Tick Tock Research Articles

Abstract PR009: Tick tock trees: Reconstructing the evolutionary dynamics of human tissues using fluctuating methylation clocks

Abstract The development of cancer from healthy somatic cells is fundamentally an evolutionary process. Understanding this process is vital to improving its clinical management and developing new treatment strategies. Tracing individual human cells’ fates would simultaneously advance somatic evolutionary theory and our understanding of normal tissue function and its change through development, aging, and cancer progression. We cannot use human cell-labeling techniques in vivo. Still, population genetic and phylogenetic models can leverage the information recorded in heritable alterations to reconstruct the unobserved somatic cells’ history. Most such methods are limited by the few parameters they can estimate and restricted to neoplastic samples due to the lack of adequate evolutionary signal in healthy somatic cells. Gabbutt et al. recently ameliorated this limitation by introducing fluctuating methylation clocks (FMCs)—tissue-specific CpG sites that randomly change their methylation state—and a model that uses them to reconstruct the evolution of a clonal stem-cell population. In this application, all FMCs in a bulk sample are interrogated using a single standard methylation array to yield estimates of rates of methylation, demethylation and cell replacement, and the size of the stem-cell niche. This technique is especially suited to studying stem-cell niche dynamics in healthy or pre-malignant tissues organized in clonal cell populations where the whole population can be sampled together, like crypts (e.g., intestine, Barrett’s esophagus) and glands (e.g., endometrium). We have developed a multi-sample extension of this model that simultaneously reconstructs the evolutionary dynamics of stem cells within a niche and the niches within the tissue. This phylodynamic model produces additional estimates like ancestral relationships between sampled clonal populations, their calendar divergence times, the number of effective evolutionary niches, and how some of these parameters change over time. Here, we will present the method, demonstrate its validity, characterize its accuracy under a broad simulation parameter space, and showcase its application in analyzing human data from the following tissues: colon, small intestine, endometrium, and Barrett’s esophagus. We will also discuss the current model's limitations and future improvements that will discern between mechanisms of stem-cell-niche reproduction and incorporate geographical information. The stochastic nature of neoplastic progression makes it unlikely for any particular somatic alteration to be highly predictive of its outcome. This can explain why developing reliable traditional biomarkers has been so difficult. Alternatively, evolutionary biomarkers measure the characteristics of the process itself and thus should apply to all neoplasms. Parametric phylogenetic reconstruction models like the one introduced here will enable us to develop such universal biomarkers. Our ultimate goal is for evolutionary biomarkers to join evolutionary therapies in the revolution of the clinical management of cancer. Citation Format: Diego Mallo, Pablo Bousquets-Muñoz, Heather E. Grant, Darryl Shibata, Trevor A. Graham, Carlo C. Maley, Calum Gabbutt. Tick tock trees: Reconstructing the evolutionary dynamics of human tissues using fluctuating methylation clocks [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference in Cancer Research: Translating Cancer Evolution and Data Science: The Next Frontier; 2023 Dec 3-6; Boston, Massachusetts. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(3 Suppl_2):Abstract nr PR009.

A Systematic Review of Live Animal Use as a Simulation Modality (“Live Tissue Training”) in the Emergency Management of Trauma

Live anaesthetized animals are used as simulation models to teach techniques in the emergency management of trauma. We aimed to explore how "live tissue training" (LTT) is designed, delivered and evaluated in order to better understand and characterize aspects of educational merit. A systematic review was performed using PRISMA guidance. A combined approach, involving a 3-stage modified narrative synthesis process and reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify key concepts across the published literature. Qualitative synthesis of 48 selected articles suggests that LTT is mainly used to teach military and civilian physicians and military medical technicians. The procedures trained vary with the learner population, from simple pre-hospital trauma tasks to advanced operative surgical skills. Many courses use a combination of didactic and practical training, with an animal model used to train practical application of knowledge and procedural skills. Descriptions of the learning interventions are limited, and explicit use of educational theory or pedagogic frameworks were absent within the literature. Four themes were identified regarding aspects of LTT that are valued by learners: "recreating the experience," relating to fidelity and realism; "tick tock" "dynamics of hemorrhage", encompassing the impact of bleeding and urgent pressure to act; "emotional impact" of conducting the training, and "self-efficacy: I believe I can do it." Thematic analysis of published literature suggests that there may be educational benefit in the use of live tissue models due to time criticality and bleeding, which creates a real-life event. LTT also invokes an emotional response, and learners experience an increase in self-efficacy from participation. We consider that these aspects and associated pedagogy should be addressed when researching and developing alternative simulation modalities, in order to intelligently replace, reduce and refine the use of animals in training practitioners in the emergency management of trauma.

