Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Each copy of the Gospels alone cost as much as a marble sarcophagus."

"We must never underestimate the fierce intellectualism of many upper class Romans" - Underestimate? After the Greeks I find it hard to imagine.

"Nowhere was this social stratification shown more blatantly than ... in their zeal and in their scholarly pursuits."

"The dinner parties Jerome urged Eustochium and her mother to shun were like the London Season in eighteenth century England" - The whole of the late classical period feels like eighteenth century England, but that was probably what eighteenth century Englishmen were aiming at.

Figure 12. Evidence that the pagan aristocracy of Rome actually did die out?

"Clergy and laity alike wanted a religion in the image of the society in which they lived - hierarchical, strenuous and loyal."

"On one occasion, 137 deaths resulted from a fierce clash of partisans in a crowded basilica."

"The average believer did not necessarily go to church regularly. But he or she was certain to turn out for the great festivals of the year."

"I see his point, and would only suggest a middle way: some formats, some 'chaos'..." Another methodology book that's recommendations are based on taste rather than efficacy.

"It was the will of God alone...that caused the harvests to flourish every year. Nature was desacralized..."

Typically, Roman aristocrats believed "Wealth was not a gift of God Himself; it was a gift of fortune. It did not, therefore, need to be given back in gratitude to God." - but did it need to be given back to the city?

"...the fierce sense of agency that was released when a convert such as Pauline's stepped clear of the restraint imposed by his peer group and placed himself and his wealth in the hands of God." - Billionaire activists in the fourth century :o

"Siricius had a high sense of the esprit de corps of an urban clergy. They were to stay with their bishop, just as officials in the imperial bureaucracy were supposed to stay in their department."

"...where I made the following mistakes: " - is chucking just phrase analysis, or are there different types of chucking - syntactic phrases, phonological tone units?

"...a phrase will be retained better if the learner gives attention to its pronunciation...and that it might be better to teach phrases with the same phonological shape together." Certainly Miss Terrapin did.

"...strongly stressed words tend to occur at the end of each chunk or to be used contrastively...."

"What impressed me most about the good [presentations] was not the 'structuring language ' beloved of EFL materials; it was the speakers ability to chunk, pause and pace their speech to make the message clear and effective."

Step 1 - are these actually collocation errors?

"People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes...Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid?"

"As for those boys, they were fanatics, and fanatics are the scum of the earth because it is through them and the vague principles they espouse, that wars and revolutions happen."

Soap-operas...are full of stereotypic language, which is almost a synonym for fixed and Ssemi-fixed expressions.

Lewis suggests students pay for expensive language classes to provide "the human element which sustains motivation....No language activity used to excess can be effective". Obviously this was written before gamified language learning apps appeared, but does he have any evidence for this?

"Everyone knows and understands a lot of English they would never use for reasons of age, politics, personality etc."

"It's very difficult to translate 'just', but it is used in a lot of fixed expressions. Can you think of a similar word in your own language?"

"It was in terms of a retreat from splendour that Paulinus communicated his new lifestyle to his spiritual friends."

"Yet the fact remains that, in the later empire, ascetics of all kinds were less often criticised for their world-denying practices than for their relations with wealthy devotees" - same old, same old o:

"The women of the Catholic church should be separated from assemblies of strange men...They should not join with them to learn or to teach." - The Assembly of Bishops, Zaragoza, 380 AD.

A view still popular with Muslims 1600 years later.

"The Government is considering an overhaul of the rules for the payment of allowances to single mothers. They [the rules] need to be tightened, and brought into line with other similar benefits." - examples of elipted collocations.

"Three years of soul-searching rendered tragic by the death of their only child, ended with a joint decision by Paulinus and Therasia to adopt a life of continence (...) and sell up their properties."

"Wealth was "slime". It was not an exuberant by-product of the semi-divine world of nature. It was a burden that had to be shed..."