I just got back from attending my second meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association. My experience at both conferences has been very positive: friendly people, interesting talks, good connections. But I would like to see a little more linguistics at NeMLA, and better opportunities for linguists to attend.

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of March, I was feeling quite unwell with a chest and sinus infection, for which I’d had three courses of antibiotics from my GP. It was pretty unpleasant but compared to what I was about to experience, it now looks trivial.

There’s an idea that dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are mutually unintelligible. John McWhorter had a nice piece in the Atlantic where he summarized the evidence against this idea. There are two factors in mutual intelligibility that McWhorter does not mention: familiarity and power. Ultimately we can place any pair of language varieties on a continuum of closeness.

The recent Green Paper proposed that universities should be excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. As of today, it now looks very unlikely that this will happen.

Today, at the FORCE11 workshop that I am attending in Madrid our facilitators spoke of utopian thinking and then of attempting to realize that utopia in the realm of scholarly communications.

I’m at a workshop in Madrid organized by FORCE11. The first exercise was to imagine a world where universities did not exist, their hierarchies and power were abolished, but we still knew what we know. What would we build? I answered through a series of “undoing” questions: What is HE for? Why do we research? What is “knowledge”? What financial form would have to underpin whatever we build?

Woman Laughing Alone with Word Salad

David Willetts is the politician responsible, above all others, in the United Kingdom for the £9,000 student fee level and its associated phenomena (including the privatization in all-but-name of UK universities). Yet he also writes extremely well of the essential unfairness and breaking of the intergenerational contract between the baby boomers and the millennials in which the latter bear a huge burden while the former group prosper.

The spectacle of two bilingual Presidential candidates arguing in Spanish last week reminded me of the Twitter feed, “Miguel Bloombito,” created by Rachel Figueroa-Levin to mock our former Mayor’s Spanish for the amusement of her friends. I may be coming late to the party here, but Bloombito is still tweeting, and was recently mentioned by one of my fellow linguists.

Research Fortnight is running an interesting piece about the REF consultation document that was pulled late last year. Indeed, while the sector is desperate for information about the requirements for the next REF (we’re currently playing somewhat blind), the consultation has been postponed while the Stern review consults. In any case, here’s a mirror of the consultation document itself.