Mind You Research Articles

A reflection on practising medicine "up North".

Forgive me for being a cold-hearted physician. I do not think I am, although the following anecdote may convince you otherwise. This week a patient asked me to see her for a medical problem of importance to her and I refused while standing right in front of her. Mind you, I did not completely refuse

“I’m that bitch”: on queerness and the catwalk

Within the world of queer performance, being “that bitch” is about having an exacting, unquestionable creative juice and asserting yourself through performance and style. It’s not about asking for permission to exist but about existing anyway, right now, and on terms you decide for yourself. For queer people of color, being “that bitch” is about queer livelihood and ethical self-making, particularly when you are forced to exist in a world with norms that were not created with you in mind in the first place. The ideal space to prove you’re “that bitch” is the catwalk, particularly in the voguing community.

Obituary: A Remembrance of Francis M. Howard MD (1922-2016).

Obituary: A Remembrance of Francis M. Howard MD (1922-2016).

Quail Cove Farms (a): One Night and a Big Decision

Nearly every dollar Bill and Elaine Jardine had earned over the previous decade had been invested in their farm and warehouse. They had spent more than $150,000 in land and equipment. And they had sunk into their business, Quail Cove Farms, immeasurable amounts of what Bill Jardine considered to be their biggest asset: their labor. They had lost nearly everything. Now, the couple had some soul-searching to do. The Jardines gave hard thought to which direction they wanted to go—if, for that matter, they even had a choice. What was the value, now, of the sweat equity they had gained from pursuing a dream of organic farming? Excerpt UVA-ENT-0168 Rev. May 1, 2019 Quail Cove Farms (A): One Night and a Big Decision Introduction Bill Jardine and his wife, Elaine, looked at one another across the kitchen table in their Machipongo, Virginia, farmhouse. It was late and they had been talking for most of the night. Soon, the sun would rise. Bill and Elaine would put on their work boots and start the daily chores. A farm needed maintenance no matter what frame of mind you were in. But at that moment, neither felt up to the tasks ahead. That was ironic because Bill had always joked, “When I retire, I want to farm; and when I get to the point where I can't farm, I want to garden.” . . .

PHOTOGRAPHY KEEPS AN EYE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHER

I think we can all agree on one point, that architecture is the main territory of photography. This is the case because ever since Atget’s time our way of duplicating the world has been done in the city; and probably without the city photography would not even exist. Architecture is the training ground for beginners, who take pictures of the street in which they live, shots of smoke- blackened industrial buildings or the notorious outskirts, intriguing because they provide indisputable proof of the decay of the contemporary city. Talking of decay, of squalor, no one takes photos any longer like the one of prostitutes on the corner of two narrow streets that Atget took in the twenties. Have we all turned into chaste artists who turn their gaze elsewhere? Among the things that architecture reveals and clarifies I would definitely include the kind of connection we have with the past. Let me explain: in the city where I live Bramante is an important presence. When I come back from my travels I always meet him when I go to the bar or do the shopping. In a sense he is part of my genetic heritage, along with the contributions made by my father and mother. Well, for a while now I have been having a recurrent dream: I see Santa Maria delle Grazie wreathed in smoke and half-destroyed by a terrorist attack. But at that point, as I wake up in distress, I realize that the Milanese have brought in the best masons in Italy and that the apse (by a long chalk the part I like most) has already been largely reconstructed. A dream in step with the times, it’s clear. Now, it seems to me that this sense of hospitality is no longer part of the genetic inheritance of architecture. Mind you, this is not meant as a criticism of Bramante’s successors, but contemporary architecture has become a difficult, almost intractable subject: perhaps because it no longer knows the distance between Venice and Los Angeles or between Baku and Milan; or perhaps due to the insouciance with which pops up on the aforementioned outskirts to suddenly alter their destiny. [...]

The bottle tree bonanza and a man called Doug

Where does your planning come from, where does it start and where does it end. If you keep an open mind you can find inspiration in unlikely places; the imagination of your children will decide where it leads.

How to love your job for 40 years

A career is about 40 years long. I'm in year 37 of my career in higher education. I have loved my career and loved every job that has made up my career. Now, mind you, I did not say I loved every day of every job that made up my career! But I really have loved every job. Here are my Pollyanna secrets of how to love your job for 40 years.

