My 2020, all about me, and my life, by me

It's New Year's Eve, so I'm slightly breaking my rule about not working between Xmas and New Year and doing a sort of look back at the year. I don't normally, but this year has been unusual and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to post in the spring because of other work things. 

Obviously the thing that's overshadowed the whole year, and will continue to do so, is the covid-19 pandemic. It meant that we had to suddenly learn how to teach online in a matter of hours, and then lived our lives more or less entirely online for the rest of the year. We actually did a really good job. I know students aren't totally satisfied, but to be quite frank nor am I. The technology isn't perfect, it's harder to teach when you're not face-to-face, and for most students it's harder to learn that way. We aren't doing it the optimum way for either distance learning or face-to-face (as the university is determined that all students should have some face-to-face sessions), so it's necessarily a compromise. But from what I see compared to other universities, we've provided a pretty good experience, with no loss of contact or teaching hours (at least, not among the colleagues I know). And we mastered a whole lot of technology really fast! I've now got a tablet thingy to draw tree diagrams which I actually should have got years ago, as it's great. 

We've also all been pushed into incorporating a lot of pedagogically good things into our teaching by necessity, so now lots more people are using things like polls and quizzes and completion tracking and so on, and everyone is recording their lectures (I'm a fan of lecture capture for accessibility, but a lot of colleagues are absolutely dead against it for various reasons). And one thing that I think is great is that now all video content has to be captioned. This wasn't pandemic-related, and in fact it came at a bad time because we're producing a lot more video with much less time available, so in the end I think the captioning was poor quality for most content because no one had time to correct the auto-captioning. I did, just about, because of my relatively light teaching load this term and a strong interest in doing it, but even I didn't manage to get everything done. So that's something that I'm going to keep working with our accessibility people on, as it's important that we work out a way to provide this that doesn't mean academic staff have to work 60 hours a week just to get the captions corrected (which is literally what I would have to do next term). 

So that was a lot more work for everyone and caused a lot of stress, and I don't think anyone wants to carry on doing it any longer than we have to, but we'll be doing it for the next term at least, and maybe we can keep some of the things that were good (like my fun drawing tablet). 

The other thing that was massive for me this year work-wise was the Black Lives Matter protests. Of course it's not about my work, it was a huge global movement, but it was particularly relevant to me in that context because this year was the last year of my 3-year project working to close attainment gaps. Over that time it became very clear to me that we needed to have an explicit anti-racist focus, but also that to bring my almost exclusively white colleagues along with me, we felt that we needed to tread quite carefully and not necessarily be as angry or passionate as we often felt, even framing a lot of our work in euphemisms about 'improving attainment' and 'student success'. It was frustrating most of the time, talking to people who thought that we were broadly doing a good thing, but that it didn't affect them, or even that our focus was off and we should be looking at something else (like class, which the Runnymede director recently talked about very clearly and helpfully). And yes I do know that I've just recently come to understand all of this myself and that my colleagues from Black and Asian backgrounds have been toiling away at this much longer than me; I'm not claiming some special insight here! But what happened this summer was that everyone was talking about race, using the words 'Black' and 'racist' (you'd be surprised how far people will go not to say the words), doing some reading, and acknowledging that they could themselves do something about it. I'm bitterly disappointed that my division decided not to extend my project's work this year. There are long-term plans in that regard, but it has meant that in this crucial year there was no one coordinating this work and it's been down to individuals to do it or not. Happily many of them have, and I've seen some great strides in how we address injustices of race and beyond, with people thinking about their module content, where there might be biases, how they talk about race, and much more. But no one was at the helm to steer the ship and make sure that processes carried on happening, data was collected, students didn't slip through the cracks, and many things simply didn't happen. It's a pity that in this year of all years, we weren't able to do that. But still; as I say, the protests following George Floyd's murder, which was awful and should never have happened, brought home to many people that it's all our individual responsibilities and I hope that that's another thing that lasts. The UK linguistics subject association LAGB has set up (or is setting up, rather) a sub-committee for race and social justice, which I'm involved with and is something we've talked about for ages and never quite got off the ground, but this year it actually happened. I'm yet to see real understanding or change at the management-type levels where it matters, but baby steps. 

