Oxford University Press's Blog, page 168

What is coercive control and why is it so difficult to recognize?

Engaging in controlling and/or coercive behaviour in intimate or familial relationships became a new criminal offence in England and Wales in December 2015. Coercive Control involves a pattern of abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten the victim. Example behaviours included in this legislation are isolation from friends and family, deprivation of basic needs, monitoring behaviour and time, controlling a victim’s life and/or finances, and may include physical violence.  The introduction of this offence was welcomed for recognising the cumulative impact of various forms of domestic abuse and for encouraging police and other criminal justice agencies to move beyond an incident-led and physical violence-based understanding of domestic abuse. However, four years on since the legislation was enacted and with no compulsory national level training or support, what has actually changed?

Coercive control as an offence carries implications for how we record and understand coercive control and domestic abuse victimisation more broadly in the UK. Despite recent figures suggesting an increase in recorded crimes of coercive control (from approximately 4,000 in 2016-17 to over 9,000 in 2018-19), prosecutions and convictions for the offence remain consistently low. This is in contrast to other domestic-abuse related crimes, namely those that result in actual bodily harm, which are 20% more likely to result in an arrest and a charge. Furthermore, the Office for National Statistics recently removed coercive and controlling behaviour questions from the Crime Survey for England and Wales because of uncertainty as to whether the questions were adequately capturing victims of the offence.

Research suggests that when coercive control crimes are reported, police officers often think that this will be hard to prove. At the same time officers miss evidential opportunities by, for example, not fully investigating coercive control disclosed in witness statements, failing to seek third party witness statements, or not making use of the body camera footage they may have recorded.

Further issues with the police response to this offence become evident when compared with other domestic abuse-related crimes. For example, it appears that some 87% of domestic abuse cases that resulted in actual bodily harm could have also been recorded as crimes of coercive control. In other words, police officers are continuing to miss important opportunities for responding to a repeated course of abusive behaviour.

Issues with police responses to coercive control highlight the potential benefits of additional resources and training. The College of Policing has developed and tested a new risk assessment that specifically takes into account coercive controlling behaviour. However, resources and training should go further. Criminal justice agencies, including the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Judiciary, need to be able to recognize coercive control at all points of contact people have with the criminal justice process. This is supported in the proposed Domestic Abuse Bill. However, delays in the delivery of training and a lack of clarity as to when Parliament will enact the bill, mean that issues with recognising and responding to coercive control will likely persist.

Featured image credit: “Grayscale Photograph of Woman Touching Her Eyes” by Juan Pablo Arenas. CC0 via Pexels.

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Eight things you didn’t know about George Eliot

Throughout her life, George Eliot was known by many names – from Mary Anne Evans at birth, to Marian Evans Lewes in her middle age, to George Eliot in her fiction – with the latter name prevailing in the years since her death through the continued popularity of her novels. Eliot has long been recognised as one of the greatest Victorian writers, in life and in death, having published seven acclaimed novels and a number of poems, in addition to her work as a translator and a journalist.

Today marks George Eliot’s 200th birthday. To celebrate this esteemed writer, discover eight facts you may not know about George Eliot.

