Academic resolutions

New year's resolutions time!

Last year I resolved to read #100papers (a more modest version of Jen Nycz's #365papers) and I didn't. A combination of just not being disciplined about reading enough so work got in the way (the whole point was to make time to read because it often gets pushed out for other stuff) and not keeping records when I did read things because I was reading them for a specific reason when I was writing an article or whatever.

I also had a couple of others that I didn't do much about, and some that I did: I swam in the sea, which was rolled over from 2016, and I *just* kept a resolution that I made some years ago to go abroad at least once a year by going to Belgium just before Xmas.

This year, I'll have a mixture of work ones (submitting a proposal I'm working on, for instance) and personal ones (e.g. learn to enjoy cheese). Here are a few academic resolutions that I think are worth considering if you're an academic too and you don't already do them.

• Read regularly. Maybe 365 papers is way too ambitious. Maybe even 50 papers is. But if you only find time to read when you need to find something out, try to fit in a bit of keeping-up-to-date time during each week. 
• Create permanent links that won't die using a service like webarchive (I got this off twitter the other day but can't find the tweeter to link to their advice. But it was basically that)
• Cite your own data properly and link back to the original. Make your work reproducible, accountable, checkable. 
• If you publish in a journal that allows you to include a load of meta-information about methods etc (CUP can do this, for instance), do so. 
• Practice inclusive teaching. Disparities in society exist, and yes they are created before our students come to university, but they worsen while they're with us and it is your problem and your responsibility to try to fix it. It is up to you personally to do something about it. Don't say that it's spoonfeeding or that students will have to get used to inequality in the real world. Those things may well be true but they're spoken from a position of power. Why not try and make things a little bit less horrible? 
• Be a role model. Find students who might benefit from a bit of guidance and offer it without them asking. Suggest opportunities to people who might not think they're good enough. Be an academic 'life coach'. Model good academic behaviour. Show your PhD students how to have a good work/life balance. 
• Respect professional services staff. They're humans. They work hard, they're not stupid, and they don't work for you. They also aren't creating bureaucracy just for the sake of it, I promise.
• Be a genuinely good citizen. Don't just make a token effort. Don't just do the minimum possible so you can tick the box on your promotion application. If you do, you're pulling up the ladder behind you for someone else who has to take the jobs that you won't. Remember that it's not as easy for other people to say no as it might be for you. They may be on probation and feel under pressure, or they may have to work twice as hard because they're female/black/disabled (and don't say that's not true or that it's their own choice - it is true, for an awful lot of people). If someone asks for a favour, say yes now and again, so that the same few people don't always end up doing it. (If you're the person who always says yes, say no now and again so that someone else has to do it.) But see below if you're not full-time. 
• Take time off. Don't make yourself ill working. If you're getting ill then talk to someone, because your job is not right. See if you can scale something back or if you're doing something too thoroughly. If you're in precarious employment and have no choice but to work all the hours for no money, talk to your union and see if they can help - and cut corners, skimp where you can, and say no all the time, to everyone. Saying yes to free labour will not get you a permanent position (sorry). 
• Do extra-curricular things that you don't get credit for, but that add value. Go to your students' events to create a bit of departmental goodwill. Organise staff drinks. Be in the office and be sociable now and again. Organise some extra events for undergraduates. 
• This turned into a bit of a grump. Enjoy your job. It's a good one, despite efforts to erode the good parts. It really is. Try and remember that and be grateful for all the nice things. 

Having yourself painted and cutting men's heads off

On last week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, they said that women at *some point in history that I've forgotten - Tudor England?* enjoyed "having themselves painted as a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off".

Ah, ambiguities. Have a think and see if you're as much of an idiot as me.

First, I recognised and chuckled at the obvious one: [in the middle of cutting a man's head off] can describe the time of the action of the painting - they were in the middle of this action when they stopped and had themselves painted. Clearly this is silly. It describes what the biblical character (Judith, obviously) was doing. She was [a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off], and that's what they had themselves painted as. I'm an intelligent person, see, and I spotted this potential pitfall and navigated it proficiently.