So some good things happened. The best thing I did this year was my radio show! I was contacted late last year by a production company about being the 'expert' on a television programme about language. I was initially sceptical but they had anticipated that and had all the right motives and understood the pitfalls, and in fact that was why they wanted a linguist, so I very happily agreed and spent the next few months working with them to write the questions (I'm sure none of mine made it into the final version!) and find interesting facts to add to the script. Luckily a lot of this time coincided with strike action at work so I was able to travel to London several times and spend whole days working on it. We recorded an episode for the commissioning person which was very funny, and the BBC decided that they wanted us to make a one-off radio programme for their 'Funny Fortnight' on Radio 2, which was so exciting! We recorded it at a theatre in London, and Tom Allen was the host and the panellists were comedians and it was so good. I loved it. 

I also got promoted this year, receiving the news at the end of March, and although it was slightly soured by my university not paying me the salary increase that's supposed to go with it, it was nice to get it. 

Then we were truly into lockdown and after that I really didn't expect to get much done. Like a lot of people I feel like it's harder to concentrate, as there's a constant sort of background worry and the extra work caused a lot of stress plus meant that summer research was basically gone as we had to prepare a lot more teaching for Autumn term, rewriting modules to be suitable for online learning and working out all the technology. But an unexpected thing was that I did manage to write a draft of an article this term. This is unheard of, but I don't think it's lockdown productivity - it was a combination of my lighter teaching load compared to usual, plus not knowing what I would be teaching next term till quite late. This meant that I couldn't prepare any teaching in advance (yes, January is going to be fun) so I devoted a lot of time to writing. I worked with a recent graduate whose dissertation I supervised (which also helped with accountability), and we got our draft to a basically acceptable state to send for friendly feedback. So that was a big achievement and one I don't expect to repeat! But it did show me that I can do sustained work on a big intimidating piece of writing over a term if I carve out the time, and taught me some things about my own writing habits and what works well for me. 

Non-work-wise, of course not seeing friends has been grim. I'm normally very sociable and go out a lot, and like to see lots of different people. I'm lucky in that I don't live alone but I also don't have children to home-school, and I have a house big enough to have a dedicated work space and I'm close to the sea and so on. We also got to know several of our neighbours a lot better this year, partly because people were keen to chat in the street but mostly because my partner went round doing a lot of volunteering while he was furloughed. So all of that meant that lockdown was not that bad. And I haven't lost anyone close to me (my grandma did die earlier this year but before coronavirus got here) and we haven't been ill with it, and are otherwise healthy, so all of that is stuff to be thankful for. But I do really miss going out, and I especially miss dancing. Normally it's a big part of my life: I have weekly practice with my morris side, monthly weekend practices with my rapper side, and all summer long we dance out at country pubs on weekday evenings and folks festivals all round the country at weekends, seeing all the friends we only meet up with at those events and having lots of fun. (The loss of conferences is similar in that respect, and I'm not sure that we'll get those back any time soon now that the budget-holders know we can do them via Zoom.) 

I took up or increased my other hobbies instead, so I made a billion knitted and crocheted things, and took up lino printing in the summer and made some good things including some epic Christmas cards, and did the couch to 5k (have let that slide a bit in the cold and rainy winter but will definitely start again...). And I got my old pub quiz team back together! We used to quiz weekly till I left Newcastle in 2012, but the pub we went to moved the quiz online, so we reformed. And because I couldn't go anywhere for my summer holiday this year, we took a two-week staycation at home in Margate. It was brilliant, just going out for (outdoor) amazing food and drinks, sitting in the sun reading books, going to the beach, and stuff like that. 

I'm very worried about the future, and the sky-rocketing virus rates and the government's inability to make good policies, and about Brexit which takes effect tomorrow (!), and about the coming term which is going to be very much harder than the last one for me, and the future of my job, and lots of other things, but my optimism in the face of it all is undefeated and I think that on balance, for me personally, this has not been all that bad a year. I know that for many people it's been horrific, with job losses, bereavements, homelessness, money worries, mental health concerns, and so much more. I'm not complacent. I'm very grateful for having escaped relatively unscathed so far and will hope for more of the same in 2021, and for better times for those who've had it tough. 

Untranslatable even by a universal translator

One of the most important things to the storylines of the long-running TV series Star Trek is that there's a universal translator. For those who don't know, it's a scifi series set in the future, when basically social problems are sorted on Earth and everyone has enough to live on and people can just go into space because they want to and so there are these space ships that belong to the Federation that just go around space and meet people and solve their diplomatic issues or sometimes, like, just relieve their loneliness or meddle in their affairs or whatever it might be. They get involved in fights much more often than you'd think, given their mission. So they're obviously always encountering races that they've never met before who all have their own language and culture and often disastrous/hilarious misunderstandings ensue, but they can always speak each other's language. I imagine this is because it would be dull if every week they main plot line was basically Arrival. So this thing is part of their ship, or in their kit (there are lots of series) and it means that what it sounds like is everyone speaks English most of the time. 

