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_________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe login to https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=EATAW You find the 'Unsubscribe' button in the blue 'Options bar'Hello Everyone,
Thank you very much for your “coronavirus words and phrases. This is the biggest burst of activity on the mailing list that I’ve seen. However, academic writing is so much more than words and phrases.
Indeed, I’d like to shock you all here and say that actually I’m not very interested in a corpus of academic words. I’m primarily interested in what things mean.
For example, conceptually, the doubling time of the number of cases of coronavirus has close similarities with compound interest, the halving time of the number of cases of coronavirus follows the same pattern as the half-life of radioactive elements, and the distance we stand from each other to prevent infection is just another form of Isaac Newton’s gravitational inverse square law.
These distinctly numerical, non-linguistic concepts do not depend on words and phrases but stream out from economics and science into the natural world, through people’s everyday lives and then, beyond the stratosphere, into space.
The famous British World War I poet Wilfred Owen put this non-linguistic otherness very well. He did not say of his poetry that the poetry was in the words. He said that the poetry was in the pity, and by this he meant the pity for all the humanity that was lost in the Great War.
He himself died a few days before the end of the War and did not live to experience the influenza pandemic that occurred soon afterwards. If he had been alive today he might have said that the poetry might well be in the pity, but that the pity is in the numbers. For us, the pity is not in politicians’ speeches, media reports, journalistic essays or even the words used to describe the Lockdown or social/physical distancing. It is in the fact that every single number we hear about represents a person and a significant proportion of people represented by those numbers have lost their lives.
So rather than sending you words and phrases I’m sending you something else.
I’ve attached an Excel spreadsheet of the COVID-19 case numbers that I have forced myself to collect while in Lockdown and the mathematics that (as a non-mathematician) I’ve forced myself to understand.
I have chosen to collect case numbers rather than deaths because such numbers allow us to predict ahead and decide on good strategies to prevent further outbreaks or future pandemics. It will be these things that will influence the academic writing advice that I will give to any academics studying how to prevent and control pandemics in the future. This is because that without the numbers and an understanding of what those numbers mean, even a vast corpus of words will not be enough.
Please feel free to look at the attached Excel File and then maybe we can talk about the meaning and how it might influence academic writing. I’ve left the file as an Excel File rather than a pdf so that you can include your own numbers* if you wish. If you would like me to explain any aspect of the mathematics then I would be happy to do so.
Stay safe and well.
With very best wishes,
Susan Mitchell
*References
- https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries (On any given day, click the "yesterday" tab. This will give yesterday’s figures recorded at midnight. )
- Scottish figures from: https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-daily-data-for-scotland/
From: European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing - discussions <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Reichelt, Melinda J
Sent: 15 May 2020 15:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: What are "stay-at-home orders" called in various languages?
Dear EATAW Members,
I hope this email finds you all well.
On Monday, a reporter from my local newspaper (the Toledo Blade, out of Toledo, Ohio, USA), will interview me for a story about the effect of Coronavirus on the English language and other languages. She has told me she is curious about how various languages are referring to what are called "stay-at-home orders" in the U.S. I thought this listserv might be a good place to gather information. I would be grateful if you would email me at [log in to unmask] and tell me what stay-at-home orders are called in the languages you know, and please give me a literal translation. I'm also curious about whether other terms besides "stay-at-home orders" are used in various English-speaking countries. In the U.S., I've also heard (and used) the term quarantine to refer to staying at home, even if you're not sick.
If you wish, if you respond, I can send you a list of interesting newly-coined words in English related to the Corona virus. Please just ask me. I've been collecting them as one of my new Coronahobbies while I'm confined to my home, needing new means of occupying myself. I have about 35 so far, but here's a sampling:
Coronabrain: When all you can think about is the Corona virus
Covidfever: Like cabin fever
Procrastibaking: What I've been doing instead of grading papers
Coronababies: We'll have them in our classes in about 18 years and nine months
Hairpocalypse: My current hairdo, which probably won't improve if I let my daughter give me a quarancut
JOMO: Joy of missing out; the opposite of FOMO, fear of missing out
Zoombies: (Zoom + zombie) What teachers feel they’ve become after conducting classes all week on Zoom
Zoomsmen: your groomsmen in a Zoom wedding
Covedient: (Covid + obedient) describes people who are obedient to stay-at-home orders
Zumping: Dumping a romantic partner via Zoom
Thanks, everyone.
Melinda
Dr. Melinda Reichelt
Professor of English, Director of ESL Writing
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA_________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe login to https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=EATAW You find the 'Unsubscribe' button in the blue 'Options bar'