Perilaku pencarian informasi beauty vlogger di wilayah Kabupaten Trenggalek untuk memenuhi kebutuhan informasi pada proses pembuatan konten video

The emergence of beauty vloggers is currently a trend in the world of beauty because they can influence skincare or make-up products through video content that is shared. This study intends to find out the information seeking behavior of beauty vloggers in the Trenggalek Regency area to meet information needs in the process of creating video content, as well as the obstacles faced by beauty vloggers in searching for information as an effort to meet information needs in the process of creating video content and how to overcome them. The type of approach used in this study is a qualitative descriptive approach. The data collection technique used was interviews with three beauty vloggers, observation and documentation. As well as data analysis used, namely data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. The results of the study show that the information seeking behavior model used by beauty vloggers in the Trenggalek Regency area is in accordance with the theory put forward by David Ellis which is divided into 8 stages including Starting, Chaining, Browsing, Differenting, Monitoring, Extracting, Verifying, Ending via whatsapp, tick tock, instagram and google. The results of the study also show the obstacles faced by beauty vloggers which are divided into 2 factors including internal factors in the form of lack of information availability and external factors in the form of inadequate internet networks. However, the constraints from these internal factors can be handled by re-searching information, while external factors can be handled by postponing information search activities and looking for a place that has network access that supports it.

Tick tock on the stomach clock: Factors affecting time to diagnosis of gastric adenocarcinoma at an urban cancer center with a large East Asian patient population.

e18508 Background: Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the world and disproportionately affects the East Asian population. Various factors contribute to this disparity such as genetics and environmental exposure. Given that language barriers can contribute to reduced quality of healthcare delivery, screening rates, and patient safety, it is important to assess the impact of language on the diagnosis of gastric cancer. Tufts Medical Center’s proximity to Boston’s Chinatown make our patient population unique for analysis of these factors. Here we present a single-institution experience of the factors affecting gastric adenocarcinoma time to diagnosis. Methods: We used ICD-10 codes to retrospectively identify patients at Tufts Medical Center with a diagnosis of gastric cancer between January 2011 and December 2021. We excluded patients that did not have a diagnosis of gastric adenocarcinoma or lacked adequate clinical documentation. We recorded demographic, clinical, and treatment characteristics including race (White, Asian, or other), primary language (English, Asian or other), presenting symptoms, enrollment in hospice, and interpreter status (certified, non-certified, none, or not applicable). Certified interpreters included professional medical services for in-person, video, or phone interpreters. Non-certified interpreters included family members, physicians fluent in the language, or others. We assessed the impact of these on the time between initial presentation to the healthcare system and eventual diagnosis of gastric cancer. Results: 80 patients were included in the analysis. Mean days to diagnosis by race were as follows: White (40), Asian (43), other (25), p = 0.20. Mean days to diagnosis based on language were as follows: English (40), Asian (43), other (6), p = 0.07. Mean days to diagnosis based on interpreter status were as follows: certified (19), non-certified (13), none (73), NA (40) (p = 0.05). When pairwise comparison was done, there was no difference between certified and non-certified interpreter (p = 0.40). There was no difference between certified interpreter and no interpreter (p = 0.06). There was a statistically significant difference between non-certified interpreter and no interpreter (p = 0.04). Presenting symptoms and eventual enrollment in hospice did not significantly impact time to diagnosis. Conclusions: We saw a shorter time from initial presentation to diagnosis of gastric adenocarcinoma in non-English speaking patients who used an interpreter at the initial visit compared to those who did not. One should always consider interpreter availability as an important part of reducing health disparities.

