Perfect Stranger Research Articles

Disrupting Molded Images: Identities, responsibilities and relationships—teachers and indigenous subject material

This paper explores the complexities of teachers’ understanding of their relationship with Aboriginal people. Drawing on her current work with teachers, the author offers a method for initiating a critical pedagogy of remembrance that allows teachers to attend to and learn from the biography of their relationship with Aboriginal people. The author argues that teachers position themselves as “perfect stranger” to Aboriginal people and explores forms of “ethical learning” which use the act of remembrance to raise awareness of the ways in which the identities of both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in Canada have been shaped by the colonial encounter. The construction of this ethical awareness among teachers is a promising way to transform relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in Canada.

WHAT ARE YOU READING?

A few months ago I was accosted in a pub near King's Cross, in central London, by a drunk spoiling for a fight. Instead of trying to reason with someone unreasonable, I alerted one of the bartenders that trouble was ahead. My warning came too late. As soon as the drunk saw me talking to the bartender, he lunged at me, shouting “You! You!,” as if somehow I had betrayed the trust of this perfect stranger. He threw me against the wall, my pint glass shattering on the floor as I fell backward. And then he started to choke me. (For a drunk, his grip was surprisingly strong.) I couldn't tell you how much time elapsed—it felt like a long time, but was probably only a minute or so—before some of the other customers finally overpowered him.

How to be a perfect stranger: a guide to etiquette in other people's religious ceremonies

How to be a perfect stranger: a guide to etiquette in other people's religious ceremonies

Book Review: How to Be a Perfect Stranger

Book Review: How to Be a Perfect Stranger

How Are Primaries Modified?

EVERYONE WHO IS SENSITIVE to relations between words has no doubt noticed, at one time or another, the manifold and sometimes puzzling relations that exist between nouns (or, more generally, primaries) and the words that modify them. Ordinary expressions like a perfect stranger, the Veterans Administration, steam shovel, my sincere desire, or the dead hand of the past seem clear enough in their meaning until we begin to ask ourselves how, precisely, the modifiers affect the meaning of the headword or primary, and whether, in each case, the relationship between primary and modifier is the same. The problem is sometimes complicated by the semantic ambiguity of the modifying word (perfect above, for example), or the elliptical nature of the expression (Veterans Administration), but I am concerned here with syntactic ambiguity. One way to make clear the relationships that exist between primary and adjunct is to use the symbolism that Otto Jespersen worked out in his Analytic Syntax.' The five expressions above show differences in syntactic form: a perfect stranger 2 (3) 'a stranger perfectly strange'; the Veterans Administration 2 (3)-I 'the administration for veterans' affairs'; steam shovel r-2_ 'an excavating shovel (formerly) operated by steam'; my sincere desire I22 'my desire which is sincere'; and the dead hand of the past 2 1 2 (p1). This is not the place to explain or justify Jespersen's system, or the theory of grammatical rank it is based on, but I should say that what follows will be best understood by the careful student of that system and that theory. My purpose in this paper is to add something to Jespersen's many scattered remarks on the restriction of primaries.2 I wish particularly to show the effect that pronunciation has on modification. The way that the student of language goes about answering the question of modification depends in large part on the ultimate aims of his study. Jespersen in his various works advanced one line of inquiry, and Fries in his American English Grammar3 another. The aim in both cases is to describe the facts of language, but Jespersen's method is, for the most part, to show points of similarity and difference between ordinary language and the language of logic, or, as he says, those points where grammatical form and logical notion meet;4

Contracts for the Benefit of Third Persons

By the great weight of authority in the United States the same facts that operate to create contractual relations between the offeror and the acceptor may also operate to create rights in a third person.2 It may be useful, therefore, to examine in detail the nature and limits of this doctrine and to classify and discuss the cases in distinct groups. To many students and practitioners of the common law prizAty of contract3 became a fetish. As such, it operated to deprive many a claimant of a remedy in cases where according to the mores of the time the claim was just. It has made many learned men believe that a chose in action could not be assigned. Even now, it is gravely asserted that a man cannot be made the debtor of another against his will. But the common law was gradually influenced by equity and by the law merchant, so that by assignment a debtor could become bound to pay a perfect stranger to himself, although until the legislature stepped in, the common-law courts characteristically made use of a fiction and pretended that they were not doing that which they really were doing.

A Collecting Trip to Southeastern Colorado

IN April and May of last year, 1905, the writer made a collecting trip to the southeast part of Colorado. With the exception of a few days' stay at Lamar the entire period was spent in Baca County, which is the extreme southeastern county of the State. I arrived at Lamar at midnight of April 4, and remained there until the morning of the ioth, when I took the stage for Springfield, the county-seat of Baca County, fifty miles away, reachling there late that afternoon, and securing quarters at the hotel kept by Mrs A C. Bruner, wlo was kind enough to put up with a collector and his traps. Leaving there on the 26th, I drove east almost to the Kansas line, where I stopped at the ranch of Mr. J. M. Johnston, at whlich Monon Postoffice is located. Mr. Johnston and his family took me in, a perfect stranger, uniintroduced, gave me the best they had, in fact treated me while, and I shall always remember my stay there with pleasure. I stopped there until M1ay 9th, when I returned to Springfield and remained until the 17th. I then went nearly thirty miles ill a northwesterly direction, and located at the ranch of Mr. E. J. Gaume, in the northwest corner of the county, where I remained until the 26th, being also hospitably treated there. Then I again returned to Springfield, and left for home on June 2, but doing my last field work May 31. country about Lamnar is a prairie country, but not as level as in Baca County. Arkansas River flows by the north side of the town, and its bottom is well wooded with cottonwood trees with some underbrush. land along the river is largely taken up and cultivated. To the south the ground gradually rises until it culminates in a nearly level mesa or prairie. A ditch winds around on this rising ground and below it the land is cultivated, above not. In places tilhe soil is very sandy. road between Lamar and Springfield is over a monotonous, nearly level prairie. Two streams with a little water are crossed, Clay Creek and Two Butte Creek; also Bear Creek about two miles north of Springfield, but this has only a little water here and there in holes. Baca County is a typical prairie country, very flat and level, tiresomely so to one accustomed to the mountains. No trees except along what few water courses there are, and not always along them. These trees are mostly broad-leaved cottonwoods, with a few willow, wild plum and cherry trees. Bear Creek north of Springfield has quite a good many trees along its banks, and it is a good collecting ground. Mr. Johnston's ranch is also ot Bear Creek, but with comparatively few trees about, tho a short distance east, at about the state line, there is quite a little grove of small cotton woods which I found full of birds. And an afternoon spent on Buffalo Creek three miles northi showed many birds among the trees there. In fact wherever one could find trees along these creeks he would find birds. Bear Creek, instead of emptying into some larger stream, has an easterly course in Kansas for a little distance then disappears in the ground. Locally they say it empties into Kansas. country around Gaume's ranch is quite different as it is on the edge of what is known as The Cedars, which name covers the extreme western part of