Sometimes there are bits of language that aren't translated. So often you hear Klingon spoken - in the current reimagining, we saw lots of scenes without humans in, on board a Klingon ship, and there it made sense to have them speaking Klingon (after all, someone's gone to the bother of inventing it) and subtitle it. 

Another episode in the current series had the people 1000 years ahead of where our main character had come from speaking 'Pidgin'. That was an instance where the translator had evidently done a partial job. Pidgins arise in contact situations and typically have a 'lexifier' language which provides the vocabulary (in the context of slavery, where many pidgins and then creoles arose, this would be the colonisers' language, such as English) and another language influences the grammar (a West African language in the slavery context). (Well, this is one way of thinking about it. Let's go with it for now and you can read about creoles yourself if you want to - you should.) The 'Pidgin' (probably actually a creole, as it seems to be stable) in the series isn't discussed but it's probably developed from some kind of lingua franca, as there seems to be a lot of trading going on. The universal translator seems to have been able to pick out some features and translate them but not all, as it doesn't translate it to English. The question of why this particular language remains untranslatable whereas all the other unfamiliar languages don't is a puzzling one - it's not because it's in the future, as it copes with all the other languages they encounter. Perhaps it really is a pidgin, and therefore doesn't yet have fully stabilised patterns and rules, and so is not reliably translatable? Or perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice this inconsistency that was convenient for the story. 

Then, recently, the main character Michael Burnham sets up some kind of formal conversation where she needs an advocate. The process is called T'Kal-in-ket, and her advocate is called a shalankhkhai, which we learn was called sha-set but they now use this Romulan term, and it has to be someone from the Qowat Milat order of warrior nuns. Now, we often encounter borrowings in the series, and they're simply absorbed into the story and we're all good - that's how it works in real life too, when we talk about eating avocado or drinking pinot noir or wearing dungarees. But the characters from 'our' gang didn't know these words and they all had to be explained to them and the explanations were things like 'a type of advocate'. In other words, these were 'untranslatable' words, the kind of word that refers to a specific concept that doesn't have an exact match in English (or whatever you're translating to), so you need to explain it. Other examples are schadenfreude, or saudade, or hygge, and so on. Similar examples in real life are job titles like Sultan or Tsar, where it doesn't quite correspond to King or Prime Minister or President or something. Others are titles like 'Mrs' - this is frequently the translation given for 'Frau' in German (on forms, for instance). This is infuriating to English-speaking customers who are not married and would use 'Ms', as 'Mrs' can only mean a married person in English, whereas Frau, Madame, Señora, etc simply mean an adult woman rather than a girl, so they are not good translations. (If Frau or Mme were the option, that would be fine!) 

I don't know what language our crew are meant to be speaking - each their own language, I suppose, as they have a universal translator. I'd like to see a bit more of the translator running into difficulties and thereby causing a linguistic subplot. 

The nonexistent national rules apply until an unspecified date

Hooray, it's been ages since I did a 'rubbish council communication' post! Here's a tweet from my own local council about last week's lockdown/tier announcement. 

❗️Thanet is in Tier 3 of the national restrictions along with the rest of Kent and Medway.

⚠️National COVID-19 rules apply in the district until this date.

➡️More information: https://t.co/B4gDCMvadI #ProtectThanet #ProtectKent pic.twitter.com/F1KyoCrs6L

— Communications Team (@ThanetCouncil) December 4, 2020

Honestly not sure how this one even happened. Did they copy and paste the information from a tweet last month saying the whole of England was in lockdown, and then not change any of it? 

They quite rightly say that we're in Tier 3. But to say that 'National COVID-19 rules apply' is non-informative, as the point of the tier system is that the rules are different in different areas. So do they just mean the rule that you have to follow the rules for your tier? Or is it more like 'the law still applies, no matter how post-apocalyptic this might seem'? Then they say that these rules apply 'until this date', which is helpful especially because there is no date mentioned anywhere in this tweet or at the page they link to. Ah well, carry on staying home and staying safe, folks.