Teacher's Efforts in Shaping the Character of Students Addicted to the TikTok Application in Elementary Schools

This study aims to see how the behavior of today's children towards the tik tok application. The formulation of the research problem is how to influence the use of the Tik-Tok application on the behavior of children in Binjai City. The purpose of this research is to find out how the use of the Tik-Tok application influences the behavior of children in Binjai City. The type of research used in this study is a type of qualitative research. The informants of this study were Maura El Mumtaz students who used the Tik-Tok application as many as 25 people aged 8-10 years. The results of this study can be concluded that the efforts made by the MIS teacher Maura El Mumtaz include: (1) Giving messages about adab and manners; (2) Provide consequences for students' bad behavior that violates the class agreement on polite behavior; (3) Teachers are also not allowed to play tick tock, this is because they are more likely to see people than them; (4) inviting parents to work together in overcoming student morals; and (5) Invite children to be positive.

Tik Tok in Improving Students' Speaking Skills in the English for Business Course

Learning media in the digital era must be aligned with technological developments. The learning media chosen must be interesting and attached to students. The Tik Tok application is currently popular with many people, including the students of administrasi bisnis department, Universitas Bina Sarana Informatika. Departing from these reasons, the researchers took the initiative to implement the Tik Tok application as a medium interesting and fun learning in delivering material in English for Business courses. This study aims to find out how effective the Tik Tok application is in improving the speaking skills of students majoring in business administration at the Universitas Bina Sarana Informatika. Qualitative method is used for analyzing the recorded video on Tik Tok application that were produced by the students as well as processing of questionnaires on student views regarding the use of tick tock media in learning in English for Business courses. The result indicated that the use of the Tik Tok application is considered quite effective in developing students' speaking skills. This can be seen from the results of the recordings sent to lecturers, students are more relaxed and not tense when speaking English using Tik Tok. This was also corroborated by the results of filling out the questionnaire which stated that the Tik Tok application was an innovation in learning English, which made students more relaxed and enjoyed the teaching and learning process and eliminated the mindset that learning English is difficult.

The Students Perceptions by Using Tik Tok as a Media Learning English

This study aims to find out student opinion responses to the use of the tik tok application to students majoring in English University at Dehasen Bengkulu. The researchers used a type of qualitative descriptive research. The researcher used Qualitative descriptive is a method. Problem solving is seen by describing the state of an object or objects. After that, the data is obtained based on the facts contained in the object. The analytical method used in this research is confirmation by using a descriptive analysis method. This descriptive analysis approach is to see students' opinions about the use of tick tock media as a medium for learning English. Then, the instrument used by researchers is a questionnaire used by researchers to collect data. The research used can be in the form of tables, graphs, medians, modes, averages, percents and percentage calculations, all of which are translated into descriptive analysis. The results of the study show that students strongly agree with the use of tick tock as a learning medium. the tik tok application is one of the social media applications that is in great demand by the public. Therefore, by being creative using tick tock, students are able to develop and increase students innovative power in learning English. with the tik tok application, students can be creative through short videos .

Perubahan Budaya Komunikasi Dalam Penggunaan Media Sosial Tik Tok (Studi Mahasiswi IAIN Bukittinggi Di Kos Putri Al Maizy, Gurun Aua, Kubang Putiah)

Cultural changes will continue to develop in every era, with the emergence of new technologies, one of which is social media. Social media aims to provide convenience in terms of communicating so that it has an impact on its users, both positive and negative. One of the most widely used applications from other social media is the Tik Tok application where each user can make various videos and interact via private chat. The app, launched in September 2016, shows how important its influence on culture is. Where tick tock has become the most widely used social media, one of which is among students. The purpose of this study was to find out the factors that cause changes in the culture of communication and how changes in the culture of communication in the use of social media tick tok by IAIN Bukittinggi students who live in Al Maizy's boarding house, Gurun Aua Nagari Kubang Putiah.