Which makes my next misunderstanding all the more ridiculous. Now, as I'm sure you realised, these women were having their portraits painted, in the guise of Judith cutting off Holofernes' head. But as well as having their portrait painted, 'having themselves painted' could mean that someone was applying paint to them: compare 'having themselves painted blue'. And yes, dear reader, that is the meaning I leapt to, and retained until about halfway through the item when I realised the more sensible interpretation. Honestly, I despair of myself sometimes.

Economist finds WALS; plays with features; gets publication

Update: Since I wrote this, there's been more discussion on Twitter, with some people thinking that linguists just don't want other academics stepping on their toes. That's definitely not the case! Other suggestions are that linguists have been trained to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything Sapir-Whorfian. That probably is true for a lot of people (including me, actually, which is why I try to be aware of that), but I hope it's clear below that that isn't my problem with this article.
There has also been an open letter started and signed by many linguists asking for the paper to be retracted. I think this is a mistake; there is nothing fraudulent or ethically wrong about the paper. It's just not a very good paper, in a not very good journal. Asking for it to be withdrawn sounds a bit like censorship to me. The review process is where crappy work should be stopped, and that process failed here, so it's worth bringing that to the journal's attention, but seeing as this publicity will have brought them many more readers I doubt they're too bothered about fixing it for the future.

Anyway, here's the post as I wrote it before I thought about all these things.

===
Linguists love it when economists do linguistics. Linguist Twitter was a super fun place to be when this article came out. It argues that languages that can leave out pronoun subjects (like Spanish), are spoken by people that have lower levels of education due to their more collectivist culture. I know right?

No need for me to point out all the ways in which it is wrong and incorrect and foolish; Joe McVeigh spent a happy while with a whisky or two doing that.

The thing is, it's actually not unreasonable to write articles like this. There are a lot of very credible papers that show that our attitudes are easily influenced by factors like what our language encodes. There's ones about noun gender affecting how elegant or sturdy we think bridges are, directionality affecting our ability to orient ourselves in our environment, and so on. And psychological experiments seem to show that it only takes a bit of a reminder that we're female to make us do worse on maths tests, etc. Some of these studies maybe are not as robust as they look, and I don't know about the reliability of the psychology ones, but the point is they are by linguists and psychologists and they look credible. So why wouldn't you write an article showing how some facet of language influences your behaviour?

Well, perhaps if you're not only not a linguist, but you also don't know anything about language and don't ask anyone who does, and you don't do it very well.

I don't know the economics dataset that the author uses, but I do know the linguistics dataset very well. It's the World Atlas of Language Structures, which I love very much. This author, Feldmann, uses it because it "provides the most authoritative information on a large number of languages". It does indeed cover a large number of languages, but there is no reason to say it is "the most authoritative". It's compiled from published grammars. Many of those are careful, detailed, accurate descriptions of the language; others are a hundred years old, written by someone who didn't necessarily have much linguistic training. You have to be careful and check those sources out. His only reason for saying it's "authoritative" is that an economics reference says it is, using that same word, and then he cites them with a glaring error in a Spanish example ("yo ablo").

Another thing is that it doesn't control for languages being closely related unless you ask it to, and to do that you need the CD-ROM version, not the online free version, and there's not indication of the method the author used so we don't know if he did that. He just says that he looked at 103 languages. 711 have this information in the free version; I can no longer use my CD-ROM copy as I don't have a CD drive in my computer any more :( so I don't know what subset he took. For example, if you take all the languages spoken in Northern Europe, it's not so surprising if most of them require pronominal subjects, because they're all related. It's better to take a genus of language to avoid skewing your results. Maybe he did this; we don't know.

His citation is poor; his linguistic sources are old or eccentric or missing or simply odd choices. They look like the citations of someone who hasn't read the linguistics literature or asked anyone who has. He doesn't give any sources at all for his claims about collectivist cultures not wanting girls to be educated, which is a big claim and one that really needs backing up.

Go ahead; make claims about culture based on linguistics. They don't tend to stand up to much scrutiny, but maybe yours will. But don't exoticise those people because of it, and don't base those claims on superficial data with no referencing or linguistic research.