Before writing fiction, George Eliot was the editor of a radical left-wing journal.
At the age of 30, Eliot moved to London, where she launched her career in journalism through John Chapman, who specialized in publishing works of a left-wing or sceptical tendency. The same year Eliot moved to London, Chapman bought the great radical periodical, the Westminster Review, first set up in the 1820s to further the cause of political and social reform in the long run-up to the Reform Act of 1832. Chapman was the nominal editor, while Eliot – from a mixture of diffidence, modesty, and fear of playing a public role – was happy to remain behind the scenes, doing the work and letting Chapman put his name to it. Eliot did however sign her name – Marian Evans – to the articles she wrote for the periodical, and became one of its best and most widely admired reviewers.George Eliot was highly critical of other female novelists.
The popular view of George Eliot is that she was a serious woman who wrote highly serious novels. She was at the other end of the spectrum from writers whose works she criticised heavily in an essay published in the Westminster Review in 1856, titled “Silly novels by lady novelists.” Following this scathing attack on frivolous novels, Eliot set out to demonstrate how women should write novels.Queen Victoria and George Eliot were born in the same year.
George Eliot was one of several major influential Victorian figures born in 1819, along with Queen Victoria herself. Victoria and Eliot never met, but the two were connected. In 1859 – the year they both turned 40 – Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede. Victoria enjoyed the book so much that she read it multiple times, including to her husband Prince Albert, and even commissioned watercolour paintings of two scenes from the book.
Image: George Eliot by Sir Frederick Burton, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.George Eliot’s love affairs led to public scandal.
Eliot did not follow Victorian social conventions in her romantic relationships, which led to scandal. Her first relationship was with George Lewes, a regular contributor to the Westminster Review, who had entered into an open marriage with Agnes Jervis twelve years earlier. Although he left Jervis in 1852, Lewes could not sue for divorce; under the terms of the law, he had condoned his wife’s adultery by registering the births of her children by another man in his own name. As a result, Eliot and Lewes lived together as unwed partners for the remainder of Lewes’ life.Marian Evans adopted a pseudonym to separate her novels from her scandalous life.
Some may assume Eliot chose to use a pseudonym due to the misogyny of Victorian society, but this would be reductive. Marian Evans was known as the freethinking radical of the Westminster Review, and the woman who was living with a married man; she needed the protection of a pseudonym. But why “George Eliot”? She picked the name – as she later told her husband, John Cross – because George was her long-term partner Lewes’ first name and Eliot was “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.”Charles Dickens suspected that George Eliot was a woman working under a male pseudonym.
Dickens wrote two notable letters to Eliot: one before and another after he discovered the author was in fact a woman. The first, addressed “My Dear Sir,” expressed his suspicions about her gender, as the collection of short stories in Scenes of a Clerical Life (1857) bore “such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now.” Due in part to the sexism faced by women writers in the 19th century, Evans reluctantly maintained the male mask even after she read his letter. In Dickens’s second letter, written the following year once he discovered her gender, he makes it clear that being female brought no discredit to her, expressing his delight with Adam Bede (1859) and respectfully addressing her as “My Dear Madam.”A great deal of Eliot’s works focus on social history and the use of accents to pre-determine social status. 
Some critics of Eliot have addressed her preoccupation with social history. One critic, Lynda Mugglestone, argues that Eliot’s novels, from the early Scenes of Clerical Life to the late Daniel Deronda, “contain recurrent descriptions of accent, of attitudes to accent, and of attitudes to linguistic correctness,” examining Eliot’s use of language to expose the different worth inherent in sympathy, and the snobbery that comes from idea of linguistic correctness that pre-determine social status.George Eliot was ahead of the game in calling out anti-Semitism.
The opening scene of George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, was inspired by a trip to the spa town of Bad Homburg where she witnessed a game of roulette at Europe’s oldest casino. Bad Homburg lies only a few kilometres north of Frankfurt, which at the time was a centre for Jewish culture. Her experiences here, along with her lifelong interest in Judaism, influenced Eliot to incorporate a positive representation of Judaism throughout the novel. According to Eliot, the English were bigoted and narrow-minded, and with her latest novel she hoped to “rouse the imagination of” her readers “to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.”

Though today we recognise just how remarkable George Eliot was, this wasn’t always the case. Following a series of dry biographies written shortly after her death, Eliot’s reputation as a great writer in life temporarily declined. But, on the centenary of her birth, Virginia Woolf began the true rehabilitation of George Eliot’s reputation with an essay in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she famously remarked that Middlemarch was “one of the few English books written for grown-up people,” causing the appreciation of George Eliot’s greatness, and interest in all aspects of her life and work, to be restored for at least another 100 years.

Featured image: Bookshelf Old Library by Free-Photos, public domain via Pixabay.

The post Eight things you didn’t know about George Eliot appeared first on OUPblog.

George Eliot 200th anniversary timeline

George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans) was born 22 November 1819, 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of her birth. Eliot is considered one of the most important and influential writers in the history of English literature and her novels are often praised as being the prototypes for the modern novel, full of rich detail of English country life and complete with characters whose motivations are laid bare by the author’s probing psychological dissections. Her masterpiece Middlemarch represents the culmination of Eliot’s recurring theme: the intelligent girl swept away by life’s endless parade of tempting adventures only to be pulled back by Victorian convention and stymied by society’s expectations of her gender.

We’ve created a timeline to showcase Eliot’s life, ranging from her upbringing, the beginning of her writing career using a pseudonym and becoming George Eliot, to her personal life and marriages.



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What lies behind Asia’s thriving shadow education industry

In another side of the country so glamorously showcased in the hit move Crazy Rich Asians, families in Singapore spent a staggering $1.4 billion last year on academic enrichment for their children.

Behind this eye popping figure lies a thriving shadow education industry that provides a mind-boggling diversity of services, from brain stimulation classes for pre-schoolers to language immersion holiday camps and robotics workshops, not to mention grade-oriented academic tuition. It is no wonder that there is such fervour for education given that Singapore prides itself as a country that has excelled academically. In the global index by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) based on international tests taken by 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science, Singapore has been placed at or among the very top in reading, math, and science. Its universities are also ranked among the world’s best for research and teaching.

But these metrics of success also belie the tremendous effort and toil that parents put into their children’s academic achievement. Parents engage in continual communication with schools, private tutors, and domestic help to supervise their children’s schedules, schoolwork, and enrichment activities closely. Leading up to major examinations, mothers are also known to quit their jobs or shorten their working hours to provide their children with personal guidance and emotional support. Similarly, mothers have been observed to manage the household tightly, pouring their energies into higher order responsibilities such as overseeing their children’s academic work, while delegating rudimentary caregiving and housekeeping duties to hired help.

The shadow education industry and its services further exacerbate the parenting burden.  Academic cram schools in particular are geared towards shaping high performers and involve additional hours of classroom instruction and homework, thereby inflating the amount of time children spend on academic work. Quite apart from the high costs of such classes, they impose additional stress on children and a growing parental burden to fund and coordinate their children’s increasingly intense academic schedules. Many parents personally take their children to and from private tuition and enrichment classes, and even attend relevant parenting workshops and talks to better inform themselves.