A Postdating ofThrow‘Time’ inTwelfth Night

IN the final act of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1600–01), Duke Orsino rebuffs Feste’s third request for payment: ‘You can fool no more money out of me at this throw’ (V.i.32). 1 The primary meaning of throw is ‘time’, from Old English þrag ‘time; season’. 2 The secondary meaning is ‘throw (of the dice)’, playing on Feste’s dice metaphor (‘ Primo , secundo , tertio is a good play’, V.i.29) and perhaps echoing Sir Toby’s rhetorical question to Maria, ‘Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip and become thy bondslave?’ (II.v.157–158). 3 Thus the Duke’s prior disbursement of two coins is likened to a player’s throws in a dice game. Feste’s third request, organized around the concept of complete sets of three (‘one, two, three’, V.i.31), places dicing alongside other metaphorical fields: proverbial wisdom (‘and the old saying is “The third pays for all”’, V.i.29–30), dancing measures (‘the triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure’, V.i.30), and campanology (‘the bells of St. Bennet, sir, may put you in mind’, V.i.31). 4 This occurrence of throw ‘time’ postdates by almost a century the last citation for that meaning at Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘throw, n . 1 ’, 1 (‘The time at which anything happens; an occasion’), from Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513).

Book Review: A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter

A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change . Rodger Streitmatter. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 246 pp. $90 hbk. $36 pbk. $35.99 ebk.Following up his previous book on the history of journalism, Mightier Than the Sword, now in its fourth edition, Rodger Streitmatter has written another set of case studies dealing with how the media has influenced American history. This time, though, Streitmatter focuses solely on instances when journalists have, as the subtitle indicates, propelled positive change. In his introduction, Streitmatter considers this usage appealingly vague, providing him with wonderful degree of latitude in the topics covered. While it's tempting to devote an inordinate amount of time assessing the problematic rhetoric of this cringe-worthy turn of phrase, the book's content and structure warrant attention on their own.The chapters range from the late 19th century, beginning with Nellie Bly's undercover expose of mental health facilities in New York City, to today's world, concluding with pieces on media coverage of the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal and Ellen DeGeneres's coming out. In between, we find accounts of how journalism, to select but a few examples, brought down Charles Ponzi's financial scam; caution against the dangers of smoking; celebrate the first Jewish Miss America; and popularize the availability and benefits of birth control. Chapters flow by in a relatively brisk pace as all 16 of them, plus the conclusion, clock in at 177 written pages, excluding notes, bibliography, and index.Meanwhile, no more than three pages elapse at any time throughout the book without extra spacing and a newly titled section break. Chapter 9, for instance, traces the media's praise for Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, with the following subheadings on three consecutive pages: Portraying Jackie Robinson as Humble, Portraying Jackie Robinson as Congenial, and Portraying Jackie Robinson as Wholesome. Rather than providing a consistent, coherent synthesis in each essay by weaving through the primary news accounts of the day, Streitmatter distracts from the flow of each chapter, short as they are, with many section breaks. He effectively provides examples that prove the subhead titles, mind you, but the book sacrifices depth in such a discontinuous manner and, ultimately, fails to craft carefully constructed arguments.To his credit, Streitmatter, a professor of journalism at American University, focuses on events often neglected in history courses and case studies of journalistic practice that many readers, scholars included, might not be too familiar with. Some of the more novel work in the book include chapters devoted to how African American newspapers in the early 20th century helped spur the great migration of subjugated persons away from the South; the publicity arm of the Justice Department under J. Edgar Hoover, which recruited journalists to portray the heroics of G-Men in the 1930s; and the degree to which television news facilitated democratic changes to the presidential nomination process. …

Design and Manufacture of an Energy-saving LED Lantern with Paper-cut Figure Projection Function