Tick tock, tick tock: Mouse culture and tissue aging captured by an epigenetic clock.

Aging is associated with dramatic changes to DNA methylation (DNAm), although the causes and consequences of such alterations are unknown. Our ability to experimentally uncover mechanisms of epigenetic aging will be greatly enhanced by our ability to study and manipulate these changes using in vitro models. However, it remains unclear whether the changes elicited by cells in culture can serve as a model of what is observed in aging tissues in vivo. To test this, we serially passaged mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and assessed changes in DNAm at each time point via reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. By developing a measure that tracked cellular aging in vitro, we tested whether it tracked physiological aging in various mouse tissues and whether anti‐aging interventions modulate this measure. Our measure, termed CultureAGE, was shown to strongly increase with age when examined in multiple tissues (liver, lung, kidney, blood, and adipose). As a control, we confirmed that the measure was not a marker of cellular senescence, suggesting that it reflects a distinct yet progressive cellular aging phenomena that can be induced in vitro. Furthermore, we demonstrated slower epigenetic aging in animals undergoing caloric restriction and a resetting of our measure in lung and kidney fibroblasts when re‐programmed to iPSCs. Enrichment and clustering analysis implicated EED and Polycomb group (PcG) factors as potentially important chromatin regulators in translational culture aging phenotypes. Overall, this study supports the concept that physiologically relevant aging changes can be induced in vitro and used to uncover mechanistic insights into epigenetic aging.

Tick tock. Should we stop the clock?

The coronavirus pandemicis putting intense pressures on pretenure faculty to remain productive during a time when they can’t even access their research labs. Many worry about what these productivit...

Kaaron WarrenInto Bones Like Oil

move away, some living (they know) inauthentically, but—all the same— satisfied. Can teen infatuation lead to anything good? Will doubts erode satisfaction ? Questions that tease the mind into imagining—and reading—lives on other pages. Granted, some people are snapshots , diminished by irony. The twoyear -old who senses that he has lost control of the big people around him; the four-year-old trying to create order in the small world of his toys. Evoked sympathy, certainly, but at a distance. An adult voice places them, someone standing nearby, not inside the children. Arrested in development , imagined as pre-adults. Other characters, thankfully, not so stopped. Some making peace through faith, the saving pleasure of a memory, to create as well as fading senses allow, to joke against eternity. The woman who hides her hands, after decades of service, hands that must surely be works of art to God; another who “just knows now that even God has his flaws.” A certain sadness comes through. Often, the characters seem isolated, contained within themselves. If they connect, it’s because they remind the reader of certain moments of self-reflection. Dialogue is rare. Community, if mentioned, is usually a context; contributing to, creating community seems secondary. A man who finds “friendship . . . from the ashes of two different desperations,” a welcome reprieve. Yet Nathan Brown doesn’t assume the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of a god as he assembles his human comedy. We do not know everything. The poems are not always finished or polished, standing as they do for incomplete lives. A dark textured cover takes and holds our fingerprints. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Kaaron Warren Into Bones Like Oil Atlanta. Meerkat Press. 2019. 100 pages. KAARON WARREN RELIVES her fascination with ghosts and, like every great writer, steals her stories from the everyday. But nothing is everyday in where she takes you. Into Bones Like Oil is a nonimposing story that is a big haunting for the unsettling themes it explores. In the gentle ticking of a clock, the silent roll of a sea, the narrative invites us into protagonist Dora’s solitude. The story discloses a mother’s guilt. We are trapped with Dora inside a shipwrecked house and its shipwrecked occupants, and all its visiting ghosts. As in such (multi) award-winning works as Tide of Stone (2018) and The Grief Hole (2016), Warren lulls you with deceptively simple text into a complex oddity, where all characters are nearly appealing in their flaws. Like Trevor, who is handsome in an immature way; short and bouncy, he’s like a little Fluffy. Like ex-sailor Luke, easy on the eye, so full of secrets. Like big Larry, so strong, his handshake could break bone. Like Roy, with the skin disease, the landlord who lures specters, who takes advantage of sleepers—conduits to ghosts and their stories. Warren enchants you with what she tells, what she doesn’t tell. There is an omnipresent suspense inside a vivid sense of place, a most gloomy place: “The bathroom was tiled, floor and walls, in pale purple with gold streaks. It gave the room an odd glow, because the light fitting was set high in the ceiling and dim due to dust and insects in the pale green glass globe. The toilet was old but clean.” There are smells everywhere: wet hair, hot metal, musk. And sound: feet, cars, the tick tock of an unseen clock. The prose is quietly ruthless. A reveal about something dreadful, like an infant torn live from a hung woman’s belly, falls out of a normal conversation about something else. There is almost a monotony to the story, yet just as you relax there are shadows of people in the room. Into Bones Like Oil is Kaaron Warren in her element. Her summons into a wine bar of sorts. For ghosts. Shipwrecked ones. And nothing is innocent. Not even you. Eugen Bacon Swinburne University of Technology Rodrigo Márquez Tizano Jakarta Trans. Thomas Bunstead. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2019. 160 pages. JAKARTA (Yakarta in the original Spanish ) is a taut novel set in an unnamed city beset by plague and social unrest, where...

