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If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

Birds are singing, the sun is shining and I am joyful first thing in the morning without caffeine. Why you ask? Because it is Word of the Year time (or WOTY as we refer to it around the office).  Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year.  This announcement is usually applauded by some and derided by others and the ongoing conversation it sparks is always a lot of fun, so I encourage you to let us know what you think in the comments.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Wondering what other new words were considered for the New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year?  Check out the list below.

Technology

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Economy

freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Politics and Current Affairs

Ardi – (Ardipithecus ramidus) oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced to the public in 2009

birther – a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s birth certificate

choice mom – a person who chooses to be a single mother

death panel – a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed

teabagger -a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)

Environment

brown state – a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations

green state – a US state that has strict environmental regulations

ecotown - a town built and run on eco-friendly principles

Novelty Words

deleb – a dead celebrity

tramp stamp – a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman

Notable Word Clusters for 2009:

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. His newest work, Asthma: The Biography, is a volume in our series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at for the next few week (read previous posts in this series here).  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment. In the excerpt below Jackson relays the story of Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.

On 7 December 1889, an American inventor, Frederick Augustus Roe, obtained a patent for a device that was designed both to cure and to prevent not only the deadly strain of influenza that was sweeping across Europe from Russia, but also a wide range of other respiratory complaints, including catarrh, bronchitis, coughs and colds, croup, whooping cough, hay fever and asthma. Sold from offices in Hanover Square in London for ten shillings, the Carbolic Smoke Ball comprised a hollow ball of India rubber containing carbolic acid powder. When the ball was compressed, a cloud of particles was forced through a fine muslin or silk diaphragm to be inhaled by the consumer. Boosted by testimonials from satisfied customers and endorsements from prominent doctors, Roe was sufficiently confident that the contraption would prevent influenza that, in several advertisements placed in the Illustrated London News and the Paul Mall Gazette during the winter of 1891, he offered to pay £100 to any person who contracted influenza ‘after having used the ball 3 times daily for two weeks according to the printed descriptions supplied with each ball’. As if to demonstrate the sincerity of his offer, Roe claimed to have deposited £1,000 with the Alliance Bank in Regent Street.

In November 1891, Louisa Elizabeth Carlill, the wife of a lawyer, purchased a Carbolic Smoke Ball in London and carefully followed the instructions for use. When Mrs Carlill contracted influenza the following January, her husband wrote to Roe claiming the ‘reward’ offered in the advertisements. Suggesting that the claim was fraudulent, Roe refused to pay and provided Mr Carlill with the names of his solicitors. In the resulting legal case, initially heard in the court of Queen’s Bench and subsequently reviewed by Appeal Court, the dispute did not revolve primarily around whether the plaintiff had used the device correctly or indeed whether or not she had contacted influenza; these issues were accepted largely as fact. Rather, legal arguments focused on whether the advertisement constituted a valid offer, rather than ‘a mere puff’, as Lord Justice Bowen neatly put it, and whether Mrs Carlill’s use of the smoke ball constituted acceptance of that offer. By deciding unanimously in Mrs Carlill’s favour, the English courts set a precedent regarding unilateral contracts that continued to inform the legal doctrines of offer and acceptance, consideration, misrepresentation, and wagering throughout the twentieth century.

While Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company became a celebrated moment in legal history, it al

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, and the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. In the videos below, he discusses the evolution of terms like “Love Affair” and names of diseases, as traced in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrating how language changes and reflects cultural histories. Shea also dives into the HTOED to talk about the longest entry, interesting word connections, and comes up with a few surprises. (Do you know what a “strumpetocracy” is?) Watch both videos after the jump. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.

Love, Pregnancy, and Venereal Disease in the Historical Thesaurus

Click here to view the embedded video.

Inside the Historical Thesaurus

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

For years, the public has not been able to get enough of Paris Hilton. She’s famous as a socialite, heiress, model, and now for joining the likes of Socrates and Mark Twain on the pages of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. No, she’s not quoted for saying, “That’s hot.” Ms. Hilton is instead immortalized for her advice, “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”

But Paris’s entry is only one of more than 20,000 new quotations added to 7th edition. Other notable inclusions come from Sarah Palin, Stephen Hawking, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Philip Pullman. Here, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations editor Elizabeth Knowles reflects on the history of the almost 70-year-old treasury, and how new entries are chosen.  To learn more check out the companion site here.

A classic reference book like this has to be regularly remade, without compromising its essential identity. Can we in fact have the modern and frivolous without damaging our book? I would say most definitely yes, where usage so dictates, and adduce in support two luminaries of the Oxford University Press of over sixty years ago. In 1931, planning the book, Kenneth Sisam, who identified an “intelligent elasticity” as an essential editorial quality, wrote to a colleague, “We shall have to guard against things quotable, as apart from things commonly quoted.” And in 1949, when the second edition was being planned, Humphrey Milford (formerly Publisher to OUP) commented, “I think the levity—comparative—of ODQ is partly the reason for its success.” In other words, the diversity of the book, and its mixture of the deeply serious and the frivolous, based on what people are quoting, is part of its essential nature.

