UCU Strikes Back

Once again, my university, along with 73 others in the UK, is on strike. We’re striking for #FourFights: 

1. Workload
2. Pay
3. Casualisation
4. Equality

To be clear, a lecturer’s salary is OK. You start at a bit over £30,000 and if you progress up the pay scale it rises to a median of £45,000 and up to £50,000+ for senior lecturers and readers (professors can make much more). That’s fine. But it’s not outrageously high either, given the minimum of 8 years’ training (more likely to be 10+ for most), and that pay scale means you’ll never go over that £50-something cap, despite a high degree of autonomy and responsibility. You can earn much more in the private sector. But we aren’t striking over the absolute amount; we are striking because we are paid much less (in real terms) for the same work than we were a decade ago. Unless you think we were grossly over-valued back then, this isn’t right. And more importantly, I (as a woman) am paid less than a similar man, and (as a white person) I’m paid more than a similar BAME person - and that’s not right. 

Worse than that, we are doing much more than we did a decade ago, for that reduced amount. Some of it is extra work that we might not mind doing per se. For instance, we all now take on much more outreach work than we ever did before, in the form of applicant days and talks in schools and media work and blogging and doing public events and so on. All this is great, and should be done. But we are doing it as well as everything we did before. Some of the extra work is increased pressure from metrics, rankings and assessment: we have to do extra things to make sure we score well in the National Student Survey, we have to apply for a certain number of research grants, and so on. And some of it is just that we are expected to handle much larger numbers of students with fewer staff (including fewer support staff, who are also under more workload pressure). My seminar groups can now contain up to 25 students. A decade ago it was maximum 15. This means an extra 40% marking (and marking takes a long time) and 40% more emails and appointments, not to mention the fact that students don’t get the benefits of small class sizes that seminars are supposed to mean. 

And remember that the salary quoted above applies to a lecturer on a full-time, open-ended contract. Many of us are on temporary, part-time contracts. This is the norm for people in their first few jobs, and it’s usually a few years at least before you get a full-time position that lasts more than a year or less. Some people work decades on part-time contracts. Many people are working more than one job, because it’s just a few hours of teaching here and there. And they aren’t paid for the long summer, because it’s teaching only, so they also need a summer job. They’ll likely be teaching new subjects for the first time every year, with short notice, which is much more work than regular, predictable teaching. Most people doing this kind of precarious work calculate their hourly rate to be around the minimum wage or less. When I was doing it, it was about £8 an hour. For some, it’s much less. Add to this the likelihood that you’ll have to travel much further (maybe hours) to get to that one hour of teaching, because you’ve had to look further to find work. You might take on a lot of pastoral work, because you’re ‘more approachable’ (you’re younger, or female, or BAME, or all three), and because you care deeply about your students, and this won’t be properly recognised in your pay, promotion or workload calculations. And you’re also constantly applying for the next job - this takes days each time, and don’t underestimate the stress of the instability and constant rejection. When I got my open-ended contract, it was like a weight was lifted from my shoulders. 

This all means that the ‘extra’ things are not going to get done, even for those lucky enough to be on a full-time, permanent contract. If you teach a new module, you’re going to use the previous person’s materials, not update it. If you teach a module for a few years in a row, you’re going to use the same slides again and not add in new scholarship or critically examine your reading lists. The people in positions of seniority are likely to be white men, so they won’t push you to prioritise equity and justice in your work, and they won’t reward you for doing so. For those on temporary contracts, you actually can’t do any of this work - you only know you’re teaching the module a week or two in advance, so there’s no time to order any new books or change much, and you can’t do it for the following year because you probably won’t teach that module again. So inequality remains unexamined and unchallenged, the whiteness of the curriculum is not addressed, and the quality of a university education is reduced. 

Address these issues, and students get a better education and better support, the university gets better ratings, staff have better mental health and can produce better work, and the institution becomes fairer. Literally no one loses. 

Can they mean it?

Dennis Baron (@DrGrammar on twitter) linked to a text from 1789 in which William Marshall writes about a gender-neutral pronoun in Gloucestershire, ou, meaning either he, she or it. It describes the word as being analogous with plural they. So ou will means he will, she will, or it will. In the same way, they will can refer to men, women, mixed groups, unknown genders, or inanimate objects (‘how are the trains? Oh, they will all be delayed’). This made me wonder about singular they, which can refer to a male or female referent (which would also be grammatical with he or she respectively), or someone of neither/another gender, or unknown gender, etc. But I’m pretty sure it can’t refer to something that would normally require it. I don’t know if I can think of a context where it’s not clear whether the referent is animate/human or not, therefore making a word that covers all possibilities a useful addition. Perhaps ‘Someone or something has knocked over the garden fence’, where it could be vandals or the wind? 