Tick-tock goes the croc: a high-density EEG study of risk-reactivity and binge-drinking.

Links between individual differences in risk processing and high-risk behaviors such as binge-drinking have long been the focus of active research. However, investigations in this area almost exclusively utilize decision-making focused paradigms. This emphasis makes it difficult to assess links between risk behaviors and raw risk reactivity independent of decision and feedback processes. A deeper understanding of this association has the potential to shed light on the role of risk reactivity in high-risk behavior susceptibility. To contribute toward this aim, this study utilizes a popular risk-taking game, the crocodile dentist, to assess links between individual differences in decision-free risk-reactivity and reported binge-drinking frequency levels. In this task, participants engage in a series of decision-free escalating risk responses. Risk-reactivity was assessed by measuring late positive potential responses toward risk-taking action initiation cues using high-density 256-Channel EEG. The results indicate that, after controlling for overall alcohol consumption frequency, higher rates of reported binge-drinking are associated with both increased general risk-taking responsivity and increased risk-reactivity escalation as a function of risk level. These findings highlight intriguing links between risk reactivity and binge-drinking frequency, making key contributions in the areas of risk-taking and affective science.

Tick tock: DNA methylation, the epigenetic clock and exceptional longevity.

Tick tock: DNA methylation, the epigenetic clock and exceptional longevity.

Tick tock: can the clock be stopped? the use of elective oocyte cryopreservation (EOC) as a means to preserve fertility (PF)

Tick tock: can the clock be stopped? the use of elective oocyte cryopreservation (EOC) as a means to preserve fertility (PF)

Tick Tock Clock: A Phonics Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Tick Tock Clock: A Phonics Reader Hope Morrison Cuyler, Margery . Tick Tock Clock: A Phonics Reader; illus. by Robert Neubecker. Harper/HarperCollins, 2012. [32p]. (I Can Read Books) Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-136309-2 $16.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-06-136311-5 $3.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. K-1. Twin girls spend the day with Grandma while their mother works, and the passing hours of the day are marked by the ticking clock and their activities. The girls are a bit on the rambunctious side—whipping paint at each other, splashing their stockinged feet into the lake, hitting each other with pillows—and by the end of the day, Grandma's tuckered out. There is plenty of repetition to support the beginning [End Page 304] reader here: every single page opens with "Tick tock," there are no more than five words on any given page, and every single line ends with either "tock" or its rhyme. While there are a few stretches to fit this formula (particular when Grandma busts out the "wok" to make dinner), most episodes fit nicely into the story of the girls' day. The girls' inclination toward mischief is pretty much the only plot, though, making for a fairly thin story; much of the book's humor lies in Grandma's reactions to the girls, but this subtle, adult-angled humor may be lost on the intended readership. Neubecker's line and digital color illustrations contrast a tidy layout, with spot art against white pages, against the girls' wildness, their arms flailing, hair flying, and mouths wide open. Grandma's countenance decidedly shifts from happy to tolerant to frazzled to just plain worn out as the day wears on, though when the girls are gone and she collapses into her easy chair at the end of the day, there is a smile on her face and a framed picture of the girls at her side: "Tick tock. Asleep like a rock!" Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Metal‐Ion‐Driven Supramolecular Chirality Pendulum