Quotations are part of the fabric of the language: we use, and meet them, every day. We quote when we find that the words of another person, in another time and place, express exactly what we want to say. Or, events bring certain quotations to prominence, as the last year has given new relevance to Thomas Jefferson’s comment that, “Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

A dictionary of quotations is not a roll-call of the great and the good, nor a listing of an editor’s favorite passages. Although having said that, of course we all do have items in which we take a particular pleasure. I was especially pleased that the formulation, “We must guard even our enemies against injustice” (attributed to the radical Tom Paine) was revealed as the writer Graham Greene’s paraphrase of Paine’s more formal eighteenth-century diction. The history of this misquotation—linking two significant figures across the centuries, and coming to light through its resonance today—was very satisfying to explore.

At Oxford, we track language to ensure that we have the quotations people are most likely to look up, so that the next time a half-remembered quotation is on the tip of your tongue, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is ready with the answer. Inclusion is based on usage: evidence that a spoken comment or written passage is being quoted by others. And while there is a common quotations stock (Shakespeare, the Bible), we all have our own quotations vocabulary, that which we remember and quote because we encountered them at a time when they were particularly significant. The antique and serious often rubs shoulders with popular culture. The same newspaper column, for example, may quote from both the Book of Common Prayer and the Rolling Stones. The result is marvelously diverse, and properly so.

Megan Branch, Intern

The only foods that I can think of as being as “American as apple pie” are recipes that have been lifted from other countries: pizza, sushi and, of course, Chinese food. College in New York has meant that I eat a lot of Chinese food. In his new book, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, Andrew Coe chronicles Chinese food’s journey across the ocean and into the hearts of Americans everywhere. Below, I’ve excerpted a passage from Chop Suey in which Coe details the earliest written account of an American’s experience eating Chinese food for the first time almost 200 years ago.

Nevertheless, the first account we have of Americans eating Chinese food does not appear until 1819, thirty-five years after Shaw’s visit. It was written by Bryant Parrott Tilden, a young trader from Salem who acted as supercargo on a number of Asia voyages. In Guangzhou, he was befriended by Paunkeiqua, a leading merchant who cultivated good relations with many American firms. Just before Tilden’s ship was set to sail home, Paunkeiqua invited the American merchants to spend the day at this mansion on Honam island. Tilden’s account of that visit, which was capped by a magnificent feast, is not unlike the descriptions Shaw or even William Hickey wrote a half century earlier. First, he tours Paunkeiqua’s traditional Chinese garden and encounters some of the merchant’s children yelling “Fankwae! Fankwae!” (“Foreign devil! Foreign devil!”). Then Paunkeiqua shows him his library, including “some curious looking old Chinese maps of the world as these ‘celestials’ suppose it to be, with their Empire occupying three quarters of it, surrounded by ‘nameless islands & seas bounded only by the edges of the maps.” Finally, his host tells him: “Now my flinde, Tillen, you must go long my for catche chow chow tiffin.” In other words, dinner was served in a spacious dining hall, where the guests were seated at small tables.

“Soon after,” Tilden writes, “a train of servants came in bringing a most splendid service of fancy colored, painted and gilt large tureens & bowls, containing soups, among them the celebrated bird nest soup, as also a variety of stewed messes, and plenty of boiled rice, & same style of smaller bowls, but alas! No plates and knives and forks.” (By “messes,” Tilden probably meant prepared dishes, not unsavory jumbles.)

The Americans attempted to eat with chopsticks, with very poor results: “Monkies [sic] with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did.” Finally, their host put an end to their discomfort by ordering western-style plates, knives, forks, and spoons. Then the main portion of the meal began:

Twenty separate courses were placed on the table during three hours in as many different services of elegant china ware, the messes consisting of soups, gelatinous food, a variety of stewed hashes, made up of all sorts of chopped meats, small birds cock’s-combs, a favorite dish, some fish & all sorts of vegetables, rice, and pickles, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ginger and pepper are used plentifully in most of their cookery. Not a joint of meat or a whole fowl or bird were placed on the table. Between the changing of the courses, we freely conversed and partook of Madeira & other European wines—and costly teas.”

After fruits, pastries, and more wine, the dinner finally came to an end. Tilden and his friends left glowing with happiness (and alcohol) at the honor Paunkeiqua had shown them with his lavish meal. Nowhere, however, does Tilden tell us whether the Americans actually enjoyed these “messes” and “hashes.”

Brenda Gregoline, ELS, manages the copyediting team for 5 of the Archives Journals, and is a member of the committee that writes and updates the AMA Manual of Style. She is a member of the Council of Science Editors and has worked in scientific publishing for nearly 15 years. In this 3-part series, she reports on the most frequent mistakes authors make when submitting manuscripts to JAMA and the Archives Journals, and lets us in on what drives copy editors crazy. Read part one here and part two here.