This work designed and manufactured an energy-saving LED lantern adorned with a revolving circle of paper characters, showing the shadow-show function. It used the high-cooling performance LED lamp to light. A small motor was also installed in the lantern to rotate paper characters. Under the light of LED, the rotating paper characters in the lantern would play a shadow show. Many shadows of well-known characters ran on the skin surface of the lantern, being like to tell a story and having lots of fun. For example, “The Magical Monkey King” is the classic Chinese adventure tale. It is one of the favorites in our growing collection of Asian children's books. One can think about that it will touch your mind and return you back to the childhood when such shadows of well-known characters run on the skin surface of the lantern. Besides, it used a special assembly of aluminum-alloy pin-fin heat sinks to be the cooling device of LED lamp within the lantern. The configuration of the cooling device was a vertical hollow square cylinder. Many circular pin fins extended inwardly from the internal surfaces of the vertical cylinder. The LEDs were installed onto the external surfaces of the vertical cylinder. Therefore, the chimney effect of the free convection heat transfer would be formed. A series of experimental tests demonstrated that such cooling design enhanced the total heat-transfer capacity remarkably.

I Should Have Known (Better?)

I Should Have Known (Better?) Giles R. Scofield, J.D., M.A. Context Like all stories, this one neither arises ex nihilo nor exists in a vacuum. In order to situate it in its proper context, one needs to know only three things. The first is that clinical is and for some time now has been, in its own words, ‘big business’. The second is that, accordingly to sociologists of the professions, one of the most means for securing professional ‘conformity’ consists of informal methods, such as peer pressure, the silent treatment, whisper campaigns, and the like. The last is that, to the extent I know anything about professions and professionalizing it is because, before I became known as a ‘right–to–die’ advocate I studied and wrote about health care professions and professionals in law school, and represented them for several years as a health care attorney. Text Once upon a time health care ethics consultation was born and named a nascent, fledgling profession. Having spent a good portion of my law school days studying the health care professions, and having represented both health care and legal professionals in the early days of my legal career, the moment I heard that health care ethics consultants were on the way to professionalizing, my curiosity was piqued and my professional liability/responsibility radar got turned on. Mind you, being a veteran of the culture war that attended legitimating a patient’s right to forgo life–sustaining treatment in the run–up to the Cruzan case, and having worked with hospitals and hospital ethics committees in post–Quinlan New Jersey, I knew that there was work to be done, and that this involved knowing something about ethics. But a new profession? Had this new profession really thought about what it means to be a profession? About what it would mean, for example, to obtain professional liability insurance coverage, which requires, among other things, a well–defined scope of practice? Instead of trying to tackle these questions in all their complexities, I chose to focus first on an important, but all too often neglected issue: the problem of the impaired professional, of the professional that every profession needs to find some way to do something about, but that few professions ever take as seriously as they should. Partly because I thought it would shed light on a problem all professions face; partly to alert those who were interested in and dedicated to creating this new profession that there was considerably more to being a profession than having a scope of practice, a standard of care, and a code of ethics. At the time, I was living and working in a city where I had access to a group of clinical bioethicists who regularly got together to discuss papers we were working on. When I thought that “the problem of the impaired ethicist” was ready to be looked at, I sent it along. As I recall, there wasn’t much discussion of the content of the paper. That is to say, others found it interesting and no one slammed it. Perhaps there was a discussion about whether ‘impairment’ was the right lens for viewing the problem I had identified, which also had something to do with an ethicist’s being compromised, but if there was any discussion of that point, it did not amount to much. What I do recall is this. Some of those present wanted to know who I was talking about; others professed to know—or intuit—who it was that I must be talking about. In other words, I couldn’t just be writing about some theoretical problem concerning a hypothetical impaired ethicist. Rather, I must have—must have had—someone specific in mind, in their minds, at least. What a chatty, catty little clique, I thought to myself. What an interesting display of nascent, fledgling professional solidarity. Anyway. The problem of the impaired ethicist made its way into print, without very much notice or fanfare, which is not surprising, given the scant attention most professions and professionals pay to the problem of professional impairment. Thereafter I turned my attention, among other things, to a more robust discussion of some...