Singapore is by no means the only country to demonstrate this intense interest in educational advancement. The zeal for academic achievement and the demand for shadow education is endemic across the Asian middle class. After all, in Asia, education is highly valued and is almost universally regarded as the guaranteed path to upward social mobility.

This belief in the importance of after-school academic reinforcement is increasingly accompanied by an interest in developing children’s excellence in extra-curricular areas such as sport and the arts. “Enrichment classes” in swimming, taekwondo, soccer, ballet, piano, violin, and visual arts are widely offered and in great demand throughout cities in Asia. Parents believe that exposure to such activities can aid in their children’s personal development, while also lending them an edge when applying for places in sought-after schools. Ultimately, such parental investment raises the competition among parents (and therefore children) to outdo one another in the race for outstanding academic and extra-curricular performance.

Essentially all these efforts to achieve academic excellence translate into highly scheduled lives for parents and children, as well as loftier expectations for children to perform well in multiple realms. In sum, the burden on parents to plan and micro-coordinate their lives around their children’s busy schedules and diverse obligations is hefty.

Fundamentally, it’s important to pay greater attention to how societal norms around academic aspirations are influencing parenting practices and the well-being of families, parents, and children. We also need to make a more a more concerted effort to understand the roots of academic pressure and manage shifts in academic landscape to prevent education from straying from its core goal of bettering our next generation.

Featured image credit: UTown, National University of Singapore by smuconlaw.  CC BY-SA 2.0 via flickr.

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Etymology and delusion, Part 1

In 1931, Ernest Weekley, the author of a still popular English etymological dictionary and many excellent books on the history of English words, brought out an article titled “Our Early Etymologists.” It appeared in Quarterly Review 257. In our fast-paced, Internet-dominated world, few people are inclined to leaf through old periodicals. Nor do they  always realize how interesting and informative The Gentleman’s Magazine, Edinburgh Review, The Nineteenth Century, Long Ago, The Dial, and others like them on both sides of the Atlantic were. I constantly sing praises to Notes and Queries, but the world of popular journals was wide, and contributions by prominent scholars made them truly valuable.

Weekley applied the term monomaniac to the people who traced the words of all languages to a single source. The idea that inspired such researchers should be evaluated in the context of that time. Old linguists believed that the protolanguage had been Hebrew or Aramaic, because Adam and Eve spoke it in Paradise. Allegedly, the Tower of Babel made havoc of that language but did not ruin it: the fragments could, it seemed, be compared and reveal their past. Classical Greek and Latin were also considered as viable candidates for the sought-after fountainhead.  As late as the eighteenth century, etymologists derived English, German, and Dutch words directly from those three languages. As always, there were aberrations: an ingenious scholar “proved” that Dutch did not go back to Hebrew, but was the language spoken by Adam and Eve. Today, deriding those experiments is not worth the trouble. More important is the lesson such experiments teach us.

Speaking the protolanguage. The fall of man by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Amazingly, it appears that tracing words of all languages to any single source is not too hard. In any case, nobody who embarked on this mad venture came home empty-handed. I am the proud owner of a modern dictionary that shows how hundreds of various words owe their origin to Russian. Another dictionary prefers Arabic. Arabic is related to Hebrew and Aramaic, so that the prospect of Paradise Regained begins to look real. Such authors are usually motivated by considerations of national pride. Probably the best-known example of this delusion is the dictionary of English by Charles Mackay (1877; the Scottish pronunciation of Kay is ki, not kay, as this name is pronounced in the United States). The title is The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe…, though the focus is on English. Mackay had the book published by a renowned press (Trübner), but out of pocket. Sadly, Mackay was a good poet and wrote several worthy books about the history of English words. Even sadder is the fact that his dictionary became well-known, and some people still refer to it.

The Tower of Babel, the creator of the departments of foreign languages. Photo by Sibeaster. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

An even more ingenious monomaniac was John Bellenden Ker (JBK). The inspiration for his gigantic project came from idioms. It seemed to him that idioms are silly and are therefore garbled versions of some formerly much more straightforward sayings. His idea was not totally indefensible. A look at the literary production of the post-Classical epoch (that is, the prose and poetry in Old and Middle English, German, etc.) will reveal rather many similes (a ship was likened to a swan, or a hero was said to look like a tall stalk dwarfing low plants around him), but usually no metaphors. In reading Beowulf, one won’t come across something like “The outcome of the battle with Grendel’s mother was unclear, not by a long chalk” or “Grendel died, and the Danes were on cloud nine.” In those days, the king would not say to his subject: “You are pulling my leg.”

