Tag Archives: PhD

Golden grass covered in dew.

Possessive

Golden, dew covered grass
Photo by Johnny McClung

‘I’ve started talking to Proto-Indo-European.’

‘You mean you’ve started talking in…’

‘No. Talking to,’ Cassie insists. ‘I’ve personified the language. I call him Piedas.’

They meet every Friday at Lenny’s for happy hour to complain about their PhDs, how far behind they are, how mad they’re going.

‘Midas? Like the king with the golden touch?’

Cassie chews on a mojito-drenched mint leaf. She knows Beth will never understand her obsession with the noun-based languages that Proto-Indo-European generated. She never should have mentioned Piedas.

‘Like Midas, but everything he touches turns to nouns.’

It troubles Cassie that 40 percent of people, herself included, are doomed to see the world in terms of nouns. Things. Isolated, rigid, commodified. Bought, sold, stolen.

‘PIEdas. Proto. Indo. European. You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Beth says. ‘Happy hour’s almost over,’ she hints.

Cassie rises unsteadily and joins the clamouring mob at the bar. Foolishly she closes her eyes and allows the invading nouns— elbow, glass, noise, light, exhaustion, panic—to transform into verbs. Gush, swirl, flow.

She sinks, as into a river, like Midas, who dipped his tortured hands into the river Pactolus to be cleansed of his greed.

What hope is there for Piedas? Cassie wonders, moments before her head hits the sticky floor. A vision appears before her dark, unconscious eyelids.

‘Everything now you touch,’ says the river to Piedas, ‘turns to yours.’

‘Mine?’ wonders the weary king, casting his eyes over the verdant landscape that now belongs to him. Each detail now reveals itself in golden splendour—the waving limbs of his grassland, the jutting peaks of his mountains, the roiling herds of his antelope.

We can redetermine the value of the possessive, Cassie realises, as the crowd helps her to her feet.

‘You are thirsty,’ said Piedas to his wilting tulip, carrying water from his river in his palms.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 109 of Structured Visions, What makes you so special? You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Negative space

Greyscale photo of a couple kissing across a table. Their faces blur together. They're each holding a coffee mug.
Photo by Nathan Walker

What’s up with me and the intimacy issues? It was only my third date with Barry (coffee at the Students Union) and I’d just told him I was crazy.

We met at an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference. He said he liked my talk on negation in language.

What he actually said was, ‘I didn’t understand your paper, not one jot of it.’

His field was psychology, not linguistics, so his joke meant he’d been paying attention. I may have already been in love. 

So why the rush to tell him about the alien in my brain?

‘An alien talks to you?’ he said.

‘Yeah, he took up residence as soon as I landed on my thesis topic,’ I said. 

‘Correlation is not causality,’ Barry pointed out. 

‘He keeps asking annoying questions about my topic. He says in his language there is no negation.’

‘There is no negation? Isn’t that a perfect example of negation?’

‘Well, what he really said is There’s only affirmation. But we were speaking English.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ Barry said. ‘I think you have a very smart brain who’s created a sparring partner to help bring your brilliant ideas even further. Or else you really are in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, which you should see as a great privilege.’

He had me at I don’t think you’re crazy. 

‘The negation is the affirmation!’ exclaimed my alien companion, with a distracting Eureka yelp.

I ignored this, leaning closer toward my human companion. ‘Can I kiss you?’ I asked.

‘I don’t see why not,’ he said, and I melted into the negative space his negative clauses revealed.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 97 of Structured Visions, ‘The intimacy of denial.’ You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Nothing doing

Greyscale photo of little boy in striped shirt
Photo by Naira Babayan

‘Daddy, you shouldn’t say that word. It hurts Okkers’s ears.’

‘Tell Oscar there’s nothing wrong with doggie do,’ I said.

I’d just stepped in a steaming pile of canine shit and wasn’t in the mood to argue linguistic politeness with my son’s imaginary friend.

‘He says you should say poo instead. And his name is Okkers, not Oscar.’

Ordinarily I’d have been fascinated by Oliver’s selective metathesis, but the word metathesis reminded me of thesis, which reminded me of the PhD I still hadn’t finished, on child language acquisition of all things. 

As it turned out, logophobia was running in our family, if family extended to invisible members like Okkers. Days after the doggie do incident I was still being policed on my use of the offending word.

I assumed it was its noun form that was considered indecent. It turned out Okkers found it equally offensive in its more common use as a verb. 