Remembering David Minter 1935–2017

Remembering David Minter 1935–2017 Carolyn Porter (bio) Thinking back over the countless memories I have of David, I’ve been reminded of something Faulkner said, speculating at large, in Light in August: “Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing” He’s talking about Byron Bunch, and how little people know about him, about what a good man he is. But he’s also pondering the limits of what any of us can know, even about those we think we know well. And there is a lot we never know, except by accident. For instance, a fellow student of David’s, Barbara Morris, once told me a story I’d never heard before. Many years ago, she was at a football game at Rice Stadium. Few fans were there. It was rainy and we were losing, she said, a moment all too familiar to Rice students of our generation. She was on her way up the steps to buy snacks for her family when she saw David talking to a campus cop who was trying to evict an elderly couple from a pair of seats that did not match their tickets. They’d moved there to watch the game in shelter from the rain. David was talking to the cop, trying to get him to leave them be. Barbara told me she didn’t know the end of this story for a fact, but knowing David, she and I both could tell you how it must have come out. You can just see David, or rather hear him, in that controlled, measured voice, steadily making the case to the cop. “They have tickets,” he’d be saying, “They are doing no one any harm. Look at this sea of empty seats.” I imagine the old couple, with wet plastic rain hats on and frayed but sturdy umbrellas stowed next to them, looking up in startled awe at this handsome stranger with the voice of a preacher and the demeanor of a judge who had emerged out of nowhere to defend them. I wasn’t there, but I am quite sure that the cop backed down. Because even if he didn’t follow the impeccable reasoning, he would have to hear the authority in those patiently, but ruthlessly delivered words. When David spoke that way, with that focused intensity that seemed to come from a kind of solar plexus of his mind, you listened. It’s also worth remark that David would have noticed this scene—the cop harassing the little old couple. (I see them as little somehow.) Because David paid attention. Here, it was a kind of peripheral vision through which he suddenly saw what was happening, instantly focused on it, and moved in to deal with it. As students, we witnessed the more sustained intensity of his focus on a work of literature, and the relentless attention he paid to the argument he was developing about it, and, for some of us, the lucky ones, the attention he paid to what we thought. [End Page 101] Which brings me to what I know not by accident, but for sure, what I know bone-deep, to use one of David’s favorite expressions. The most precious experience for David’s students came when you found him paying attention to you, to what you had to say, whether on paper or in writing. It was not a matter simply of seeking approval; it was more deeply a matter of what Faulkner called that “happy marriage of speaking and hearing” in which you could think out loud with impunity. You could trust that you would be understood, pressed to go further, to explain what you meant, all the while knowing that your ideas were being taken seriously by the most serious mind you were ever likely to encounter. David’s brilliance, his impeccable honesty, his open-minded curiosity, his open-hearted generosity—all these stand out in memory, as they stood out, day to day, year to year. For me...

“Looking for That Pot of Gold”: The Transnational Life of Kevin Henry

“Looking for That Pot of Gold”:The Transnational Life of Kevin Henry Sara S. Goek (bio) Flute player and piper Kevin Henry was born in 1929 on a small farm on the Sligo-Mayo border, the eighth of eleven children. Like many rural Irish families, the Henrys struggled to make ends meet, especially during the war years. In 1947 Henry left to join an older brother in Lincolnshire. Over the next ten years he lived in at least eighteen places in four countries, migrating throughout England, back to Ireland, across the Atlantic to Canada, and over the American border at Niagara Falls en route to New York City. From there he moved to Florida, Chicago, Butte, and back to Chicago, where he eventually settled down. He worked as an agricultural laborer, miner, tunnel digger, waiter, dance-hall musician, carpenter, and iron worker. At the beginning of an interview in April 2013 he reflected on his childhood and the impetus it provided for his migrations: Nobody believes in fairy stories and that stuff anymore, but in my part of the country ’twas a big tradition of telling fairy stories to us kids. When you grew up looking for this pot of gold, if you know what I mean, and through this pot of gold in your mind you went out into the world and you started looking for that pot of gold, you didn’t look for anything but the best, especially the money part of it, if you know what I mean.1 In these words Henry articulated a worldview that originated in rural Ireland, tying him to his roots and concomitantly explaining his physical movements away from them. While Eamon de Valera dreamed of a spiritual nation of people “satisfied with frugal comfort,” the fairy [End Page 92] stories as Henry understood them recognized life’s material necessities and aspirations.2 The mythical pot of gold may partially refer to money, but it implies more than that. It represents a state of mind more than an object. It suggests an unwillingness to be satisfied with his lot in life as it was given. A pot of gold is not something one receives, but something that must be sought. Henry framed his life story around that quest, showing the continued relevance of the values and traditions from his youth. When I visited Henry in Chicago to interview him for my Ph.D. research on postwar Irish migration and music, he and his wife Pauline generously shared their stories, tunes, and lunch, and I left with about four hours of recordings. Henry has much in common with other migrants of his generation: He comes from a rural background; he left school at age fifteen; he migrated first at age eighteen, destined for England; and for many years he worked in a variety of unskilled laboring jobs. In other ways he is an exception. He was the most mobile of my interviewees, and despite his deeply felt connections to Ireland, he expressed no desire to return permanently. Instead, he constructed his life story in a way that reconciled his strong sense of Irishness with the fact that he has spent most of his life outside of Ireland. Focusing on even a single oral-history interview can deepen our understanding of the movements, motivations, and meanings contained in the stories of individual migrants.3 It allows “for bringing actors and agency back into the analysis, something that is usually missing in macro-social analysis of cultures or societies.”4 Henry left Ireland to improve his circumstances, and while this could be read as a straightforward case of involuntary economic migration, he did not frame it that way. Instead, he chose to emphasize his own agency and the continued relevance of values from his youth, using them to justify his mobility and to compare the places and jobs along the way. [End Page 93] While oral history affords access to the stories of “ordinary” migrants such as Henry, transnationalism offers a means of interpreting those stories. In the introduction to their book Transnational Lives Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott write that “individual identity and attachment have long been shaped by the...