Incidentally, I’d saved the link to this with the note to myself ‘Can they mean it?’, as per the title of this post. I was so confused about who might mean what, until I realised that I was asking whether the word they can mean the same thing as the word it. 

Very dedicated police force

I’m writing this on a train to Yorkshire (an East Midlands Railway train, train fans!). The announcer chap said that if we saw anything suspicious, we should contact a member of ‘the railway’s very dedicated police force’, the British Transport Police. Oh how I laughed. See, he’s taken a standard phrase ‘dedicated police force’, which contains the word ‘dedicated’, meaning they work specifically for the railways, are dedicated just to them. But he’s used that same word, ‘dedicated’, in a different way, meaning that they care about their job, they are dedicated workers. 

But - and this is important - all he did was add ‘very’. He did nothing else at all to alter the sentence. So how did I know that the meaning had changed? LINGUISTICS, people! In the standard phrase, ‘dedicated’ is a participle. It is shorthand for ‘the police force that is dedicated to the railway’ - it’s a form of the verb, in other words. And as a verb form, it can’t be modified by ‘very’. Things like ‘I’m very running’ or ‘I very work’ are not grammatical for the same reason. In the one he actually said, he used ‘very’. So the word ‘dedicated’ can’t be a participle. It must be an adjective, which is what ‘very’ can modify: ‘I’m very tired’, ‘I’m very clever’, ‘The very hungry caterpillar’, for example. And if ‘dedicated’ is an adjective, it no longer functions as the participle; it’s an attribute of the person it applies to, in this case the British Transport Police. 

All that from a simple addition of ‘very’! Honestly you people, how are you not constantly as amazed as me at how cool language is? 

Get someone to open… what?

Just before Christmas, I played a game with a group of friends that consists of secret missions that you have to complete without the other players realising. They’re written on little cards which fold in half and are kept in a wallet. One of them read ‘Put this card in a jar and get someone to open it.’ My friend tried complete this mission by putting the card in a jar of sweets, which she then later on took the lid off and held out to someone. We pointed out that she had not got the other person to open the jar, and had therefore failed the mission. It then transpired that there is ambiguity in the wording! She interpreted ‘it’ as referring to the card (which, remember, folded in half, so it could be opened up). We had all interpreted it as referring to the jar. 

Strictly speaking, either interpretation is possible. A pronoun refers back to something else in the sentence, and provided certain structural constraints are met, it might refer to more than one thing. Take an example like ‘I saw Lina arguing with Mira. She looked pretty embarrassed.’ Here, ‘she’ could be Lina or Mira - it’s equally possible that either of the women was embarrassed, and structurally speaking one is the subject (so the topic), and therefore likely to be referred to, and the other is closer to the pronoun, so likely to be the intended referent. We can’t tell and in this case you’d probably have to ask ‘Lina or Mira?’, unless you had some prior knowledge that made it clear. 

In the case of the jar and the card, are both equally likely to be ‘it’? Well, because of the specific nature of this card, yes, both are things that can be opened, so the meaning of ‘open it’ is at least possible for both. Jars are probably more canonically ‘things that are opened’ (think Family Fortunes, ‘name something you open’) so that might push you towards the jar option. The jar is closer to the pronoun, and this is another thing that influences the interpretation, but not by much, so this might also slightly affect the preference for the jar. (See Mira Ariel’s work over the last several years for much more on this!) 

What interested me, though, was the fact that another friend said ‘it literally says “get someone to open the jar” on the card’. It didn’t - it said ‘get someone to open it’. But her interpretation of the referent of ‘it’ as being ‘the jar’ was strong enough that she considered it to have literally said ‘the jar’. 

Anyway, we decided it definitely meant the jar and she was considered to have failed the mission. 

As someone firmly on the Left...

Dangling modifiers are one of those 'grammar' things that children learn about, writers are warned about, and peevers peeve about. Strunk and White give this one:

Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap.