Tick tock: The arms of a chirality pendulum can be completely and reversibly moved forward and backward like the pendulum of a clock by coordination and removal of a metal center (see picture). Each motion leads to a complete inversion of the configuration (swinging forth: P→M and swinging back: M→P).

Remains, and: What’s Been Missing from My Life

112 rebecca wolff Remains You can’t read these stones Their ancient theme Long shadow on the short grass And if you could— the interference the interference in your process. “My daughter sleeps” the news is bad The truth is wives outlive their lives. Cremains: Some wealth pertains, in private graveyard and its maintenance: Lord Byron and his walking talk. John Keats and his talking clock. Tick tock. Wordsworth, the immortal vault. My poem. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 112 5/22/2009 12:37:04 PM 113 rebecca wolff What’s Been Missing from My Life here in Boise intoxicants, my fluid transmission gay men and their art graveyards, their old dead the little hitch in my step that means I have to pee I can’t hear you the mountains are blocking the frequencies CRSUM09 poetry.indd 113 5/22/2009 12:37:04 PM ...

Imminence and Immanence: Isabel Archer's Temporal Predicament in The Portrait of a Lady

Imminence and Immanence: Isabel Archer's Temporal Predicament in The Portrait of a Lady Jonathan Warren, University of Toronto That Henry James charges Isabel Archer with a vast potential in The Portrait of a Lady has been richly noted by critics who have exploited the role of the young American girl in connection with James's international theme. Isabel Archer is easily read as an emblem of the future in a landscape of the past. However, a more rigorous analysis reveals that this appreciation is insufficient. Isabel is, most definitely, imbued with futurity, but this aspect is defied by her peculiar attachment to the past. In James's figuring of Isabel's early contexts, in the manner of her description by others, and in her own words Isabel is revealed as an icon of imminence confounded by stasis. Isabel's appeal to futurity is undermined by the fact that the future seems, in this novel, like it will never arrive: James describes Isabel's environment, history, and character as never-changing. Her great promise is persistently suspended and postponed; her potential remains just that, potential. When Isabel finally acts, she thinks that she does so in accordance with her historically futural, but always-postponed role: she promises herself openly to Osmond. In doing so, Isabel appeals to an indeterminate future that no longer exists for her simply because Osmond is not the vastly futural figure that she has imagined him to be. Rather, Osmond is the very essence of past contingency and treachery. Isabel eventually realizes Osmond's and Merle's duplicitous history, and, by doing so, she recognizes that the past is not an unchanging eternity that subsumes the present and forever puts off the future. Isabel's difficult reconciliation of this personally baffling temporal schism, as revealed through her second promise, offers a new explanation of her ultimate choice. The apparent absence of temporal progress, which characterizes Isabel, is an aspect of Jamesian fiction that Georges Poulet, of the so-called Geneva school, has explained as a necessary reduction of the otherwise stupefying immensity of James's sprawling consciousness.1 All considerations of Jamesian time must now The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 1-16 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The Henry James Review necessarily engage Poulet's watershed commentaries on the subject.2 That Poulet chooses to focus exclusively on the issue of time is itself exceptional in James studies. Jamesian critics who cite Poulet tend either generally to accept his interpretations of time or to situate his work in other nontemporal contexts.3 This study implicitly questions Poulet's conclusions on Jamesian time specifically. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer resists the obliterative onslaught of time only to be confronted with a crisis of understanding that, according to Poulet, such resistance should have prevented. Instead, Isabel's crisis is precipitated by her resistance to time. In this way, Isabel emerges here as a symbol of Poulet's misreading of Jamesian time. From the outset of The Portrait of a Lady, the context of the action is rendered as putatively eternal: eerily undaunted and unaffected by the passage of time. Indeed, the passage of time is not evoked so much as is the idyllic synchrony of the eternal moment, which the tick tock of a progression does not seem to affect ; moreover, in James's figurai language the advance of time is often not a progression at all, but an ancillary—almost aesthetic —aspect of a world that shall not advance out of a plenary instant, an instant that subsumes the temporal and apparently discharges its force.4 The establishing scene provides a fine example of this static aspect: "Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. . . . From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure (PL I)." The gathering on the lawn takes place during a little eternity that occupies the present moment between what has waned into the past and what is left. There is certainly...