It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all the information in the thousand-page AMA Manual of Style–they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Here, in classic top-10-list reverse order, are the top 10 editorial problems we see in our submitted and accepted manuscripts, compiled by committee and editorialized upon by me. In Part I we discussed filling out author forms, omitting “behind the scenes” stuff, and generally making life difficult for the copy editor. In Part II we discussed common punctuation and style mistakes, errors of grandiosity, and wacky references. Today we discuss the final 4 in our top-10 list of most frequent mistakes.

4. Duplicate submission. In scientific publication, it is not acceptable to submit a report of original research to multiple journals at the same time. Journal editors are likely to be more disturbed by this if it looks deliberate rather than like a simple mistake (not realizing that a foreign-language journal “counts,” for example) or if the case is debatable (a small section of results was published in another paper, but the new paper adds tons of new material). Remember those forms from the 10th most common mistake? One of them asks about previous submission or publication. We need authors to be up-front about any other articles in the pipeline, even if (especially if) they’re not sure if they might constitute duplicate publication.

3. Failing to protect patient identity. Yup, there’s a form for this too! Any time a patient is identifiable, in a photograph or even in text (as in a case report), authors must have the patient’s consent. (Contrary to popular belief, the gossip-mag-style “black bars” over the eyes are not sufficient to conceal identity.) Usually we hear complaints about this, because studies are written long after patients are treated and it can be hard to track people down, but them’s the breaks. If it’s really impossible to obtain after-the-fact patient consent, editors will work with authors to crop photos, take out case-report details, or whatever it takes to “de-identify” patients.

2. Not matching up all the data “bits.” In the abstract, 76 patients were randomized to receive the intervention, but it’s 77 in Table 1. There was a 44.5% reduction in symptoms in the medicated group in the text, but later it’s 44.7%. Sometimes this is because the abstract is written first from the overall results, while the data in a table are more precisely calculated by a statistician; or maybe the number of patients changed along the way and no one went back to revise the earlier data. Either way, it drives copy editors crazy.

1. Not reading a journal’s Instructions for Authors. These days almost all scientific journals have online submission, and almost always there is a link to something called “Information for Authors,” “Guidelines for Manuscript Submission,” or something similar. Judging by the kinds of questions editorial offices receive almost daily, authors rarely read these—but the publication process would often go so much more smoothly if they would.

We are proud of our style manual here at JAMA/Archives, although we realize it isn’t the last word in scientific style and format. There can never really be a “last word” because some editor will always want to have it! Anyway, without authors there wouldn’t be anything to edit, so we would never hold any “mistakes” against them. No matter how grievous a manuscript’s misstep, an editor will be there to correct it, because it’s our job. (But mostly because we can’t stop ourselves.)

Brenda Gregoline, ELS, manages the copyediting team for 5 of the Archives Journals, and is a member of the committee that writes and updates the AMA Manual of Style. She is a member of the Council of Science Editors and has worked in scientific publishing for nearly 15 years. In this 3-part series, she reports on the most frequent mistakes authors make when submitting manuscripts to JAMA and the Archives Journals, and lets us in on what drives copy editors crazy.

It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all the information in the thousand-page AMA Manual of Style–they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Here, in classic top-10-list reverse order, are the top 10 editorial problems we see in our submitted and accepted manuscripts, compiled by committee and editorialized upon by me. In Part I we discussed filling out author forms, omitting “behind the scenes” stuff, and generally making life difficult for the copy editor. Today we discuss the next 3 in our top-10 list of most frequent mistakes.

7. Common punctuation and style mistakes (not an exhaustive list). Most frequently we see authors fail to expand abbreviations; use different abbreviations for the same term throughout a manuscript; use commas like seasoning instead of like punctuation marks with actual rules of deployment; and overuse the em dash. However, I’d like to tell any authors reading this not to fret, because that’s the kind of stuff we’re paid to fix. Plus I can’t really throw stones—being a fan of the em dash myself.

6. Errors of grandiosity. Sometimes a perfectly nice and valid study will go hog-wild in the conclusion, claiming to be changing the future of scientific inquiry or heralding a sea-change in the treatment of patients everywhere. Or authors will selectively interpret results, focusing on the positive and ignoring the negative or neutral. It’s natural to want to write an elegant conclusion—it’s one of the few places in a scientific manuscript where one can really let loose with the prose—but it’s always better to err on the side of caution.

5. Wacky references. All journals have a reference citation policy, and across scientific journals it is fairly standard to give reference numbers at the point of citation, cite references in numerical order in the text (as opposed to only in tables or figures), and retain a unique number for each reference no matter how many times it’s cited. However, we still get papers with references handled in all kinds of odd ways (alphabetical, chronological, or seemingly inspired by the full moon). References that include URLs can mean big problems. Often the URL doesn’t work or the site is password-protected, subscription-only, or otherwise useless to the reader. Also aggravating: references that are just the result of the search string for the article and not the URL for the article itself.