"I explained to her that it was a joke", he apologised.

This clipping on the right is from an article in the Guardian.

Recently, a footballer named Ada Hegerberg won a Ballon D'Or, which is a football award. She was asked if she knew how to twerk by the man presenting the award and apparently 'seemed to attempt to leave the stage, before reluctantly agreeing to dance to another song'.

The man, Martin Solveig, says that he apologised. Now then. An apology, I think, has to include the words 'I'm sorry' or 'I apologise' or something along those lines. To be effective, it also has to acknowledge that harm was done, and it has to apologise for the right thing. Let's see how he does.

'I explained to [Ada]'

Oh dear. Explaining to someone that they were wrong is not really the same as  apologising to them.

'My apologies to anyone'

Well, it's Ada who needs the apology, but I guess that includes her?

'who may have been offended'

Ah, OK, he's not apologising to her. If he was, he'd have apologised for making inappropriate comments or making her feel uncomfortable or overstepping his boundaries. He's apologising to the world at large who may have been offended. But maybe no one was offended! Maybe nothing was wrong at all! Maybe there was no need to apologise at all! In which case, it's a good thing he didn't.

Subject omission is gendered in English and Swedish

My student, Helen Pettersson, recently completed her MA dissertation on null subjects in English and Swedish text messages. She constructed some fake Whatsapp conversations, presented them to participants online, and asked for their judgements on various types of sentence. She wanted to know whether Swedish behaves like English in its acceptance of null subjects in colloquial registers, and as a sub-question, whether text messages are more like spoken English or like the more elliptical 'diary' register (things like Saw self in mirror today. Felt was growing fatter, which is OK in a diary but not in speech). Well, spoilers, in all the contexts she tested, English and Swedish are quite similar. But there was one way in which they differ, and it wasn't the topic of her dissertation but it is quite interesting.

Some of her stimuli presented a message with no prior context (it wasn't a reply to another text message) and asked her respondents what they thought the missing pronoun was: was it I, you, he, she, it, we, you (plural) or they? These were sentences like Might watch a film later. We expected that the majority of people would choose I, because that's what we know null subjects most commonly refer to in English, probably because it's the most accessible referent (you're more likely to be talking about yourself than someone else). But we also thought that there would be some variation, as it's perfectly possible that it could refer to someone else.

Here are the results for Swedish:

Mostly I (jag), as expected, with a smattering of the others, mostly He and She. Funnily enough, there are quite a few more participants who went with he when the sentence was about having broken a mirror - perhaps because boys are clumsy? 

And here are the results for English: 

There are lots more votes for they than in the Swedish data, and I wonder if this is because people were allowing it to be singular they, as in the pronoun used when it's an unspecified person involved with no known gender or possibly even number, as well as the third person plural pronoun. But in addition, just look at how many more votes the masculine pronoun got than the feminine! This is really a striking difference from Swedish, and I'm not aware of any particular reason for this, which makes it all the more intriguing.

Bears, hamsters, coffee and hashtags

All hipster bars and coffee shops these days have signs with quirky slogans or jokes on them. They come with a punchline that undercuts the set-up, and the first time you see them they are genuinely really funny. For instance, this classic 'bears' sign:

Dunno, maybe bears... 

And this one self-referencing hipsters:

Hipsters... no wait, hamsters

But after the first time, the joke is no longer funny because it has to be original. That doesn't actually matter, because it will be new to most of the people that see it for quite some time, so it's OK that some people are bored of it (it probably won't put them off going to their regular place or a cafe that looks nice).

There's something more to the joke format that I'm beginning to find wearing, though, and I think it's the Conventional Set-up --> Twist format. Even though this is essentially how jokes work, it has somehow become a cliche on blackboard coffee shop signs.

