Scene: a quietly bustling bistro in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement. SERVER: Oui, vous désirez? PIXELBUDS: Yes, you desire? TOURIST: Um, yeah, I’ll have the steak frites. PIXELBUDS: UM, OUAIS, JE VAIS AVOIR LES FRITES DE STEAK SERVER: Que les frites? PIXELBUDS: Than fries? TOURIST: No, at the same time. PIXELBUDS: NON, EN MEME TEMPS SERVER: Alors, vous voulez le steak aussi? PIXELBUDS: DESOLE, JE N’AI PAS COMPRIS.

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

I’m currently handling a difficult case where a poetry publisher is demanding a royalty for citation of text within a work of literary criticism. They want to know how many “copies” we are “printing” so they can charge us. It is my view that this is totally extortionate and that this use is “fair dealing” under UK law for purposes of criticism and review.

The recent self-censorship by Cambridge University Press in China is billed, by some, as an assault on academic freedom. It is certainly a worrying trend. There are, though, a couple of responses that I wanted to note about this: Following David Price, I note that making material open access with an open license allows for the free, open, online dissemination of scholarly work.

In a comment, Candy asked: Can we also please talk about how “cis” is used as a term of abuse against feminists? As in, “shut up privileged cis bitches?” It’s the bit where trans activism begins to overlap with Men Rights Activism.

I have a letter in today’s Times Higher Education repying to Marilyn Deegan on open-access books. The full, unedited version of the letter is in my institutional repository or below. Dear Sir, In her ‘Open access monograph dash could lead us off a cliff’ (Times Higher, 27th July 2017), Marilyn Deegan attacks a series of straw arguments about open access for books that have little basis in policy reality.

Slides

There has been a lot of angst about the newly proposed non-portability requirements for REF2021 and beyond, particularly from ECRs. I want to say upfront that I do not want to disparage such worries; I speak from a position of privilege, having a permanent position even though I am, by RCUK standards, myself an Early-Career Researcher. I do, though, want to set out why I think these fears are misplaced/over-blown.

Last week I attended the rather enjoyable English: Shared Futures conference and participated in a panel titled “How to Get Published as an Early Career Academic”. This was a worthwhile thing to do, although it’s a shame we need this.

Last January I wrote that the purpose of phonetic transcription is to talk about differences in pronunciation. Last December I introduced accent tags, a fascinating genre of self-produced YouTube videos of crowdsourced dialectology and a great source of data about language variation. I put these together when I was teaching a unit on language variation for the second-semester Survey of Linguistics course at Saint John’s University.