Authors and aspiring authors: stay tuned for the final 4!

Megan Branch, Intern

Here on the OUPblog, we’ve been posting a series of Dictionary posts so be sure to check out the ABC’s of math and education. The language of law is confusing at the best of times, so today’s ABC’s come from the Oxford Dictionary of Law, edited by Jonathan Law and Elizabeth A. Martin. The Dictionary contains over 4,200 entries covering all types of law–from historical treaties, like the Treaty of Rome, to property law, and everything in between. Below, I’ve excerpted some terms from the “A,” “B,” “C,” and “Q,” “R,” “S” sections.

Actual total loss (in marine insurance): A loss of a ship or cargo in which the subject matter is destroyed or damaged to such an extent that it can no longer be used for its purpose, or when the insured is irretrievably deprived of it. If the ship or cargo is the subject of a *valued policy, the measure of indemnity is the sum fixed by the policy; if the policy is unvalued, the measure of indemnity is the insurable value of the subject insured.

Bench warrant: A warrant for the arrest of a person who has failed to attend court when summoned or subpoenaed to do so or against whom an order of committal for contempt of court has been made and who cannot be found. The warrant is issued during a sitting of the court.

Contra bonos mores [Latin]: Against good morals. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the criminal law should, or does, prohibit immoral conduct merely on the ground of its immorality. The tendency in recent years has been to limit legal intervention in matters of morals to acts that cause harm to others. However, there are still certain offences regarded as essentially immoral (e.g. *incest). There are also offences of conspiring to corrupt public morals (although *corruption of public morals is not in itself criminal) and of outraging (or conspiring to outrage) public decency, although the scope of these offences is uncertain.

Qualified right: A right set out in the European Convention on Human Rights that will only be violated if the interference with it is not proportionate (see PROPORTIONALITY). An interference with a qualified right that is not proportionate to the *legitimate aim being pursued will not be lawful.

Refreshing memory: A procedure in which a witness may, while testifying, remind himself of matters about which he is testifying by referring to a document made on an earlier occasion. Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 a witness in criminal proceedings may at any stage while testifying refresh his memory from a document or transcript of a sound recording made or verified by the witness on a earlier occasion.

Soft law (in international law): Guidelines of behaviour, such as those provided by treaties not yet in force, resolutions of the United Nations, or international conferences, that are not binding in themselves but are more than mere statements of political aspiration (they fall into a legal/political limbo between these two states). Soft law contrasts with hard law, i.e. those legal obligations, found either in *treaties or customary international law (see CUSTOM), that are binding in and of themselves.

Megan Branch, Intern

The Oxford Dictionary of Education edited by Susan Wallace, covers educational terms and concepts from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Some of the words, like “Big Brother Syndrome” are unique to the 21st century while others—“regius professor”—have been around for hundreds of years. The Dictionary is UK-focused, so I thought it would be interesting to look at some terms that we don’t hear very often in the US. Below, I’ve excerpted some of the words from the “A”, “B”, “C” and “R”, “S”, “T” sections.

Active vocabulary: The range of words which an individual is able to use accurately in their speech (active spoken vocabulary), or their writing (active written vocabulary), or both of these. The active vocabulary does not include words which are only recognized and understood, either by reading or hearing, but not actually used. At most stages of learning of a language, the learner’s active vocabulary will be more limited than their comprehension. In other words, their understanding will outstrip their ability to express themselves.

Big Brother Syndrome: A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement. Derived from a reality television programme of the same name, the term is now in widespread use by teachers and other professionals involved in work with young people. It expresses a concern not only about values, but also about the difficulties of motivating learners toward academic achievement or useful qualifications which learners themselves may dismiss as irrelevant to their goal of being thrust into a celebrity lifestyle, since their Big Brother role models often make a virtue of having achieved fame despite having little or no academic success at school.

Controlled schools: A specific kind of school in Northern Ireland, owned and funded by the *Education and Library Boards. Boards of governors are now taking more control. These are mainly Protestant schools and the Church is represented on the board of governors.

Regius professor:*Professorships (or chairs) at the *universities of Oxford and Cambridge and some Scottish universities, which were funded, or endowed, by the Crown and for which the Crown retains the right to nominate appointees. In practice, candidates are chosen on the advice of senior government ministers. The first such chair to be founded was that of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in the 15th century.

Summative assessment: *Assessment which takes place at the end of a course of study and provides the final judgment on, or ‘sums up,’ the candidate’s performance. The most common form of summative assessment is the end examination.

