You make me feel special!
Because getting tagged to do memes makes me feel totally flattered and special, I’m going to respond to EFL Geek’s tag and rise to the occasion with: 5 Things My Readers Don’t Know About Me. This might be kind of difficult, since many of my readers are people who know me as an actual person, so I’ll try to dig up some obscure facts.
1. I spent most of my youth (ages 9-17) dancing in a dance company that occasionally danced in professional shows in Branson, MO. Among them was Dino’s Christmas Spectacular, in which I wore, among other things, an enormous sweltering teddy bear costume and pointe shoes. Here is me when I was, like, 10 or 11 or something:
Amazing. I know.
2. I was a cheerleader in 8th grade.
3. I hardly ever read Language Log anymore, partly due to my frustration with how rarely the posts are written by women (Heidi Harley recently joined the ranks, thankfully, but it’s still waaaaay heavily male). It makes me feel like linguistics is a boys’ club, and I don’t like that feeling one bit. I realize it’s a bit irrational to feel this way, that it’s not at all intentional on the part of Language Log Plaza, and that the burden is on some women to step up and write as frequently as Liberman, Pullum, Zwicky, etc. Still: secret anguish.
4. I am obsessed with the color orange. Within my sight are: orange spray water bottle (for shooing the cat away from my desk), orange toolbox, orange dishtowel, orange potholder, orange handbag, orange bandanna, orange winter coat, orange vintage coat, orange tennis shoes, orange scarf, orange hat (the latter two of which I knitted, back when I used to knit).
5. I was obsessed with panda bears until about 5 years ago. Collected them all the time: stuffed animals, posters, pencils, anything decorated with them. Evidence.
Well, wasn’t that fun? And now I’m going to tag…Full-Fledged Pidgin (obligatorily), No-Sword, Noncompositional, A Roguish Chrestomathy, and Emerging Communications. Fess up!
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Oh! Now I feel special, too, and I promise to respond, just as soon as I manage to think of five reasonably interesting facts about myself to post.
I know what you mean about Language Log–it’s a sort of flagship among the growing fleet of linguistics blogs, and I wish it were more representative of the demographics of the field. Linguistics isn’t a boys’ club, or at least it’s becoming less of one. (In the department in which I’ve been accumulating degrees, thirty years ago all but one of the faculty members were male; now, all but one are female. Every undergraduate linguistics course I’ve taught has had more female students than male–some overwhelmingly so–and although the numbers seem to even out a bit in graduate school (and it would be interesting to try to find out why), I think this pattern is gradually working its way up through the ranks.) At any rate, there are certainly many women out there with bloggably interesting things to say about linguistics, and even if it isn’t actually anybody in particular’s fault that we don’t see more blog posts from more of them in more prominent places, it still seems wrong that we don’t.
Comment by Q. Pheevr — 1/20/2007 @ 8:16 pm
I’ll second Q’s comments. I never got turned off by languagelog’s maleness, but I guess I just wasn’t sensitive to that particular aspect of it (plus I admittedly skip over most posts anyway).
But something that intrigues me is the “ha ha only serious” insider affect that colors much of LL content. For instance, oblique references to the LSA meeting as a meeting of cabal of linguists, and also the fictional world that is made reference to frequently. There are discussions among the LL posters at water coolers, and outside their offices at the Plaza and so forth. Now, this is not to say that an independent blogger can’t adopt the same topography and say that “the other day when I saw Geoff Pullum so excited that he slipped near water fountain in front of his remote office at the LL Plaza…”. But then, references to “senior writers’ lounge” and “receiving mail”, and so forth, definitely make this seem like an insiders-only deal (either senior-linguists-only, or maybe just linguists-only).
I’m not sure what the overall effect of this is, given that LL is probably one of the interfaces between the field of linguistics and the general public.
[ps witness the male/female breakdown of the current LSA Fellows]
Comment by Russell — 1/22/2007 @ 7:48 pm
“I’m not sure what the overall effect of this is, given that LL is probably one of the interfaces between the field of linguistics and the general public.”
This is precisely why I’m bothered by it - it’s simply not representative of the field, yet it’s become the field’s representative to the public, and inasmuch as that’s an important role to play (which I think it is), I’m troubled by the imbalance.
It’s also very interesting what you point out about the rhetorical style that creates a secretive world. That may in fact contribute to my growing distaste.
Comment by squires — 1/22/2007 @ 10:51 pm
Then again, I post pictures of myself in ridiculous dancing costumes from when I was 9, so who am I to say???
Comment by squires — 1/22/2007 @ 10:52 pm