I was at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain last week. I go every year, as I'm on the committee, and it's held in a university somewhere in the UK. They had this sign:

Drink responsibly!
#DontSpillIt

If this had been a normal blackboard sign, I'd have found it twee and predictable, even though I haven't seen this exact joke anywhere. The format has become wearing. But somehow, putting the punchline in a hashtag was enough for my jaded joke palate to accept this as a witty sign. A normal blackboard says "We're cleverer than you: we made you think one thing and then turned it round on you". The hashtag somehow says "The sign is real; we mean the main message literally and aren't trying to subvert it. However, look at this funny interpretation too".

I stan for eponymous words

"The dark side of gay stan culture" is the subject of a Guardian article today. It's about the link between gay men and female pop star divas like Ariana Grande, Beyonce, etc, and how it's often couched in criticism, either overt or implied, of those stars' songs, attitude or appearance. Anyway, point is, it says this about the word stan:

[It's a] portmanteau of "fan" and "stalker" taken from Eminem's hit about a crazed follower.

Now then. That sounded off immediately. I can well believe it's a portmanteau of those words, and I can also believe it's from the Eminem song, but both? No. The character in the song is called Stan, and there was no suggestion that he's called that because it's a portmanteau. He just is.

Approximately one second of googling returned a link that says exactly what the Guardian says, attributed to Urban Dictionary. And Urban Dictionary does indeed say both of those things, but in different definitions. Urban Dictionary is compiled by people who submit entries, so any one word can have any number of definitions, frequently repetitive and of very variable quality. In this case, many of them say it's from the song, and one says it's a portmanteau. There's no real way to know which is true, either, though with new words like this it often is the thing that most people think it is.

I actually assumed it was from stand, with consonant cluster simplification at the end of the word, because I've much more often heard it as the verb, as in I stan (for) Beyonce. I hadn't even considered the Eminem origin, maybe because it's so long since that song (Stan was released in 2000) and I've only really noticed this word in the last year or two. But the Bustle article I linked above says that the word has actually been around since then - just not in mainstream use (it says it's been related to K-Pop, for instance). This is the recency illusion: words are always waaaaay older than you think they are.

Is true. Or is?

Queen Oona from Disenchantment

In a dramatic departure from blogging about the Simpsons, I'm blogging about Disenchantment, the latest Matt Groening cartoon series. This is Queen Oona, a fairly minor character (the wicked step-mother in this fairytale-inspired set of characters).

Queen Oona is from the neighbouring kingdom of Dankmire, and her accent is... European. Vaguely Russian, maybe? Kind of German? Anyway, whatever it's based on, the Dankmirian language clearly has what we call 'pro-drop', 'null subjects', or 'zero anaphora'. That means that in the right context, you can leave out a subject pronoun (this Spanish example is from Wikipedia):

Está completamente seco.
is completely dry
'It's completely dry.'

In the example above, you can infer that the subject is he/she/it because the verb (está) has 3rd person singular agreement. From there, you have more or less as much information as if we'd just used the word it, and you use your normal contextual knowledge to fill in the referent, as with the English equivalent.

Oona said, in episode 6,

Is true. 

Shortly followed by

Or is? 

Both of these sentences would be totally grammatical in Oona's (let's assume Slavic) first language, where the word it can be left out. I don't know Russian so let's illustrate with Spanish again. This is the exact equivalent, and I think it's good:

Es verdad. O es? 

But the thing is, it made me laugh, and I think it was meant to. I don't know why. I came here thinking I had a good explanation: maybe because is is a clitic (a word that needs another word to lean on) in English, so this literal translation sounds just too unnatural? Maybe lack of familiarity with post-verbal null subjects, like in the question 'is (it)?' in this example? Another one to file under Things Someone Else Should (And Probably Has) Research(ed).

Ombudsmun

This is a screenshot from a tweet that passed through my timeline:

tweet including the word 'ombudsmun'

It includes the word 'ombudsman', but spelt 'ombudsmun'. I'm a big fan of this spelling. The word  contains the word 'man', but as in many words, the syllable is not stressed and the vowel is reduced to a schwa (the sound at the end of my name). The writer has reflected that in the spelling (probably not deliberately, maybe not consciously) by spelling it 'mun'.