Tattoo 2082

Tattoo 2082 Mary Helen Stefaniak (bio) Like the internal combustion engine, repurposing South Florida seemed like a good idea at the time. Everybody knew that old folks liked the weather down there, and many of the existing luxury towers with their great ocean views had been built to survive hurricanes and storm surges. They were well suited to rising waters, their AC and electricals strategically installed. Key West had already gone under in 2043 (all but the hilltop cemetery), its submersion followed for many years by apocryphal sightings of web-toed cats. By mid-century, when long stretches of the Florida coast were underwater, investors posed the question: Why not sell that melting real estate to those who wouldn’t need it for long? And so it was that friends and fellow residents Kyla, Caitlin, Jared, and Drew were playing a game of bridge one morning, girls against boys, in the newly remodeled canteen/solarium at Aventura Assisted-Living Condominiums and Resort (formerly Miami Lifestyle Condos) when an automated laser nurse floated through the room at just below hip level. Using technology developed in the early 21st century for eradicating mosquitoes, one male at a time, the AutoNurse laser-targeted each of the oldsters in turn, dispensed the right dosage of the right drugs, and then floated noiselessly into the breezeway beyond. Jared fanned his cards with gnarled fingers and remarked, “I hate that robot bitch.” Drew, a former Rhodes scholar and author of several well-received volumes whose subjects he could sometimes recall, pointed out that the AutoNurse was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a robot. [End Page 167] “Actually,” said Kyla, a former National Science fellow, “it is.” “Well, it’s certainly not a bitch,” Caitlin put in, laying her cards on the table. The four of them found it amusing to think that everyone used to play bridge with physical cards of plastic-coated paper—paper, mind you! When Drew’s great-grandson gave him a vintage boxed set of two decks in a molded polystyrene holder, the four amigos (as they sometimes called themselves, Caitlin being a former high school Spanish teacher) had taken to playing cards “in person.” They started playing in the old canteen on the 10th floor, back when the windows had offered a view of red tile roofs and the flashy tops of palm trees. The new canteen/solarium looked out from the 35th floor over nothing but sea and sky. You had to go up to the roof to spot the other residential towers poking up out of the water in an archipelago that stretched north and south as far as the aging eye could see. Both decks of cards were worn around the edges now and had acquired a greasy feel. Between tricks they reached for their iBreathe O2 inhalers. By 2082, atmospheric oxygen levels had dropped around the globe. The obesity problem having been long since solved by the invention of cellulose noodles, Americans now counted units of oxygen expended rather than calories consumed, and oxygen conservation—a marriage of time-motion studies and SCUBA-diving technique—was the fastest-growing field in the 49 states. Jared had made his fortune in it, having gotten in on the ground floor 70-odd years ago with an undergraduate research project to determine which was more oxygen-efficient: the twist-off cap or a hand-held bottle opener. The O2-measuring protocol that he designed was still in use. Millennials they used to be called. Images of tiny people holding hands as they [End Page 168] jumped from tall buildings were embedded in their collective unconscious. Three out of four of them had helped a grandchild build a tower of blocks and fly a toy airplane into the side of it to knock it down. An odd feeling of relief and expiation—the end of suspense, the emptying of guilt—always came over them as the blocks tumbled down to the sound of the grandchild’s laughter. In April 2010, when the Gulf oil spill began with a blast that became a rupture between all time up to that moment (i.e., time poised, as time...

