Where have all the numbers gone? (Or 1 + 99 = 53 + 47)
In 2011 the American Dialect Society listed ‘the 99%’ among its Words of the Year. In 2012 ’47%’ became the new politically-charged number. These numbers are connected in a way that might not be obvious.
Mitt Romney was recorded declaring, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” Because they pay no income tax, Romney suggested, 47% of Americans are dependent on government. This resembles a charge made in 2011 by conservative activists at the53.tumblr, which in turn was a response to the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated wearethe99percent.tumblr.
AAA Handouts
Via Jocelyn Ahlers Hello – Thanks to the hard work of the SLA’s web team, we are able to offer what we hope will be a useful service to all presenters at the AAA who are planning to bring handouts and who would like an additional way to distribute those handouts to conference attendees. The [...]
SLA Presidential Panel
The inaugural SLA presidential panel entitled: Frontiers in Methodology in Linguistic Anthropology has been organized for Thursday evening from 7:30-9pm in Union Square 22. Charles Goodwin, Marjorie H. Goodwin, Brendan O’Connor, Susan Philips and Deborah Tannen will be discussing how current theoretical interests within our subdiscipline have influenced how we do fieldwork. We encourage all the membership to come together to discuss and debate the current state of methodologies in our discipline(s).
Why preschool hasn’t saved the world
Radio programs have recently celebrated a “new understanding” of the importance of preschool for success later in life. Related knowledge has been part of academic discussion for decades, but has had relatively little effect on how education is organized. To contribute to public understanding, I summarize Shirley Brice Heath’s “What no bedtime story means” (1982).
Student Essay Contest Winners (2012)
Undergraduate prize winner: Kamala Russell from the University of Chicago, with a paper entitled, Form and function: Character Viewpoint Gestures in Dialogic Narrative.
Graduate prize winner: Jennifer Guzman (UCLA), The Epistemics of Symptom Experience and Symptom Accounts in Mapuche Healing and Pediatric Primary Care in Southern Chile.
American Anthropological Association 2012 Annual Meeting
A preliminary schedule for the American Anthropological Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting has been released. This schedule includes more that 50 linguistic and language-related panel sessions.
AAA Ethics Grant
Applications for AAA Committee on Ethics small grants for ethics curricular materials are due 2 November 2012. A grant of between $200 and $1,000 is available.
Danish media reactions to Journal of Linguistic Anthropology paper
In this guest post Martha Sif Karrebæk relates how her Journal of Linguistic Anthropology paper, “What’s in your lunchbox today?”, became a topic of discussion in Danish mass media.
AAA Leadership Nominations extended to 10 October
The AAA Nominations Committee is seeking nominations for open positions on the 2013 AAA ballot. The deadline for nominations in Monday 1 October 2012.
Ladies, Gentlemen, and English usage
Recently I have been re-reading James Thurber’s “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to English Usage”, a parody of Henry Watson Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The parody is built around a central conceit: that a language usage guide is equivalent to lifestyle or relationship advice. This is not merely a conceit around which to build a parody; it is also a fair assessment of what usage guides are used for.