Tripos: A course of study leading to an *honours degree at Cambridge University, where the student is required to pass two tripos examinations in order to be awarded their *Bachelor of Arts. The name refers to the three-legged stool on which, in medieval times, graduates sat to deliver a satirical speech at their degree ceremony.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at “swine flue”. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

“Swine flu” or a strand of influenza A subtype “H1N1?” Try as federal officials might, the media continues to resist their call to term the “swine flu” the new strain of “H1N1″ virus.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was at pains to say, “This really isn’t swine [flu], it’s H1N1 virus.” He also explained why: “and it is significant because there are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message.” (At least ten countries have placed bans on the import of pork even though the World Health Organization has attested that H1N1 is an air-borne and not a food-borne virus.)

The hegemony of “swine flu” over “H1N1″ is even more peculiar given that the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) reports that the particular strand of H1N1 virus (which typically infect pigs) that is causing the current epidemic has not previously been reported in pigs and actually contains avian and human components. It was only on May 2, long after “swine flu” had gained rhetorical currency that the strain was found in pigs at a farm in Alberta, Canada. Even there the story has a twist - the pigs had gotten infected because of their contact with a farm worker who had recently returned from Mexico, and not the other way around - prompting some to suggest that the proper nomenclature ought to be “human flu” or “Mexican flu.”

But the media’s job is to transmit the news in the best way that rolls of one’s tongue, not deal with the fallout of their infelicitous use of words. To be fair, administration officials were slow to catch on. As late as April 26, two days before Vilsack’s press conference, the White House and Richard Besser of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were still referring to the “swine flu.” Clearly, the pork lobbyists aren’t going to win this battle and the malapropistic epidemic will continue. Administration officials should know that if they really wanted a working alternative to “swine flu,” they would have to do a lot better than a robotic scientific abbreviation.

Our current malapropism has an ancient pedigree. The 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic called the “Spanish Flu” didn’t start in Spain (and probably started in Kansas). This is ironic, because the “Spanish Flu” acquired its name only because Spain was a neutral country in WW1 and with no state censorship of news of the disease, was offering the most reliable information about it. This ended up generating the impression that the disease originated and was particularly widespread in Spain. Even when the media is not trying, it defines and shapes our reality.

Why does any of this matter? Because words characterize an issue in such a way as to insinuate a cause and to frame our reactions. Sometimes, words can even drive mass hysteria. Consider the “swine flu” outbreak in 1976, which claimed a single life at Fort Dix, NJ. Because this particular strain of virus looked a lot like the one that caused the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1920 (also misleadingly named), public health officials convinced President Gerald Ford to commence a mass immunization program for all Americans. The use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut was not without consequences. Of the 40 million Americans immunized, about 500 developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.

So let us pick our words carefully, lest our slovenly words presage our slovenly deeds.

 ***/5Joy Wells and her brother Byron live with their parents in a ramshackle old home in Spooking, a dying town on the outskirts of a booming suburb called Darlington. For Joy, a rabid fan of famous horror writer, E.A. Peugeot, Spooking is ever

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The narrative of this lovely, lyrical novel unfolds in short vignettes, like a delicate bird skimming just over the water, dipping now and then to leave deepening ripples on the surface.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on change in Obama’s administration. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Short of revolution in which blood is spilt and heads roll, change is a rare thing in the evolution of civilization. American presidents have tried to mimic change rhetorically - the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier, the New World Order - but the truth is the whole point of a democratic system of election is to allow for peaceful change, which is to say that elections are designed to preserve continuity amidst change, which is to say that in the end we value continuity more than we do change. And so President-elect Barack Obama has correctly intoned that the nation has only one president at a time, indicating his resistance to taking responsibility when he has no authority, while also making a subtler point that while the torch passes and the persons change, it is the torch that matters.

We are allowed to dream dreams of change in a campaign, but when government starts, the flights of rhetorical fancy and fantasy must end. So we really shouldn’t be surprised that President-Elect Obama’s first crop of nominations are all veterans from the last Democratic administration. Whereas the Republicans have built up a cadre of accomplished officials and advisors having won 7 out of the last 11 presidential elections, Obama has no such luxury. He needs knowledgeable people as well as experienced politicos to get any job done. His ends may be different, but Obama’s means will likely be strikingly similar to the men who have come before him. In every action since he was elected, Obama has proved Hillary Clinton right that you need experience to bring about change.

Campaigns may all be run on the message of change, but government is about continuity and Obama should not allow the symbolism of his campaign to interfere with the staffing of his administration. Nothing - short of revolution and a constitutional convention - starts on a clean slate. Washington is what it is, and he who presumes to be able to sweep in and replace the reality of sticky institutions and entrenched interests without the paradoxical aid of these institutions or interests has allowed the victory of an election to get to his head.

Having sounded the clarion call for change all year, the president-elects appears to be bracing for the trench-warfare ahead by surrounding himself with a team of capable rivals. Ours is a stubborn political system rigged against change - from horizontal to vertical centralization - that even united party control of government may not surmount. Individual by individual, interest by interest, institution by institution, nation by nation, President-elect Barack Obama will have to bring about change that we believed in.