For a while, I was spearheading a single-woman campaign to get 'man' to be truly gender-neutral by using terms like 'postman' for female postal workers. In the end I gave up but it remains true that if it's to be reinterpreted either as a suffix (as in postman, policeman, etc) or as just an inseparable part of the word, with no independent meaning, as looks to be the case here, then it has to be the schwa pronunciation rather than the full 'man' vowel. That loss of vowel content hastens its loss of semantic content.

There are other instances of this spelling, even on quite official ombudsman sites (enough that I had to quickly check it isn't actually a variant spelling - seems not). And I ought to also note here that 'man' is used as a pronoun in some varieties of English, such as Multicultural London English, but that it is more or less gendered when it's used in a non-generic 'one' sense (you get some instances of it being used of women, but it's rare). It's also a pronoun in German, in an obviously historically-related turn of events.

The Conversation: 'untranslatable' words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures

I wrote a piece for The Conversation recently, which I'm reposting here just in case you haven't seen it yet.

Language: 'untranslatable' words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures

Say what? Shutterstock

Laura Bailey, University of Kent
When the word “hygge” became popular outside Denmark a few years ago, it seemed the perfect way to express the feeling of wrapping yourself up in a crocheted blanket with a cosy jumper, a cup of tea and back-to-back episodes of The Bridge. But is it really only the Danes, with their cold Scandinavian evenings, who could have come up with a word for such a specific concept? And is it only the Swedes who could have needed the verb “fika” to describe chatting over a coffee?
The internet abounds with words that lack a single-word English equivalent. In order to be really lacking an English equivalent, it must be a single, indivisible unit of meaning, as phrases are infinitely productive and can be created on demand by combining different words. Take, for example, the claim by Adam Jacot de Boinod in I Never Knew There Was A Word For It, that Malay has a word for the gap between the teeth that English lacks: “gigi rongak”. Well, this appears to be a phrase, and it translates literally as the perfectly cromulent English phrase “tooth gap”.
In fact, English even has a single-word technical term for a gap between the teeth: “diastema”. Okay, that’s actually a Greek word, but it’s in use in English, so it’s also an English word. Does that matter?
Where we get our words from tells us something about our history. Take, for instance, Quechua – the language spoken by people indigenous to the Andes and the South American highlands. The Quechuan word for “book” is “liwru”, which comes from the Spanish word “libro”, because Spanish colonisers introduced written forms of language to the people they conquered. In fact, English does now have a word for “hygge” – it’s “hygge”.

Cultures in language

It is often said that Eskimos have 50 words for snow, but it’s a myth that has been comprehensively dismantled, probably first of all by Laura Martin in 1986. “Eskimo” is a somewhat meaningless term anyway, but the structure of the languages spoken by peoples such as the Inuit or Aleut in the Arctic Circle are very synthetic, meaning that each “word” may comprise many parts or “morphemes”.
Entire phrases can be contained within words in these languages – a single “word” may literally mean “fallen snow”. For that reason, “having 50 words for snow” in these languages is about as remarkable as having 50 sentences to talk about snow in English.

The ‘50 words for snow’ fallacy is a perfect example of misreading a culture. Shutterstock

And yet the myth and others like it snowball, because we are fascinated by the idea that language reveals something about our psyche – or perhaps even determines it. The economist Keith Chen has devoted some considerable effort to demonstrating that speakers of languages that grammatically encode the future and the present separately behave more recklessly with respect to their health and money. He argues that it shows that overt future tense marking makes a speaker more aware of the future as a separate time from the present and thus more distant, which has a corresponding effect on behaviour.
Many linguists have some reservations about his conclusions, but the main claim hit the news and people were intrigued by the idea.

False cultural judgements

While careful experimentation has shown that having words for concepts makes them easier or faster to name, it is not true that lacking a concept means you cannot conceive of it, and vice versa. For instance, many languages have gender-neutral pronouns (the same word is used for he and she) but are spoken in cultures with very poor levels of gender equality.
This might seem obvious – it’s Orwell’s Newspeak (from 1984) in action. In Orwell’s dystopia, the word “free” was stripped of all meaning of individual freedoms and could be used only in the sense of a dog being free from lice, which in turn was supposed to remove the ability of the citizens of Oceania to conceive of such freedom. But it is not just science fiction. There is an important note of caution that linguists are always aware of: making claims about other cultures risks “exoticising” them.