If you have mastered Old English grammar and have a good dictionary of this language, you will understand everything written in that language. In Germanic, only Old Icelandic had all kinds of metaphorical expressions. The image behind them was usually clear, as, for instance, in the modern English phrase about something left on the back burner. Our modern idioms do not usually predate the Renaissance. Even when we wonder why we say her mind went woolgathering or under what circumstances the cat was let out of the bag, we still assume that some people, even if under the circumstances unknown to us, gathered wool and felt distracted, and that the cat and the bag refer to the familiar objects. We are also ready to agree that some colorful expression reached English from the Bible, from another language, or from someone’s (for instance, Shakespeare’s) idiosyncratic usage. Granted, some misunderstanding could produce an idiom, whose wording makes no sense to us. Finally, some words can disappear but survive in an idiom. Let them: we needn’t worry what the lurch looks like in which we are often left.

JBK had a much more general idea. He wrote: “My conviction is, the words in their original forms did convey the import they were used for at the time, but in the course of use, and through the mutability peculiar to our language, those forms have been confounded with others, of a similar or nearly similar pronunciation, which have subsequently found their way into the tongue and supplanted them.” He reconstructed an Old Low Saxon dialect resembling Modern Dutch and “translated” hundreds of words and idioms into it. I’ll cite two examples.

A toad under a harrow as a concept of etymology. The Red Skeleton Show on CBS, 1963. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

“TOOTH I believe to be as teeth in the collective sense; the se [formerly tothe]. Toe u’s; q. e. to is you; to, is yourself; without to, you are nothing; to and you are one; to, is you all. Toe, has the sense of ended, finished, closed, as when we say the door is to, that is, shut, and also that of entrance, approach, as when we say he is gone to London…. The feminizing terminal s of the Dutch [old form of our language] shades off into th; groes and growth are the same word.….” (p. 165 of Volume 1), and so it continues for another page and a quarter. You may say that the style and reasoning are unmistakably those of a madman. But don’t hurry. JBK was a serious botanist, a scholar respected in his field. Also, he was well aware of the work of his predecessors, but shrugged it off or dismissed with contempt.

I’ll also reproduce his etymology of an idiom. He cited the phrase to live like a toad under a harrow and explained its meaning (his explanations are detailed and often useful): “To have lost all share in the control of your own happiness from want of resolution; to suffer indignities from one over whom you were constituted the master, he that should have been looked up to by the other; and thus to permit the order of things to be reversed in regard to yourself.” This is the translation of the English idiom into “Low Saxon”: “T’u leve lijcke er dood, ander er haar vrouw; q. e. to you love is like death, the case is different with your wife; your affection is as painful as death to you, while your wife is delighted by your suffering…. T’u, to you. Lever, liefde, love. Lijcke, is like, resembles. Er, in your case, there. Dood, death, German tod. Ander, quite another affair, quite otherwise, the reverse. Er, there. Haar frouw, your wife, unless it is heer vrouw, and thus master wife, and I think it was. D and t are the same sound. V a mere aspirate and not sounded between to rs” (p. 39). I have left out a few lines about wives abusing their husbands.

Beware of monomaniacs. No entry by Morgaine. CC by-sa 2.0 via Flickr.

What a miracle of ingenuity, what an anguished cry of a henpecked or cuckolded husband! There are two volumes of this incredible stuff. The title of the book is An Essay on the Archaeology of Our Popular Phrases, and Nursery Rhymes (1837). Vol. I is mainly about idioms; Vol. II is devoted almost entirely to words. But JBK also wrote four volumes (!) in which he purported to explain the true meaning of nursery rhymes. In the Essay, only a few specimens of such poems are given, but the linguistic base underlying that branch of his research is the same. He believed that all ditties were cleverly disguised anticlerical compositions, and “restored” their initial text, allegedly forgotten with time, in “Low Saxon.”

Beware of amateur etymologists. Some of them are deranged and devilishly ingenious.

Feature image credit: No Entry by jill, jellidonut. CC by-sa 2.0 via Flickr.

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Announcing the shortlist for the Place of the Year 2019

Over the past few weeks, hundreds of you voted on our eight nominees for Place of the Year 2019. While competition was fierce, we have our final four: New Zealand, Greenland, the Palace of Westminster, and the Atmosphere! But which one is most emblematic of 2019? Which location has truly impacted global discourse? Refresh your memory with our spotlights below and vote for your pick to represent 2019 as the Place of the Year!

New Zealand
During Friday prayers on 15 March, a white supremacist terrorist attacked Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center, both in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring over 40 others. These attacks were the first mass shooting in New Zealand since 1997, and the terrorist livestreamed his attack on Al Noor Mosque via Facebook. One week after the attacks, 20,000 people gathered there to pay their respects in a nationwide moment of silence and prayer.

On 21 March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles, and the legislation was voted into place by Parliament in a vote of 119-1 on 10 April. The swiftness of the initial ban prompted international conversations about gun control, racism, and tolerance, which continued in New Zealand in particular and prompted even more legislative action. In September, New Zealand lawmakers presented further gun control plans, including proposals to create a firearm registry, tighten gun license requirements, increase penalties for firearms offences, and more. Current owners of semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles have until 20 December, 2019, to surrender their now-illegal weapons to the government’s buy-back program.