In the article below, written several weeks ago before Obama was President-elect, scholar Steven Niven, Executive Editor of the African American National Biography and the forthcoming Dictionary of African Biography, examined the historic candidacy of Barack Obama within the context of the civil rights movement and the changing nature of black politics. This article originally appeared on The Oxford African American Studies Center.

Barack Obama Jr., the first African American presidential nominee of a major political party, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. His birth coincided with a crucial turning point in the history of American race relations, although like many turning points it did not seem so at the time. Few observers believed that Jim Crow was in its death throes. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, less than 1 percent of southern black students attended integrated schools. Southern colleges had witnessed token integration at best. In early 1961 Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes integrated the University of Georgia, but James Meredith’s application to enter Ole Miss that same year was met by Mississippi authorities with a “carefully calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity,” in the words of federal judge John Minor Wisdom. Despite the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and promises from the new administration of President John F. Kennedy, the voting rights of African Americans remained virtually nonexistent in large swathes of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

However, the Freedom Rides that began in the summer of 1961 and the voting rights campaign that Robert P. Moses initiated in McComb County, Mississippi, in the very week of Obama’s birth, signaled a hardening of African American resistance. There was among a cadre of activists a new determination to confront both segregation and the extreme caution of the Kennedy administration on civil rights. Later that fall, Bob Moses wrote a note from the freezing drunk-tank in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he and eleven others were being held for attempting to register black voters. “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected.”

Over the next three years, Moses, Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer, James Forman, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bob Zellner, and thousands of activists devoted their lives to shattering that iceberg. Some, including Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner gave their lives in that cause. They took the civil rights struggle to the heart of the segregationist South: to McComb, Jackson, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Albany, Georgia, and to Birmingham, Alabama. By filling county jails and prison farms, by facing fire hoses, truncheons, and worse, they ultimately made segregation and disfranchisement untenable, paving the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Obama’s childhood experience of the dramatic changes wrought by the 1960s, seen from the vantage point of Hawaii and Indonesia, necessarily differed from most African American contemporaries in rural Mississippi or urban Detroit. But it would be a mistake to argue that he was untouched by those developments. His black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr. met his white Kansan mother, Ann Dunham, at the University of Hawaii, where the older Obama had gone to study on a program founded by his fellow Luo, Tom Mboya. Mboya’s program received financial support from civil rights stalwarts, including Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier. After Obama Sr. left his wife and child behind in 1963, Ann Dunham became the dominant figure in young Barry Obama’s formative years, and Obama has argued that the values his mother taught greatly shaped his worldview. Those values were largely secular, but grounded in the church-based interracial idealism of the early 1960s civil rights movement—the beloved community inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric, Fannie Lou Hamer’s heroic activism, and Mahalia Jackson’s gospel singing.

After returning from Indonesia in 1971 to live with his white grandparents and go to high school in Hawaii, Obama’s formal education was abetted by his friendship with “Frank,” an African American drinking buddy of his grandfather, who tutored the young Obama in the history of black progressive struggles. The scholar Gerald Horne has speculated that Frank may have been Frank Marshall Davis, a pioneering radical journalist in the 1930s whose jazz criticism and poetry was influential in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late 1940s.

Obama’s work as an anti-poverty activist in Chicago in the 1980s likewise built on the legacy of Arthur Brazier and other 1960s community organizers influenced by Saul Alinsky. Arriving in Chicago in the era of Harold Washington also helped school Obama in the ways of Chicago politics. As the director of a major “get-out-the vote” drive in Illinois in the 1992 elections, he helped elect both Bill Clinton to the presidency and Carol Moseley Braun to the U.S. Senate. Connections through his wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, who lived in Chicago’s working-class black Southside, a schoolfriend of Santita Jackson (daughter of Jesse Jackson), and an aide to Mayor Richard Daley certainly helped Obama win friends and influence the right people in Chicago’s Democratic Party. The luster of his fame as the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, as well as his self-evident political and rhetorical skills undoubtedly marked Obama out from the general pack of political hopefuls. In 1996 he easily won a seat in the Illinois Senate, representing a district that encompassed the worlds of both “Obama the University of Chicago Law Professor”—liberal, wealthy, and cosmopolitan Hyde Park—and “Obama the community organizer”—the district’s poorer neighborhoods which housed the headquarters of Operation Breadbasket.

Obama’s achievements in the Illinois legislature were solid, though not spectacular. His cool demeanor, cerebral approach, and links to Hyde Park liberalism irked established black leaders in Springfield, veterans of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, who viewed Obama as a Johnny-Come-Lately who had not paid his dues. The charge that he was somehow “not black enough” came to the fore in his unsuccessful primary challenge for the U.S. congressional seat of the former Black Panther, Bobby Rush, in 2000. Although Obama secured a majority of white primary voters, Rush won the vast majority of black voters and defeated Obama by a margin of 2 to 1, successfully depicting him as a Harvard-educated, Hyde Park elitist at odds with the more prosaic values of the mainly black working-class district.

