Once again, three linguists on Facebook. beginning with Lauren Hall-Lew on Facebook on 10/4:
— LHL (Univ.of Edinburgh): I’ve been binging Desert Islands Discs, because most of my podcasts are political, and my heart can only take so much.
— AZ (Stanford) > LHL: (Side comment: for me, the spelling really has to be bingeing; otherwise it’s just bing-bing-bing like bullets, or Bing like Bing Crosby.)
— LHL > AZ: excellent point! I am a terrible speller!
The evaluation phase. After the initial exchange, I went into advice and encouragement mode. I need to emphasize here that I hold LHL in great respect, for her cast of mind, for the humanity and clear thinking of her research, in fact for the way she has lived her life; she is a fine linguist and a good friend. In my response, I wanted to avoid becoming patronizing, but I also wanted to do some gentle instruction
— AZ > LHL: Well, no, you are not a terrible speller; remember that I have seen a lot of your draft writing [note: LHL’s PhD is from Stanford], and you make the occasional ordinary gaffe of (even) educated writers in English. What you are is not perfect, and now, after years of writing lots of stuff for publication, having it edited, and being an editor yourself, you have undoubtedly improved considerably, and you should stop being ashamed of your spelling. Nobody’s perfect. I have been a spectacularly good speller from childhood on, but there are some words I still run aground on.
And, then, I have seen astoundingly bad spelling in highly educated and exceptionally talented people — one student, S, who wrote PhD qualifying exams that were the best their committee had ever seen, and were also by far the worst-spelled writing the committee members had ever seen, anywhere. S later applied themselves to a spelling improvement program (so that people wouldn’t reject their work as the product of an illiterate fool), which brought S into the ordinary range, and then nobody noticed.
[note: what afflicted S is some kind of spelling-specific difficulty, not at all like the syndrome of dysgraphia in the disability literature; here, spelling seems to be entirely detachable from forming letters, putting thoughts into writing, and other component abilities of writing]
— LHL >AZ: Thank you. You’re right. It was a spontaneous expression of a long-held identity of mine! I tend to find spelling-related things like Scrabble maddening and I blame it on my tendency to think more like a phonetician than a writer.
[note: the suggestion is then that there’s a range of ability on each side of the sound-symbol relationship, and that LHL is lower on the symbol side but higher on the sound side; all abilities vary throughout the population (I am prepared to talk about my abilities at various aspects of spatial relations, which are notably on the low side), and nobody’s good at everything (how many people do you know who can tell you, right off, what day of the week some date occurred on?), so the only real question is the entirely practical one of how to get along with the abilities you have: which low-ranking ones might you need to work around, or, instead, work at improving, which can you just live with, and which can you just not care about? And those answers will depend very much on the context you’re in]
— AZ > LHL: But please don’t delete our exchange, which I think might be useful for others to see.
Damien Hall (Newcastle Univ.) > AZ: Indeed so. Instructive in at least two ways.
— AZ > DH: Thank you. I pretty much cannot be restrained from teaching, but I try hard to advise and instruct with a light hand, using gentle humor and taking the audience’s viewpoint as much as possible. And being willing to adjust the approach to the context and the audience’s background, attitudes, and needs.
[note: an idea that I have long had, usually expressed as something like I am helplessly a teacher (and have been, literally since childhood); but never before formulated as cannot be restrained, which came to me out of the air — I know, I know, actually from my mind, but it felt like a kind of possession — and immediately struck me as wonderful, a delightful present from the elves of thought]
— DH > AZ: I pretty much cannot be restrained from teaching. I love that. I’m sorry we’ve never met.
— AZ > DH: Me too. I miss having face-to-face friendships and developing new ones, but that’s all gone. But at least we’ve gotten to know one another on-line.
Afterthoughts. I had several of them. Then I went back and inserted them as notes interrupting the FB exchanges. Trying to capture some of their immediacy.
Yes, I routinely see myself from the outside, observing what I am doing, and keeping track of my observations. And I will analyze anything; I don’t think I have (yet) analyzed a ham sandwich, but I have analyzed, among other things, hot dogs in buns, the experience of getting pronged, the overture to Die Zauberflöte, various kinds of typos, ecstatic states, my own writing style, masculinity, and tons of cartoons and comic strips.
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