End Notes

End Notes Simona Sawhney (bio) He woke up from the dream, pulse stumbling, stuttering, mouth parched—his body smarting from a forest of blows. In the dream, his old, battered Maruti had screeched to a halt as the police van thundering behind had swerved right in front. He had been dragged out on the road, as ramshackle traffic roared and hissed around him. The moon hung a feeble orb over the rancid night air. They had wrenched open the containers in the trunk. The squeal of a lackey: “It seems to be beef, Sir…” Blows, kicks … “Don’t you know the law, you sister-fucker? But you won’t learn this way … wait till we teach you a lesson…” Spine, knees, groin on fire … raging pain. … “You will eatthe cow-mother, will you, will you, you bastard son-of-Babur?” “Let me go, Sir,” whimpering, sobbing, crawling … “You are mistaken Sir, you are mistaken, I have never eaten beef in my life, this is not beef.” “What is it then, sister-fucker, if it isn’t beef?” “It is not beef, Sir, it is … only … only … human-meat, Sir … flesh of some useless human beings.” That look on the policeman’s face, his lathi suspended in mid-air—idiotic, incredulous, disappointed. “Human beings?” He spat out the word with great globs of disgust. Then, suddenly, cunningly: “What was their caste, Asshole, what were their names?” He woke up. If you’re a foreigner, of course, you may eat beef.1 And that is as it should be. Because foreigners have lifestyles, food preferences, tastes and habits … and hell, we’ve always been ready to cut up and serve our mothers, whether bony or bonny, to the guy who lands from afar with a thick wad of cash. Especially if he be fair of skin. If dark, then it’s a different matter of course. Because the dark ones, don’t you know, they fuck anything that moves. That must be the reason they all have a strange smell about them … or maybe it’s the drugs. Prostitutes and addicts. They ought to be dragged out on the street and stripped, every single one of them.2 But we’re too tolerant, that’s our problem. [End Page 113] That’s why they all take advantage of us. So hospitable, so tolerant, so accommodating, that is why we are so abused. But enough is enough, right? No more niceness for these drug-pushing fornicators, these child molesters, these crazy beasts. They should go back where they came from. We will send them back, right back where they came from. Now the fair ones, the blue-eyed ones, glowing and gorgeous with the pure sheen of pure wealth—they are a different matter altogether. Clear as day, they were born to rule the earth. Yes, yes, I know, we booted them out, our Great Leaders booted them out a few decades ago, but truth to tell, we’ve been yearning for them ever since the day they boarded their ships and left our shores. We yearn so much, so longingly, so wistfully, we spend all our time trying to adore them, emulate them, become them—only in flesh, mind you, only in flesh … I ask you, is it not grossly unfair to be ugly, if you could be Fair and Lovely instead?3 It is time we seriously put our minds to the Whitification of our beloved Motherland. White is the American, our younger brother, White the Truth, and White the Cow. And White indeed, indeed, was our Lord, though playfully, jestfully named Krishna, the darkie, by his blessed mother. So, in the midst of this Grand Project of Whitification—blazoned on billboards and painfully etched on the skin—in the midst of this project of de-Beastification, which has strangely, paradoxically, morphed such that what is yanked out of the human is not the savage, violent beast, but instead the cud-chewing, ruminating, slow-gazing, unperturbed beast—in the midst of such projects, what on earth happened to one Rohith Vemula?4 On Earth. On the earth he too had lived. And on the earth, though suspended by a few feet...