Despite that setback, Obama stunned political observers four years later by winning the 2004 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Illinois, and then crushing his (admittedly very weak) Republican opponent in the general election, Alan Keyes. Keyes—a black, ultraconservative, fundamentalist pro-lifer who had been a minor diplomat in the Ronald Reagan administration, had few direct links to Illinois—was placed on the ballot after the primaries because the Republican primary winner had dropped out following a sex scandal. Obama also benefited from a well-received keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston. It was at the DNC that most Americans first heard and saw the self-described “skinny kid with a funny name,” who urged his fellow citizens to look beyond the fierce partisanship that had characterized politics since the 1990s.

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red [Republican] States and Blue [Democratic] States,” he told the watching millions.

But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Obama’s arrival in the Senate in January 2005 provoked significant media interest, verging on what some have called Obama-mania. He was, after all, only the fifth African American to serve in that body in 215 years, following Hiram Rhodes Revels, Blanche Bruce, Edward Brooke, and Moseley-Braun. But media scrutiny and the popular interest in the new candidate went far beyond the attention given to Moseley-Braun in 1992. In part, this was because Obama’s election symbolized a broader generational shift in African American politics. Black political gains in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, were largely achieved by a generation of politicians who came of age in the southern civil right movement, like John Lewis, Eva Clayton, Vernon Jordan, Andrew Young, or in urban Democratic politics, such as Charles Rangel in New York and Willie Brown in San Francisco. Obama was not the only Ivy League–educated black politician to emerge in the early 2000s. In 2002, Artur Davis, like Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate won election to the House of Representatives from Alabama; in 2005, Deval Patrick, another Harvard Law graduate, became only the second African American elected governor of a state (Massachusetts) since Reconstruction; and in 2006 Cory Booker (Yale Law School and Queens College Oxford) and Michael Nutter (University of Pennsylvania) were elected mayors of Newark and Philadelphia, respectively. Harold Ford Jr., a Penn grad and Tennessee congressman narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race in Tennessee the same year. Patrick and Nutter are a few years older than Obama, while Davis (b. 1967), Booker (b. 1969), and Ford (b. 1970) are slightly younger. In terms of ideology, there are also similarities in these politicians’ commitment to post-partisanship, although Ford, now leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Davis, have been more willing to adopt socially, as well as economically conservative positions, so as to broaden their appeal as possible statewide candidates in the South.

But perhaps the most remarkable facet of Obama-mania is the rapidity with which the freshman Senator was discussed as a possible presidential candidate in 2012 or 2016. Or rather that would have been the most remarkable facet, had Obama not sought and then won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008! It is hard to think of a comparable American politician whose rise has been so swift, dramatic, or unforeseen, except maybe that other, most famous Illinois politician, Abraham Lincoln.

Whether Obama follows Lincoln as the second U.S. president from Illinois is unknown at this time of writing, five weeks from Election Day, 2008. At the very least, Obama’s candidacy marks another tremor in the iceberg that Bob Moses faced in that Magnolia drunk-tank in the fall of 1961, and that James Meredith faced down while integrating Old Miss in the face of a full-force white riot a year later. It is, then, all too fitting—and a reasonable marker of American progress in race relations—that forty-six years later Barack Obama became the first African American to participate in a presidential debate, not just in Mississippi, but at Ole Miss, itself, the hallowed symbol of segregationist resistance.

*****On a trip to Wales to study photography and earn her graduate degree, KayLynn Deveney stumbled across Albert Hastings, and old man who lived alone in an apartment near where she was staying. In getting to know him, she realized that Albert was a

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Early today we posted an article about health care reform by Lawrence J. Schneiderman, M.D, a Professor Emeritus at UCSD Medical School and Visiting Scholar in the Program in Medicine and Human Values at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. His new book, Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles, looks at end of life decisions from both the medical and philosophical perspectives and advises on how to best make tough decisions. In the excerpt below Schneiderman emphasizes the importance of communicating your end-of-life preferences.

