night, otherwise we (read: RK) will have upset a lot of people and gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. I wonder how heated the meeting tomorrow will be; that’ll kind of depend on the newlyweds’ attitudes to power and leadership. We don’t have MG there to be the counter-alpha female so we’re going to have to try to fend for ourselves....
1 comment:
Newlyweds as in the marraige already happened? That's really really fast if they already had a wedding. Or are they just engaged? I didn't think you could plan a wedding that fast. Unless they eloped.
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