The terrorist has been charged with 92 crimes, including murder, attempted murder, and terrorism, though he denies all charges. While the trial was originally scheduled to begin on 4 May, 2020, the High Court of New Zealand agreed to delay the trial to 2 June 2020, to avoid overlapping with Ramadan.

Greenland
In an unprecedented loss, Greenland (roughly 80% of which is covered in ice) had two large ice-melts, culminating in a record-breaking loss of 58 billion tons of ice in one year—40 billion more tons than the average. In November, Greenland’s main airport Kangerlussuaq Airport reported that they will cease to operate civilian flights within five years due to runways cracking as the permafrost melts below them. As a result, Greenland is building a new airport in a more stable location.

In the political realm, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly implied that he would like to purchase Greenland from Denmark multiple times (despite the fact that Greenland is self-governing and not owned by Denmark). Trump’s – and China’s – interest in Greenland mainly revolves around the nation’s growing geopolitical significance: As polar ice caps melt, new North Atlantic shipping lanes have become available through Greenland’s waters. The island is also home to vast deposits of natural resources such as coal, copper, iron ore, zinc, and other rare minerals. Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland has been denounced by some Greenlanders as a dangerous example of imperialism.

Palace of Westminster
Brexit has been dragging on since 2016, but since July, the politics involved have become uncharacteristically chaotic. After her third Brexit proposal was voted down, Prime Minister Theresa May resigned on 7 June. Notoriously unconventional Boris Johnson was elected and promptly achieved a new record by facing seven consecutive defeats in his first seven votes in Parliament. In a bold, bipartisan act, some Conservatives joined the opposition to pass a law ensuring that Britain could not leave the European Union without a deal – an act which prompted Prime Minister Johnson to expel 21 members from the conservative party (the largest number to leave a party at once since 1981).

In an unprecedented act, Johnson, with the support of the Queen, announced his intent to close Parliament for four weeks. A month later, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled the suspension unlawful on the basis that Johnson secured the Queen’s support by giving her false information (again, unprecedented in modern memory).

After resuming, Parliament approved the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill – essentially agreeing to continue debating the bill piece-by-piece, something which no previously proposed Withdrawal Agreement has achieved – but denied a 31 October exit. The new Brexit deadline is 31 January 2020 – as long as the General Election, called by Johnson, and set to occur on 12 December this year, doesn’t drastically change Parliament – or Britain’s future – yet again.

The Atmosphere 
The summer of 2019 tied for hottest summer on record in the northern hemisphere, continuing the trend of extreme weather set by deadly cold winter temperatures, heavy snowfalls, and catastrophic mudslides and typhoons worldwide. Climate change claimed its first Icelandic glacier as a victim, where researchers marked the event with memorial plaque, and Arctic sea ice experienced the largest September decrease in 1,000 years. All of these climate events are driven by the carbon dioxide being poured into the oceans and Earth’s atmosphere by human activities, from corporations’ carbon footprints to the deliberate burning of the Amazon in exchange for timber and livestock pastures.

In September, the International Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report that the effects of climate change are being felt much more severely, and sooner, than previously anticipated; hundred-year floods are projected to become a yearly occurrence by 2050 in many locations, and global sea levels may rise as much as three feet by 2100 (this is 12% higher than the most recent 2013 estimate). Despite the dire warnings, 2019 is projected to be the year with the highest carbon emissions of all time, and while the fact that the ozone hole is the smallest it’s been since its discovery might sound like good news, it’s actually being kept on the smaller side by the record heat in our atmosphere.

Voting closes Wednesday, 4 December – be sure to check back on Monday, 9 December to find out the winner!

Place of the Year 2019 Shortlist

What do your friends think should be Place of the Year? Share with them on Twitter or Facebook to find out their pick! 

The post Announcing the shortlist for the Place of the Year 2019 appeared first on OUPblog.

Announcing the Shortlist for the Place of the Year 2019

Over the past few weeks, hundreds of you voted on our eight nominees for Place of the Year 2019. While competition was fierce, we have our final four: New Zealand, Greenland, the Palace of Westminster, and the Atmosphere! But which one is most emblematic of 2019? Which location has truly impacted global discourse? Refresh your memory with our spotlights below and vote for your pick to represent 2019 as the Place of the Year!

New Zealand
During Friday prayers on 15 March, a white supremacist terrorist attacked Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center, both in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring over 40 others. These attacks were the first mass shooting in New Zealand since 1997, and the terrorist livestreamed his attack on Al Noor Mosque via Facebook. One week after the attacks, 20,000 people gathered there to pay their respects in a nationwide moment of silence and prayer.

On 21 March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles, and the legislation was voted into place by Parliament in a vote of 119-1 on 10 April. The swiftness of the initial ban prompted international conversations about gun control, racism, and tolerance, which continued in New Zealand in particular and prompted even more legislative action. In September, New Zealand lawmakers presented further gun control plans, including proposals to create a firearm registry, tighten gun license requirements, increase penalties for firearms offences, and more. Current owners of semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles have until 20 December, 2019, to surrender their now-illegal weapons to the government’s buy-back program.