A mural depicting indigenous people in Arizona. Shutterstock

At worst, this results in racism. The Hopi people of Arizona, who are sometimes claimed to have no way to express time based on a misunderstanding of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work on their language, were assumed by some to be incapable of following bus timetables or arriving at work on schedule, a mistaken belief that led to obvious problems.
But even an apparently benign conclusion about how some Australian languages encode space with compass directions (“north”) rather than ego-relative position (“my left-hand side”) suggests English speakers often miss out on knowledge about language and cognition because they are busy measuring things against an arbitrary English-centric benchmark. Different language conventions are usually not exotic or unusual; it’s just that English speakers come from a position of very great privilege because their language is the default. People who speak other languages are seen as different, as outsiders.

I’m not a total killjoy. I still delight in “untranslatable” words. It’s something special to learn a word and along with it make concrete a nebulous but recognisable concept like hygge, or indeed its wonderfully chilling opposite, uhygge. I just suggest a position of healthy scepticism when you meet claims that a language has “no word for X” or “50 words for Y”, or, as the internet recently got excited about, that “tag” stands for “touch and go” (sorry folks, it doesn’t).
Laura Bailey, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, University of Kent
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Trump and sensitive editing

Trump (who I don't blog about much because I don't think it's helpful to criticise his poor command of language when he is so unbelievably awful in so many other more important ways) has been mocked on twitter again. He used the phrase [they] pour over my tweets rather than pore over. This is a very common mistake; lots of perfectly intelligent people also make it; it's not transparent enough for it to be a thing you could work out. You just either know it or you don't. In most uses, pore is a little hole for your skin to breathe through, so it's not obvious why it should mean 'gaze intently', and in fact we don't know where that meaning comes from - we just have it recorded in early English writing and without a known origin. So I'm not going to beat Trump up for not knowing that, but the internet did. The problem was that he used it in a tweet where he explicitly said how good his written English was, and a version of Muphry's Law states that if you write anything praising your accurate writing, there'll be an error in it.

So let's look at this positively. Lot's of people just corrected the spelling of pore, others pointed out other less-than-brilliant aspects of the writing in the original tweet, but this person, a writer himself, edited the tweet to read much better:

“Having written many best-selling books and somewhat priding myself on my writing ability, it should be noted that the fake news likes to constantly pore over my tweets looking for mistakes. I capitalize certain words for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized.”

There
FIFY pic.twitter.com/M9wi9u1CkJ

— michaelharriot (@michaelharriot) July 3, 2018

There's a commonly-criticised error in the original tweet, which Michael hasn't fixed: the dangling participle(s) at the beginning. Normally, people are keen to point out the comedy of such constructions (Plunging hundreds of feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls). But in this case, it's fine: the potential confound is it, which is what we call an expletive, which means that it doesn't mean anything so you can't accidentally interpret the modifier as modifying it. And it sets up the context for the rest of the tweet nicely, so it's a perfectly acceptable construction.

Secondly, Michael has actually introduced a split infinitive (to constantly pore). I'm a big fan of these, especially if they make a sentence read better, which they often do, and which it definitely does in this case. It's not the liking that's constant, it's the poring, and the rhythm is also nicer in my opinion.

I like this sensitive editing with attention paid to how the tweet sounds and no rigid adherence to the rules given that it is a tweet. If you're an editor for a newspaper whose style guide says no split infinitives, then you must remove all split infinitives and that's it. But if you do have a choice, then it's good to be able to use them where it improves a thing.

Danny Dyer should be held account for it

Danny Dyer was briefly everyone's favourite wideboy again last week when he called David Cameron a 'twat' on telly, twice. Here's a link to the Guardian's round-up of the twitter response, with video.

As well as his well-chosen epithet, he also said this:

“How comes he can scuttle off? He called all this on. Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah, where is the geezer? I think he should be held account for it.”