You’d be surprised at how often you use the word do. Still, testing Okkers’s sensitivities offered a welcome, and not entirely off-topic (or so I told myself), distraction from my thesis.

‘Is Okkers offended by the auxiliary and the main verb use of the verb?’ I asked Oliver.

‘What’s an Ox Hillary?’

‘Like, when you’re posing a question in the simple aspect. Do you want an ice cream, for instance.’

‘Ew! Stop!’

‘You don’t want an ice cream?’

‘Stop it!’ (Clearly the negative contraction was also a problem for Okkers. I provided the promised ice cream to make up for my linguistic missteps.)

The ever perceptive Okkers noticed every form of do, not just auxiliaries and negative contractions, but also inflections for person and tense (does, did), and when used as a pro-verb, as in What are you doing? He took particular issue with the participles (doing, done). He could spot these from a mile away.

Our conversations around the topic became so fascinating that I made space for both of them in my office. We spent hours discussing the intricacies of the taboo word, ingeniously avoiding voicing it, forming ever more convincing hypotheses about its unfortunate omnipresence in the English language.

My wife became suspicious. ‘What are you going up there?’ she shouted from the hallway. We’d locked the door. ‘Are you getting anything done?’

Together we groaned, the three of us, with murderous intent.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

Go

Greyscale photo of woman reading
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com

(The following is an excerpt from a short story published in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol 5.)

Anna gripped the banister of the university library’s vertiginous staircase with the same white-knuckled power she’d discovered during her turbulent transatlantic flight. She felt the bottom drop again as she reached the ground-floor helpdesk, now grasping nothing more substantial than a flimsy slip of paper, wet with her sweat.

Anna had inscribed the words on a sheet from the hotel pad before she’d started out today, in case she lost the power of speech or failed to contort her Virginia accent into something more understandable, if not more palatable, to her English addressees. She’d already mispronounced Birmingham twice since she’d arrived, once at Heathrow customs and once at Euston station, her thick tongue reluctant to renounce the Alabama namesake.

The bemused librarian glanced over what she’d written. Abena Amina. Imperatives in Omotic Languages. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1985.

“We don’t hold hard copies of theses here anymore. They’re all sent to the British Library.”

“Can you tell me how to get there?” Anna whispered, like a frightened child.

“It’s in London,” was the response. “But you don’t go to the British Library to access an archived thesis, you write to request it. They scan it and email it to you.”

Anna imagined a less foolhardy version of her past self, discreetly filling out an online form from her work computer in Roanoke, scrolling through the returned digital file later that evening while Rich graded papers, unaware. In a flash of hindsight she saw the tensions on their budget and marriage erased, never forming.

Shame pressed against her like a blinding wall of fire. She blinked. Her interlocutor’s face appeared now as a blur of purposeful motion, silhouetted against imagined flames. “The departments sometimes hold onto the bound copies,” she conceded, and made a few phone calls. The campus map she eventually handed Anna held the clues to the next stage in her ill-planned scavenger hunt. A name scrawled in the margins: Adam Draper. A circle drawn around one of the buildings: Frankland.

The Frankland Building, it turned out, housed a neglected repository of doctoral theses from days gone by. They’d been piled unceremoniously onto the sagging shelves of the cluttered psychology postgrad room. Adam Draper was the psychology postgrad who’d been tasked to serve as guide to the uninvited American visitor.

Anna spotted the volume within minutes, retrieving it from among scores of gold-embossed maroon spines, half-hidden behind the misshapen blades of a Venetian blind caked with layers of dust. Its heft spoke of a mystery soon to be revealed. She pulled the tome to her and hugged it to her chest, as if it were a child she’d forgotten, returned to her fully grown.

“There must be something rather valuable in there,” Adam said, and Anna realized he’d witnessed this devastatingly vulnerable scene. Her lips moved to excuse her behavior, but no words formed there. The vertigo she’d felt in the library still pulled at her, but now with a singly directed propulsion – a force that would not allow itself to be squandered on unnecessary words.

She’d not released her grip on her prize. “Do I sign this out or something?”

“Well… the thesis isn’t really supposed to leave the postgrad office. But you can stay and read it for as long as you like. I was planning on working in here today anyway.”

So her guide became her silent companion as she plunged into the secrets of Imperatives in Omotic Languages.

Read the rest of “Go” in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss “Go” in Episode 67 of Structured Visions.