The terrorist has been charged with 92 crimes, including murder, attempted murder, and terrorism, though he denies all charges. While the trial was originally scheduled to begin on 4 May, 2020, the High Court of New Zealand agreed to delay the trial to 2 June 2020, to avoid overlapping with Ramadan.

Greenland
In an unprecedented loss, Greenland (roughly 80% of which is covered in ice) had two large ice-melts, culminating in a record-breaking loss of 58 billion tons of ice in one year—40 billion more tons than the average. In November, Greenland’s main airport Kangerlussuaq Airport reported that they will cease to operate civilian flights within five years due to runways cracking as the permafrost melts below them. As a result, Greenland is building a new airport in a more stable location.

In the political realm, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly implied that he would like to purchase Greenland from Denmark multiple times (despite the fact that Greenland is self-governing and not owned by Denmark). Trump’s – and China’s – interest in Greenland mainly revolves around the nation’s growing geopolitical significance: As polar ice caps melt, new North Atlantic shipping lanes have become available through Greenland’s waters. The island is also home to vast deposits of natural resources such as coal, copper, iron ore, zinc, and other rare minerals. Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland has been denounced by some Greenlanders as a dangerous example of imperialism.

Palace of Westminster
Brexit has been dragging on since 2016, but since July, the politics involved have become uncharacteristically chaotic. After her third Brexit proposal was voted down, Prime Minister Theresa May resigned on 7 June. Notoriously unconventional Boris Johnson was elected and promptly achieved a new record by facing seven consecutive defeats in his first seven votes in Parliament. In a bold, bipartisan act, some Conservatives joined the opposition to pass a law ensuring that Britain could not leave the European Union without a deal – an act which prompted Prime Minister Johnson to expel 21 members from the conservative party (the largest number to leave a party at once since 1981).

In an unprecedented act, Johnson, with the support of the Queen, announced his intent to close Parliament for four weeks. A month later, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled the suspension unlawful on the basis that Johnson secured the Queen’s support by giving her false information (again, unprecedented in modern memory).

After resuming, Parliament approved the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill – essentially agreeing to continue debating the bill piece-by-piece, something which no previously proposed Withdrawal Agreement has achieved – but denied a 31 October exit. The new Brexit deadline is 31 January 2020 – as long as the General Election, called by Johnson, and set to occur on 12 December this year, doesn’t drastically change Parliament – or Britain’s future – yet again.

The Atmosphere 
The summer of 2019 tied for hottest summer on record in the northern hemisphere, continuing the trend of extreme weather set by deadly cold winter temperatures, heavy snowfalls, and catastrophic mudslides and typhoons worldwide. Climate change claimed its first Icelandic glacier as a victim, where researchers marked the event with memorial plaque, and Arctic sea ice experienced the largest September decrease in 1,000 years. All of these climate events are driven by the carbon dioxide being poured into the oceans and Earth’s atmosphere by human activities, from corporations’ carbon footprints to the deliberate burning of the Amazon in exchange for timber and livestock pastures.

In September, the International Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report that the effects of climate change are being felt much more severely, and sooner, than previously anticipated; hundred-year floods are projected to become a yearly occurrence by 2050 in many locations, and global sea levels may rise as much as three feet by 2100 (this is 12% higher than the most recent 2013 estimate). Despite the dire warnings, 2019 is projected to be the year with the highest carbon emissions of all time, and while the fact that the ozone hole is the smallest it’s been since its discovery might sound like good news, it’s actually being kept on the smaller side by the record heat in our atmosphere.

Voting closes Wednesday, 4 December – be sure to check back on Monday, 9 December to find out the winner!

Place of the Year 2019 Shortlist

What do your friends think should be Place of the Year? Share with them on Twitter or Facebook to find out their pick! 

The post Announcing the Shortlist for the Place of the Year 2019 appeared first on OUPblog.

From Stradivari to Spotify: How new technology has always inspired new music

Successful composers, authors, and scientists have distinctive writing styles which define all their works. They are rarely in isolation from their contemporaries, so their work is inherently time stamped. Similarities can exist with their students and followers, so they set the pattern of writing over one or two generations.

The normal assumption is that the evolution of music has been primarily from emulation of winners and current fashion. Certainly, this is a major factor, but it overlooks extremely significant input from science and technology. Historically, early inputs came from the development of the printing press and the invention of musical notation, allowing music to be transmitted widely. Early instruments were invariably of low volume designed for a very small audience and composers recognised this and wrote appropriately. Performers were rarely happy and there are many examples of instruments, such as early pianos, being destroyed by artists eager for a stronger sound. Improved piano concepts and construction offered more power and so composers changed style. The forte pianos of around 1800 had only around one thousandth the power of a modern concert grand. Trumpets originally only had a few notes achieved by lip control, but additions of keys and extra plumbing gave them a wider range and a full chromatic scale. Totally new instruments such as the saxophone similarly opened greater musical opportunities. Architecture and acoustics introduced better and larger concert halls, which again changed musical composition. Larger audiences financed bigger orchestras. Even violins created by Antonio Stradivari have been modified internally. Science continues to drive musical innovation.