One of my patients, Earl Adams (not his real name), an African-American in his late seventies, was afflicted with severe Parkinsonism. Not only could he no longer play the organ for Sunday church services, he could barely move and relied on his devoted wife for even the most basic needs. She got him out of bed in the morning, helped him to the toilet, bathed him, fed him, kept him upright during the day, and returned him to bed at night. So successful was she at these tasks that whenever she brought him to see me he was always clean-shaven and meticulously dressed, complete with jacket and tie. (more…)

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written and illustrated by Matt Faulkner Simon and Schuster 2008 LuLu and Jelly can't believe that Abbey saw a fountain in town that bubbled colored water; they have to see this for themselves. When their Uncle Jack needs to make a run into town the kids beg to go with so they can investigate. Oh, but this is the Deep South, and it's mid 1960's, and the town is crowded with freedom riders and

 ***Theodosia Throckmorton (Theo for short), the young daughter of the curator of the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London, is very busy these days. The year is 1906, and the world’s western powers are busily excavating the treasure

How Youth Changed America in the 60's Laban Carrick Hill Little Brown 2007 Finally. Now we're getting somewhere. In an amazingly clear and concise 175 pages or so the history and influence of the Boomer generation is laid out for a young adult audience. Starting with the post-war population boom and suburban expansion, the book focuses on the various key elements and movements that brought

A twentieth-century life
by Marc Aronson
Viking 2007

Part of a new series of biographies put out by Viking I was really looking forward to this one on RFK. I was hoping we had finally come to the place where the history of the latter half of the twentieth century would balance out the tri-war arc (Revolutionary, Civil and Second World War) that tends to dominate in textbooks. While Marc Aronson's contribution to this correction might have been welcome the book suffers from trying too hard to do too much.

In telling RFK's life story Aronson goes for a big-picture approach, attempting to give the scope and scale of RFK's world as well as his world view in attempting to define the man. In and of itself this isn't a bad thing but it takes a deft hand to draft a portrait that is both clear and contextual, and it takes greater caution with the way that information is supported. A person's life isn't always encapsulated in easy-to-understand chapters but like any good story it has a beginning, middle and end and, unless the subject has invented a time machine, generally moves in a forward direction through time.

No, I'm not suggesting that the only way to tell a person's life is a narrative a-to-b sequence of events, but the narrative being told needs to feel like it's moving forward in a way that will make sense to the reader and in the end provide them with a clear portrait of the subject. There are moments where history is condensed, where events months apart are casually referenced as taking place one after the other. Where dates are necessary they are given, but often they are presented as reference for other events in a way that provides both milieu and is deceptive.

Let's also be honest about the fact that most biographies written for children are provided as resources for school lessons, not likely pleasure reading, and in that light require a certain level of comprehension so that they can be used in reports. They can even be biased (and Aronson shows hint of his love of Bobby every time he makes sure to underline the man's faults, like an apologist) so long as they honest and clear in their appraisals.

Aronson's picture of RFK is presented deep within the soup of history that belongs to the Kennedy clan, alternately zooming in and out to show Bobby's place and influences. At times, especially in the first half of the book where his older brothers are showcased as foils, the book feels more like a biography of the Kennedy's than an examination of RFK. The book is muddled and slow to gain momentum: you could easily skip the forward, introduction and first two chapters of the book. Chapter One is designed to be one of those book-ending vignettes of Bobby on the presidential campaign trail just before he is assassinated but it presumes a reader born at the end of the Clinton administration has enough historical knowledge to appreciate the tension of this pending event. Aronson makes those sort of assumptions throughout which I think is a mistake.

In an attempt to keep the text breezy Aronson traffics in the unsupported statement, or sentences that must be taken on face value but still raise questions. At the democratic convention he reports that Lyndon Johnson and his aids were disorganized and inefficient, compared to Bobby and his crew, but doesn't explain in what ways or how this was crucial to the process. Further on he makes cursory mention of the buying of delegates in advance of the convention assuming the reader both understands how convention politics works, to say nothing of the electoral college. Throughout Aronson presents information in a way that only makes me want a second opinion, which if nothing else is a distraction from the story at hand.

He also makes spotty use of the attempt to make the book relevant to modern readers that tend to make it look silly. To bolster the idea of RFK coming from East Coast wealth but able to make himself empathetic with farm workers and civil rights activists Aronson points to the tough talk in rap music, to rappers who talk about "keeping it real", while raking in wealth and fame that pull them far from the real streets they rap about. In trying to discuss how unmoored RFK was following his brother's assassination he uses Phillip Pullman's example of what happens when a character in one of the 'His Dark Materials' books loses their animal daemons. What Aronson fails to point out in all this "relevance" is that while RFK was shrewed about his public image it was only after his older brother was assassinated RFK and he was finally free of the insecurities he had been held under since birth, that what he lost was also a personality pegged to always trying to prove he was as good as his brothers, to himself, to his father, to the world. I think that might have deserved a paragraph.

In the end I do think Up Close: Robert F. Kennedy can serve as a catalyst for a history-loving teen or tween to use as a jumping off point for delving into the 1960's. One look at the bibliography full of adult titles proves that there's a need for more age-appropriate materials but that shouldn't prove too much of a hindrance to the hungry.

There are other books in the Up Close series -- I'm looking forward to seeing what Ellen Levine does with Rachel Carson, and another on Johnny Cash by Anne E. Neimark that I might check out -- so I'm going to hold out hope that this was an anomaly.