"Mind you, that's just, like, a guestimation": A diachronic analysis of morphological creativity in American teen talk and dubbing

The language of adolescents has always been of particular interest to linguists mostly for being extremely creative. Adolescence is, in fact, a transition stage that coincides with the entrance into secondary school, where teenagers strive to construct their own identity, mainly through linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989, 1997, 2004). In this sense, language becomes a strong identity marker (Edwards 2009) whose role becomes crucial in the portrayal of adolescent characters in films. The present paper aims at investigating the language of American adolescents diachronically in three famous movies of different decades from the 1980s to 2000s, namely Sixteen Candles (1984, Hughes), Clueless (1995, Heckerling) and Juno (2007, Reitman), which revolve around teenagers’ life at high school. The first step in the analysis consists in the identification of some characterising features of teen talk, especially focusing on word formation. Then, the analysis will be carried out contrastively and cross-culturally from a translational perspective, since these phenomena will be also investigated in Italian dubbing. More specifically, it will be ascertained whether or not these features are transposed into Italian, if so, pinpointing the most common strategies employed as well as the strategies used for compensation when, on the contrary, the complexity and difficulty in rendering certain linguistic and cultural specific phenomena hamper to find efficient translating solutions in the target text. Finally, problems deriving from this type of audiovisual translation, like lip synch, will also be taken into account and it will also be checked if the dubbed version succeeds in depicting the characters in the same way as in the original text.

Mind you: an enunciative description

The predicate mind is situated somewhere between the lexical and the grammatical, lending itself to various grammaticalised uses, such as never mind or mind employed alone as a form of discourse particle. The present article deals with the parenthetical sequence mind you, using examples taken from the British National Corpus. After a brief discussion evoking the methodological difficulties implied by corpus study of a polyvalent, multiword marker of this type, I will propose a description, formulated within the Theory of Enunciative Operations, according to which, in a sequence of the general form mind you mind you indicates that q operates a retroactive adjustment relative to the inferences which the utterance of p might give rise to. This mechanism is doubly retroactive when mind you is in final position relative to q, i.e. q, mind you. I will then consider two suggestions as to the diachronic sources of the mind you sequence, favouring the hypothesis that this use has developed from an inverted imperative construction. This will enable me to link the discursive functions of the predicate mind to its other values, via a schematic form according to which an occurrence of mind implies the imposition of some phenomenon b on the attention of a subject a.

One good hand

If you had been a few feet away, you would have never guessed she was nearly 50 years old. She looked more like a child, her tiny silhouette hiding beneath the bleached-white hospital sheets. A brightly colored cloth wrapped her hair, further concealing her years. Only temporal wasting and paper-like tightening of the caramel-colored skin over her cheekbones betrayed her age and illness. I met Ms. Lana as I would come to call her, while on-call as a medical student. As a third-year medical student, you are always hoping to get the ‘‘perfect patient’’ . . . the one who gives you a clear, concise history, the one whomakes you look good in front of your team, and the one who does not mind you rudely waking them for morning rounds. At first Ms. Lana seemed anything but the ‘‘perfect patient.’’ When I entered her room for the admission interview, she could not have seemed less interested. She did not open her eyes throughout the encounter; she mumbled faint responses laced with irritation to only a sporadic selection of my questions. Most of what I knew aboutMs. Lana that first day I gleaned from her extensive hospital records. She had been admitted to our health system 12 times over the previous 5 years, the past 10 admissions being for recurrent abdominal pain and nausea secondary to diabetic gastroparesis. She had had 13 abdominal/ pelvic CT scanswith contrast and four ultrasounds of the abdomen. All imaging tests had been negative except imaging years ago that had shown gall stone pancreatitis and cholecystectomy. Multiple X-rays of her abdomen, an upper gastrointestinal series, a small bowel follow-through, an upper endoscopy and a colonoscopy – all had been unrevealing. Two gastric emptying studies showed mild gastroparesis, Ms. Lana had been non-adherent with the promotility agent that had been repeatedly prescribed, and had over the course of several hospitalizations become dependent on oxycodone, whichwould exacerbate hermotility issues. Her illness was further complicated by HIV, hepatitis C, depression, alcohol abuse, and intermittent cocaine use. Our attending had actually taken care of Ms. Lana twice before. Her abdominal pain and nausea would be controlled at each admission, and after discharge she would not take her pro-motility agents or follow through with HIV and substance use care. At first, Patient Education and Counseling 98 (2015) 1164–1166

Acceptance of the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for 2015:

In the interests of time, I’ll just thank everybody. Not just my students, mentors, and family, but the entire field of petrology. Thanks for encouraging me to think and work for 30 years and counting. I don’t know why petrology raises my pulse whilst somebody else obsesses over climate or embryology or astrophysics. Can it be genetic? Surely it’s more than the topic; it’s also your collective personality. Maybe it’s because I like a good argument. Mind you, I do wish we could actually settle some of our debates. You know, like the physicists—a question is fought over, someone makes a definitive measurement, and everybody moves on to a new challenge. But even if petrology cannot stop chasing its tail, it is also an elastic domain that invites us to ask ever-larger questions. Petrology started as “the origin of rocks” but it expands and colonizes—from nanophases to magma oceans, from carbon sequestration to super-Earths. Everything is a petrologic object, from the core to the clouds, from cement to comets. Yes, they all can be understood with phase diagrams. I’m grateful to contribute a little to this contentious widening adventure and thankful to have all of you as colleagues, adversaries, and friends.

Telling the Truth About Women’s Lives

Tell us, they say, about women and abortion in Ireland. OI'm not sure that I can any more, or at least not in any straightforward way. There several reasons for this, personal as much as political. I'm not sure which is the most complicated, and in any case (in my case), the reasons peculiarly resistant to partition. One way and another, I suspect it's to do with the passage of time, the transmutations of generations and, above all, how abortion is framed and dealt with in Ireland. But it's not in Ireland, abortion, that's the whole point. If it were, we wouldn't be here having to write about it. Again. Or think about it, or not much, or not so endlessly. It's Byzantine, this matter of abortion, convoluted, complex beyond all reason and necessity, harrowing, tortuous. Also often wounding, and sometimes bizarre. (1) As I'm writing this, keeping an ear to the ground as ever, I hear a bishop speak. He says, inter alia, that lesbians and gay men who have children may be care-givers, but they are not necessarily parents. When asked about his views on a woman having an abortion after she has been raped, the bishop says women who become pregnant through rape should not destroy a life in order to get back at the rapist. (2) That these models of logic aroused more amusement and caustic comment than ire and offence is a sign of the rapid and steep decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland over the past 20 years. The bishop's intervention in a secular debate is seen as contentious and out of step with contemporary morality and behaviour. It is counter-cultural. Irish people no longer cowed or obsequious in the face of episcopal intimidation. And we're certainly not obedient. Mostly, we don't believe the bishop, and definitely we don't do what the bishop says. To be fair (although I'm under no obligation, given our history of subjugation by the Catholic clergy), the next day, other bishops and priests rushed quasi en masse to dissociate themselves from the bishop's remarks, and he had to apologise for any hurt he 'may' have caused, which is more of a damage limitation exercise than an apology. Mind you (I'm still being fair), it wasn't the abortion remarks the hastening clergy were repudiating, only the comments on the parenting suitability of lesbians and gay men, considered as potentially damaging to the Catholic Church in light of the marriage equality referendum to be held in May. So a strategic partial repudiation then. Nothing to do with truth. All the same, it's a change that changes so much, after generations of feminism, we know a lot more now about the truths of women's lives, and we're talking about them, not sub rosa and entre nous, but out loud and in public. I grew up knowing nothing. No one ever told me the 'facts of life ', and I'm not sure when I even knew there were facts I didn 't know. Until quite a ripe age, sex and reproduction remained largely a mystery for me. In my convent school when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a nun told us, in all seriousness, that if we met boys (and we did, of course we did), we should keep our berets and gloves on all the time. For me, and for so many women of my generation and generations before me, you had to learn on the job. Trial and error. The consequences of the errors were always left to us, the women, to bear. These were the wages of sin, because sex (outside marriage) and sin were synonymous. Hence the Magdalen laundries, followed, in so many cases, by the lonely boat to England and life-long damage. As a young woman, I was lucky not to get pregnant. It wasn 't because I was well-informed and well equipped--or practicing chastity. Au contraire. I was just lucky, that's all. The silence surrounding abortion in this country has been deafening, only punctuated every decade or so by a dreadful human tragedy - the loss of a woman's life or the awful public drama of court cases taken to wrest from the State the right to access abortion here, where we live. …