The most cited scientific input came from efforts to make musical recordings. This led  to microphones, amplifiers, and electronics. Today’s musical electronics include keyboards and synthesisers. Music was the key stimulus of our modern electronic world! Wide dissemination of music via records and broadcasting helped promote access to music from across the globe. Science has then capitalised on the recording demand with inventions of vinyl records, magnetic tape, and CDs.

Each technology emerged, dominated, and then faded in roughly 25 years (a generation). The CD market has been displaced by the use of downloads and then streaming. Musically there some downsides to music associated with these inventions. The transmitted frequency response, dynamic range and presence from a live event cannot be delivered through electronic recordings. The simulations may be good, and errors of performance corrected, and soloists amplified, but the listening experience is very different. Repeated listening to this sanitized music also changes our expectations of what to expect in a concert. Streaming has also reduced revenue for recording artists and companies.

Another change is the use by broadcasters and recording companies to use only snippets of a very limited repertoire of familiar music. Streaming, and especially in the form of play-lists, have introduced another problem. Because lists are generated by algorithm based on history, listeners don’t automatically explore anything outside of their initial perspectives. This is a significant disservice to music. The only solution is to consciously explore pieces we had not previously listened to and attend live concerts to rekindle the excitement and adrenaline of real performance.

Featured image credit: Photo by Karim MANJRA via Unsplash

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The truth about ‘Latinx’

In recent years, the term Latinx has become popular in academic settings in English to designate a group of people without reference to gender, which is designated by -o and -a endings in some Romance languages. While academics and Twitter users have begun to use the term, only 2% of the U.S. population actually identifies with this word.  Latinx has become so widely used that Elizabeth Warren has taken to using it on the campaign trail.  This has led to a reflection on its political implications in a recent Ross Douthat piece in the New York Times.  The interesting question is why a term that is thought to help unify a large group of people would fail to gain wider traction.

Since Spanish is my mother tongue, I can understand why this term would befuddle Spanish speakers.  From a linguistic perspective, it makes no sense to create a genderless word in a gender-marked language. Yes, the -o and -a endings signal the grammatical gender, such as in the terms niño and niña. But the endings for the adult form are not always straightforward, such as in el hombre and la mujer. In fact, all nouns carry grammatical gender and some of these end in -o/a (i.e. la tierra) and others do not (i.e. el arbol). Finally, even within categories that have similar meanings there can be variation. In Spanish, it’s el puma and la pantera. But in Italian, one would say la tigre. Confused yet? Grammatical gender is confusing, especially with regard to animals.

With all this confusion, Spanish speakers lose a connection between sex and gender. No one would be insulted if they are considered part of el pueblo Latino or la gente Latina. Just because someone says I am part of la gente Latina doesn’t make me feel that they are referring only to women. For a speaker of this class of Romance languages, the notion that gender and sex are the same thing makes little sense. Yes, gender originates in sex but it is not the same thing when it comes to non-sexed nouns.

The problem arises when we use a gender-marked Romance language term in English contexts. For example, one day I ran across a cover for Newsweek that characterizes Selena as “Tejano’s Queen.” I was confused by this. Did they mean Tejano’s (i.e. people from Texas) music?  The word music was never used so I kept on reading.  I found that the special issue was “proud to present Selena, a 100-page tribute to the most beloved Tejano singer of all time.” Oh, so she was a Tejano singer and the reference was to music.  But, in fact, she would be una cantante de musicaTejana or una cantante Tejana. Either way, the gender would be feminine not masculine. Tejana and Tejano had been masculinized to the latter. This is not unusual for Anglophones. You might remember the once Terminator, and now ex-Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger stating “No problemo.” The problem (no pun intended) is that it should be No hay problema. Again, an Anglophone (probably the scriptwriters) masculinizes a Spanish noun. Spanish has two genders but for some reason Anglophones think there is only one. Thus, what grammatical gender is and is not becomes entirely lost when moving to a language where gender and sex are the same thing.

But let’s leave my linguistic perch for a second and think about the implications of the term X is. The term X is sought as one that would be all inclusive. The term reminds me of algebra where X represents a variable that has no defined meaning.  As such it is perfectly suited for equations where a term is unknown.  In this case, it can take on any value and in human terms would represent a more inclusive term.

The problem with creating a new genderless word, is that it already exists in gender-marked languages that have a true neuter. There are two languages that come to mind when thinking about the lexical origins of English. One is German and the other is Latin. Of these two languages, Latin has the perfect solution. Not only does it contain a neuter but it also has a plural neuter, Latinae. Rather than using a synthetically and anglophonically derived ending such as X, we could opt for a more organic one that has its roots in the language that has influenced speakers across the planet. In that sense, Latinae is all-inclusive and derives from a language that sought to create a genderless ending system. Latin is the natural language of science and the one used to represent complex concepts in English. Latinae gets rid of a sex and gender bias, it is inclusive, and was actually used for that reason. Let’s go with a genderless solution from a gender-marked language.

