it’s in

Thesis safely submitted today at 1500 hours.
Tis the end of an era I tell ye.

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question meetings

Back in the mists of time I posted something here about the traditional Scottish “communion season” and mentioned the Question Meeting, which (currently at least) is part of the Friday theme of self-examination ahead of participating in the Lord’s Supper.
Different people have different stories about how question meetings started and why. There is also some [...]

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spectrographic artwork

Can I tell you about something I came across on a university website recently – an intriguing combination of speech science and civil liberties, in the Tony Benn sonograms, created by an artist called Tracey Moberley.
Being clueless about copyright I don’t want to copy the images to publish here, so you’ll just have to follow [...]

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uptalk description & references

‘Uptalk’ is one of the names given to the phenomenon which has recently appeared in English where people use rising intonation at the end of sentences – a pitch pattern that is more usually associated with questions. Some people associate it with American English, others with Australian English – and theories abound as to why [...]

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no Plan B?

Reinforcing the consistent pattern that whenever voters in any of Europe’s member states are directly consulted about the plans embodied in the Lisbon Treaty they always reject them, the Irish have now impressively voted No.
One theory for why they did so is of course this from the BBC:
“Our correspondent says that many voters seem to [...]

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davis against the monstrosities

David Davis is obviously not the only MP who cares about civil liberties – Tony Benn, William Hague, Nick Clegg, et al do a fine job – but he’s demonstrated his commitment in the most unthinkable of ways. His very impressive resignation speech is available here in full:
“… in truth, 42 days is just one [...]

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28 days was more than enough

The Commons has voted in favour of extending the time limit that a person can be detained without charge from 28 to 42 days.
It was shocking when they extended it up from 14 to 28 days, and that was only a couple of years ago – as was the increase from 7 to 14 – [...]

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the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of duration

Ok, I’ve finally had to concede defeat with this point. I’ve reserved it a place in Chapter 6 for as long as I could, but it’s just too detailed to fit. But I still like it too much to ditch it, so here it is. Context: should segmental phonology be regarded as a qualitatively [...]

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police stop street evangelism in birmingham

In my inbox this morning, a note from the Christian Institute about two Christians in Birmingham who were confronted by police and told that by talking to Muslim youths about Christianity they were committing a hate crime – and that they might get beaten up if they went there again. The area being “a Muslim [...]

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