They're also one of those grammar things, like so many of these peeves, that actually don't usually matter much. It's nearly always clear from the context what is meant, and maybe the sentence would be neater if it was changed, but not always. The one above is corrected to 'Being in a dilapidated condition, the house was for sale very cheap' which is fine too, but I don't think there's much in it, readability-wise.

So it was quite exciting to find one that actually does matter:

As someone firmly on the Left, Jeremy Corbyn would be a truly terrible Prime Minister, even in comparison to the appalling one currently at No. 10.

— Mary • Pronouns: Hufflepuff/Esquire ❤️🐱🏁🕷 (@MaryMinifieEsq) October 26, 2019

The dangling modifier here is 'as someone firmly on the left'. It can refer to the speaker, as these modifiers often do, or it could refer to Jeremy Corbyn, the closest referent. This is the interpretation that style guides would say is 'correct'. But both are plausible, which is why we can't disambiguate with context here. The two different meanings are as follows:

I am someone firmly on the Left, but I still think that Jeremy Corbyn would be a terrible Prime Minister. 

Because Jeremy Corbyn is firmly on the Left, I think he would be a terrible Prime Minister.  

I actually don't know which is the intended meaning, as I don't know the person who tweeted it. Probably the first is more likely given the audience and tweet it responds to, but who knows. A rare genuine case for writing out the dangling modifier.

Processing numbers as letters

I went to a training workshop thing at Canterbury Christchurch University recently. They number their rooms differently than we do at Kent. At Kent, typically, there's a letter or letters to denote the building, say CC for Cornwallis Central, and then a number for the room, where the first digit is the floor (or else it's LT for Lecture Theatre). So if your office is CC104, it's Cornwallis Central, first floor, room 4.

This is fine, once you know it, just like any conventional system. CCCU does theirs differently, and I'm sure it's also fine once you know it, but it really threw me. They also have a letter for the building  - in this case N for Newton - and a number for the room, in this case 03. But the floor is indicated by a letter that corresponds to the first letter of the name of the floor number - so ground floor is g, first floor is f, second floor is s, and third floor is t:

Sign with the text:
1st Floor Nf 01-14
2nd Floor Ns 01-17
3rd Floor Nt 01-19

This was absolutely flummoxing, even though I'd read the instructions and knew it to be the case. Every time, I had to think really hard about what letter 'second' or 'third' began with, perhaps because my brain was associating them with a digit rather than the written word, and it took me ages to process them.

Oh and if there's more than three floors (by which I think they mean three floors above ground floor), they revert to numerals. Honestly.

100% belief about 100% racism

As promised, more on Stormzy. He caused a right ruckus the other day, not on purpose. In an interview in Italy, he said, when asked if he thought Britain was still racist today, "Definitely, 100%". This was reported by ITV and then others as him saying that he thought Britain was "100% racist". This was widely condemned, ridiculed and mocked, as well as provoking an absolute meltdown among people who took it to mean that Stormzy was calling them personally racist. (An aside: even if he had meant that Britain is 100% racist, he wouldn't be wrong, on the sensible definition of a racist society as one in which your racialised identity affects your success and advantage in life, which it does in Britain.)

Curiously, both phrasings could actually mean both things, but there's a tendency for them to be interpreted differently. The two meanings are: Stormzy is 100% of the belief that there is (some) racism in Britain; and Stormzy believes that Britain is 100% (i.e. entirely) racist. '100%' either quantifies the amount of racism (complete racism), or it quantifies his level of belief (total belief). While his phrasing lends itself strongly to the interpretation where he means "Yeah, I believe 100% that there is (some) racism", the phrasing reported lends itself more to "Yeah, I believe that Britain is 100% racist". Why? the position of the '100%' next to the adjective 'racist' in the inaccurate reporting implies modification of that adjective, or in other words, totally racist.

His answer as it was actually given could also mean this, though, even with the preceding question ("is Britain still racist today") for context: "Definitely, [it is] 100% [racist]". As noted above, I'd have supported his answer if this had been what he meant. But he was clear about the fact that it wasn't!

And I think you can get this correct reading even with the inaccurate phrasing, although it's less salient. In "Britain is 100% racist", I can get an interpretation here where '100%' is an intensifier rather than a proper quantifier, and means something more like 'definitely'. The meaning of "Britain is definitely racist" doesn't necessarily mean that every aspect of and person in Britain is racist: "Britain is racist" can mean "There is some racism in Britain". But because it can also mean the entirety, and the partial meaning isn't made explicit, the 'entirely racist' meaning is more readily available.