If you miss the X, you could tune in for reruns of The X-Files. Here, you would be presented with the motto “The truth is out there,” which also applies to our search for a genderless all-inclusive term Latinae to replace Latino/a/x.Verum illic, the truth is out there.

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What universities get wrong about free speech

When racist firebrands claimed a right to speak at various universities two years ago, free speech absolutists on the left and right rushed to their defense. The ACLU provided free legal assistance to neo-Nazis while President Donald Trump, who had asked for football players who express political opinions to “leave the country” or be fired for their speech and who has banned use of the term “abortion” in health clinics with federal funding, declared a national emergency in higher education and threatened to withhold federal funding unless his notion of free speech is upheld.

The University of Chicago issued a statement of principles on free speech that has been adopted by hundreds of universities and colleges. It proclaims that “universities exist for the sake of [free] inquiry.” Regrettably, the full statement is not only misleading but, by dint of what it fails to mention, incorrect. The university’s purpose is not unfettered debate of all ideas with the narrow exceptions of “expression that violates the law, […] falsely defames a specific individual [or] constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.” Universities exist for the purpose of advancing knowledge and finding new truths. By elevating “free and open inquiry” to be the university’s sole purpose, the University of Chicago turns the means of speech into the university’s end point. This failure to mention “truth” and “knowledge” is symptomatic of how academia has been manipulated in the speech debates. Once universities declare unfettered debate rather than the advancement of knowledge to be their principal purpose, they have lost to those who seek to undermine academia’s role as an arbiter of truth in society.

Viewing the speech conflicts as matters of hurt feelings and a choice between free speech and “an inclusive and welcoming society,” as defined by a much-cited set of annual studies of over 4,400 college students, also misses the point. The university’s mission depends on the participation of all qualified faculty and students on equal terms, which means without discriminating against anyone based on their identity. Conflicts over speech are not matters of negotiating competing claims of offense, nor of pitting speech against an “inclusive and welcoming” environment, but as violations of this principle of equal participation in the service of teaching and research.

Many of today’s students are unwilling to trade in equality for a hollow conception of free speech which protects hate speech that forces minorities to justify their participation in public life. If hate speech is the price we pay for free speech, the students recognize, the lion’s share of this price is paid by minorities and women. So when a speaker questions a particular group’s right to exist, the university ought to draw a line. All of academia should oppose such speech, as it routinely opposes falsehoods and settled ideas because deliberate falsehoods, now called “deep fakes,” undermine our capacity to determine the truth. If deep fakes are the price we pay for free speech, debates over political ads on social media illustrate, the lion’s share of this price will be paid by those with fewer resources.

When viewed through the lens of equality rather than offended feelings or the vague terms of inclusion and diversity, the campus controversies reveal the inextricable link between freedom and equality in the university and in society. Freedom of speech is an empty promise when granted only to those who have power, resources, and social standing, and aim to deprive others of their right to exist.

The campus controversies, which President Trump’s executive order and the University of Chicago guidelines are meant to end, are battles over equality of participation and over the university’s prerogative not to revive long-settled debates. When universities privilege a hollow concept of free speech or turn speech into their raison d’être, they compromise their legal obligation to guarantee the equal participation of all qualified students and faculty. They also abdicate their role as arbiters of truth, where free speech is not the end goal but essential to and in the service of their purpose of advancing knowledge.

The campus controversies are instructive because they show how free speech, when turned into a hollow concept, can be turned against the institutions of democracy and against the mission of the university it is meant to serve. In 1949, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned, in Terminiello v. Chicago, that the Constitution must not become a “suicide pact.” The wholesale defense of hate speech and deep fakes, as we are discovering around the world, threatens to undermine rather than protect democracy.

Free speech absolutists worry that any regulation of hate speech today will lead to the regulation of dissent tomorrow. Others think that exposure to hate speech builds resilience and if students are insulated from racism on an idyllic campus, they won’t be ready for real life. But just as the slippery slope is not inevitable, there is no evidence that hate speech builds character. There is proof, however, that hate can lead to murder in locations such as Christchurch, New Zealand, Oslo, Norway, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In our age when hate spreads with the click of a button, rigid speech absolutism in one place can cause death very far away. We need to allow as much speech as possible to let people shape their way of life but we must not turn free speech into a rigid piety that allows some to deprive others of that right.

When universities and self-appointed watchdog groups elevate “unfettered debate” above the university’s actual purpose, it is like arguing that the purpose of a representative democracy is to hold elections, when in truth elections are the means to achieve democracy. In today’s climate, when the truth seems up for grabs by anyone capable of producing viral content, universities must clarify their mission of advancing knowledge and finding new truths by means of speech and according to protocols of intentional debate, scientific discovery, professional expertise, and established methodologies. To uphold their crucial function of arbiters of truth, universities must counter efforts to undermine this prerogative in the name of free speech absolutism and politically motivated calls for viewpoint diversity. Instead of losing sight of their purpose of finding the truth, universities should foster deeper conversations about the interlocking principles of freedom and equality that can become the premise for speech that is truly free and open to all.

Featured image credit: “Man standing infront of group of people” by Priscilla D u Preez via Unsplash.

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