Bilingual and Bidialectical Language Play

Bilingual and Bidialectical Language Play* Don L. F. Nilsen Arizona State University A story is told about an educator who asks a black what should be done about the "black problem." The black responds, "Dey ain't no black problem; dey a white problem." One of the great ironies of our education system is that at the same time the system is trying to teach English and French and Spanish to Americans, it is somehow signalling to the blacks of Detroit and the Chícanos ofTexas and the French of Montreal that their language is some sort of social disease to be cured. Cultural pluralism is not something we have to cope with in the composition class. It is a fantastic and marvelous resource that can be used to make composition classes much more exciting. Speakers of nonstandard English living in the United States have some very important language skills in at least two different dialects. Rather than telling black students that they are inferior because they do not have an excellent command ofstandard formal written English, tell them that they have some very important linguistic skills that are very different from, and, in many cases, superior to the linguistic skills of speakers of standard English. These are linguistic skills that many standard speakers are only vaguely aware of, likejiving, shucking, rapping, coming down hard, louding, sounding, laying it on, running it down, running a game, playing the dozens (e.g. ya mammaing) and other types of linguistic styling. At the same time as teachers are teaching the standard dialect, they should be letting nonstandard speaking students tell the class something about their language games. Not only will teachers learn something about the way language works but, in addition, the students will gain a higher impression of themselves. They will be less on the defensive, more receptive to the study of standard formal written English, and able to make a much more positive contribution to the class. Once it is accepted by the class that bidialecticalism and bilingualism is a good thing the classroom atmosphere becomes less tense. Humor is an important teaching tool, but only if humor makes as much fun of standard formal written English as it does of nonstandard dialect. * This paper was originally read at the CCCC Convention in Dallas, Texas on March 26, 1981, as part of Section B-Il: "Coping with Cultural Pluralism in the Composition Class." The author is indebted to John Hakac (ASU English Department ) for the Brooklyn example and to Eugene Valentine (ASU English Department ) for the French Humpty-Dumpty example. Don L. F. Nilsen129 A speaker of standard English meets a person from Brooklyn in a park. The Brooklynite speaks first, "Chees, look at da boids." The standard speaker responds, "Those aren't boids; they're birds," to which Brooklynite reacts with "Dat's funny, dey choip like boids." Have we offended the Brooklynite? Perhaps a little, but the story launches us into a discussion of dialects. Humor happens in prestige dialects as well as in nonprestige dialects. Many people have the impression that British English is somehow superior to American English, yet they laugh at the British nurse who asked by a patient, "Did I come here to die?" "No," she responded, "it wasyesterdie." Or they laugh at the misunderstanding that occurs between a Britisher who says he works in a hotel as a clerk, and an American who thinks he must therefore sit around all day going "tick tock tick tock." These anecdotes simply aren't funny to a person who doesn't have some bidialectical facility. England and American are two regions where the English language is spoken. In England the Northumbrian dialect is not the same as the West Saxon dialect. An American who pronounces Mrs. as Miz., who talks about/ritters, and about carrying someone home, and who says he "belongs to be careful," is not using incorrect forms, but only regional forms, which are perfectly appropriate to some contexts, and completely inappropriate to other contexts in which standard formal written English or some other form of English is expected. In encouraging bilingual skills, the realization is essential that some errors are more salient than...