He repeated that phrase: he should be held account for it. If you've been paying attention to my research interests lately, you'll know that I collect missing prepositions. The most frequently omitted preposition, by far, is to in a directional sense with a familiar location: I'm going to the pub, for instance. (The article the is also omitted; that's not relevant today.) Now, this phrase of Danny Dyer's is normally held to account. He skipped the to. Might this be the same kind of thing?

I think not, partly because this to doesn't have the same characteristics as the commonly-omitted kind. While it is a preposition, it's part of an idiom and doesn't have any directional meaning. It just holds the whole thing together. You can function perfectly well without it without losing any meaning, as demonstrated by Danny himself. The other thing that to my mind makes it more likely that this is a simple speech error is the existence of the basically synonymous phrase held accountable. Then, the to isn't present at all, so it's a straightforward process to mix the two up and come out with held account.

Miss Bailey, a lady doctor

Female academics on twitter have been adding their 'Dr' title to their handle today (I've done it too) to make a point. A discussion has been taking place about how women with PhDs routinely find it harder than men to have their knowledge and expertise in their field recognised. It's actually a lot more complicated than that, because people have been accused of saying that people without PhDs can't be experts (not true, of course) and that they shouldn't proclaim themselves 'Dr' 'simply' for having a PhD (a bizarre claim, as there's nothing simple about it and... you are a doctor if you have a PhD?) and also the general nonsense that you get whenever you say anything feminist on the internet.

I've seen others disagreeing with this practice as it seems exclusionary to them, and I don't normally have my title in my handle for the same reasons I don't insist on it in everyday life - a title just isn't necessary, and it can make people feel like you're trying to be better than them. I've done it today, because I also think that we should be allowed to use that title when it's relevant without it being seen as showing off or being immodest - and my twitter is semi-professional, so it is appropriate to use my professional name and title.

I also expect people who address me as "[title] Bailey" to use it, because it's my title and that is what should be written on their computer screen (the only people who use my title are cold callers). If they prefer not to, then they should absolutely use 'Ms', and definitely not 'Miss' or 'Mrs', as neither of those is accurate. (Mx would also be ok but that's yet to catch on very much.)

I most definitely do not expect non-academic people in my everyday life to use 'Dr'. For example, the removal men who are currently moving all of our offices at work do not need to call me anything but Laura. This is partly a balance of power thing: I am relatively in a position of power if they are effectively doing a job for me (moving my office). But they are relatively in a position of power too, because they are men and I'm a woman. The other day two of them were talking outside my open office door (so they knew I could hear) about who on my corridor needed a crate delivered. One, reading off a list, said "Dr Laura Bailey. One crate." His colleague, who sounded very young, repeated "One crate for Miss Bailey", and that use of 'Miss' instantly made me feel infantilised, disrespected, and powerless. (He went on to repeat my colleagues' European surnames with gleeful incredulity, which endeared him to me even less.) That opportunity for casual delegitimisation by using a title that inherently includes youth, powerlessness, lack of authority is why I put 'Dr' into my twitter handle today.

It ain't nothin'

I've talked about 'double negation' before, by which I really mean negative concord: using two negative elements in one clause to give a single negative meaning. I've pointed out how it makes no sense to argue against it on the grounds of it being illogical (it isn't), and I usually say that in context, you can always understand what the speaker means. That's more or less true in speech, when you have intonation to help you out. But in writing, without that clue, sometimes the context isn't quite enough. I found this example in a friend's facebook post:

15 days in jail, which ain't nothin'. 

The context really didn't tell me if 15 days was a lot or not much for the crime in question, and so without the intonational cues (in my crude non-expert terms, whether you'd give stress to both ain't and nothin' or just to nothin') I couldn't tell if he meant that 15 days was a significant time, or that 15 days was nothing at all.

ELL Undergraduate Conference 2018

We had our annual undergraduate conference on Saturday, where our dissertation students presented their work. I normally Storify the tweets but they're killing the service in May, so I've just collected the hashtag here (so they're in the wrong order chronologically):

#ELLconf2018 Tweets