"So, how many languages do you speak?" As a former student of linguistics, I have been asked this question a lot. The answer is: three fluently (English, French and Italian), one well (Spanish) and two a little (German and Japanese) but, as I would often explain, linguistics isn't about learning as many languages as possible, but the scientific study of language — how it evolved, how it is structured and how it varies. The cliché of the linguist as the polyglot is the biggest misstep of Denis Villeneuve's new film Arrival, but something likely only to irritate linguists, who are, in any case, too busy enjoying their discipline's moment in the spotlight to care too much; besides, there are a few good linguistics in-jokes too.

As usual, I've tried to avoid any major spoilers in this review, but this is one of those films that is best experienced by going in knowing as little as possible about it, so please consider coming back after you've watched the film if you would like to go into it with a blank slate. Suffice to say, though, that it was beautiful and moving, thoughtful and complex, and one of my favourite films of the year. The Contact connection is an obvious one but it reminded me more of Christopher Nolan's excellent Interstellar in its themes and tone.

The film's titular arrival is that of twelve huge ovoid spacecraft in random locations across the globe, prompting world leaders to try to work out who or what is inside them and what they want. Some nations react with suspicion, while others send in the scientists, including theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). The US military also sends in the country's top linguist, Louise Banks (Amy Adams) — or, at least, the top linguist who already has the necessary security clearance. Handily, she is also fluent in a wide array of languages.

Banks's task is to find out why the alien visitors are here. Unsurprisingly, she is apprehensive when she first enters the alien craft that has landed in Montana and the reveal of the alien beings — shadowy seven-legged cephalopods — is teasingly slow. After a brief attempt to crack the heptapods' 'spoken' language, Banks demonstrates writing, eventually encouraging the pair — whom Donnelly dubs Abbott and Costello — to reveal their own form of visual communication: complex, ephemeral ink patterns that resemble coffee rings. With Louise's knowledge of language and some hefty computational processing power, the team make very gradual progress in understanding what Abbott and Costello have to say.

At least, so they think; without any common points of reference, how could another being understand that if I point at myself and say 'Bex', I am referring to 'Bex the coffee blogger' rather than 'woman', 'human' or 'living creature', for example? There is a crucial difference, then, between the heptapods saying they have weapons and saying they have a gift. One of the film's central linguistic themes relates to linguistic relativity whereby the language you speak shapes how you perceive the world. Without saying too much about the language or communication system of the heptapods, the perception of time is a critical component of it, and this also becomes key to understanding the film.

While Banks endeavours to crack her toughest linguistic puzzle yet, she is also struggling with events in her personal life, which first surface in the film's opening sequence — an emotional and powerful montage that is accompanied by Max Richter's haunting and apt On the Nature of Daylight. And really, despite its alien catalysts, Arrival is a film about humanity, compassion and understanding. Adams is magnificent as Banks — empathetic, warm and convincing as the unlikely heroine, she manages to turn her character's inherent sadness into her biggest strength.

Villeneuve's film is cleverly structured and compelling to watch, particularly as the final pennies begin to drop. Like Interstellar, it is the kind of film that overwhelms you at the time and then stays with you as you gradually process what you have seen and experienced. Although quite different from Villeneuve's last film, Sicario, Arrival does have a lot in common with his 2011 movie Incendies, where the search for truth, identity and meaning also features prominently.

When researching this trip to Naples, I was surprised to see so much negativity for the southern Italian city. Requests for Neapolitan hotel recommendations on TripAdvisor are often met with suggestions to stay in Sorrento and make a day trip into Naples 'if necessary'. The city is often accused of being dirty, dangerous and just plain unlovely. I think most of these claims are unjustified. Sure, Naples is rough — and not just around the edges — but it is colourful, characterful and has some of the world's best pizza.

As this post goes live, I will be on the way to Mexico for some culture, history, sun, fun and especially food. In the meantime, though, here are some of the things I enjoyed in April.


1. Bron (The Bridge). I had overdosed a bit on Scandinavian and/or crime dramas, but as soon as I watched the first episode of Bron, a Swedish–Danish collaboration, I was hooked. As the show opens, a body is found on the bridge between Malmö, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, and because the jurisdiction is initially uncertain, two detectives — Saga (Sofia Helin), a brilliant Swedish detective with a number of Asperger's-like characteristics, and her jovial but troubled Danish colleague Martin (Kim Bodnia) — take on the case. The crimes are interesting, but it's the beautifully complex and subtle relationship between Saga and Martin that really makes Bron stand out. Oh, and season two is even better than the first season!

2. Quarter Horse Coffee. I stopped by Oxford-based Quarter Horse Coffee while visiting my parents last month. It's an awesome cafe with friendly staff and excellent coffee. I have been enjoying some of their beans, which they roast at their Birmingham location, at home for the past couple of weeks and it will definitely be my go-to place for stocking up on coffee when I'm in town.


3. So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. This was easily my favourite book of the month. Ronson explores what public shaming means in the #hashtag age. He talks to a number of people who have experienced high-profile public shamings, explores the psychology of the shamers and the shamees and asks whether there is anything that you can do if a single ill-advised Facebook photo upload has done serious damage to your online — and real-world — reputation. The narrative is compelling and the stories are fascinating, although you do wonder if by devouring the book you are somehow participating in the continued attention to the featured individuals.

4. Smorgasburg. I spend a lot of time at street-food markets, but Smorgasburg — the weekly weekend outdoor feast held in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — is one of the biggest and best. A huge number of stalls sell a wide variety of food from breakfast sandwiches to barbecue and lobster rolls to lollipops. I gorged on an epic egg-and-bacon roll from Rise & Swine, a lobster roll and a couple of delicious oysters. But there were so many other things I would have liked to try, including Asian hot dogs, tacos and ramen burgers. I also bought a jar of salted caramel peanut butter from The 3 Nuts, which tastes great on a bagel or, you know, your finger.



5. Michel Thomas Method language courses. I'm a self-proclaimed language geek. I speak French and Italian with reasonable fluency, but I've also picked up some basic proficiency in Spanish, German and Japanese over the years. While I was revising for my A-level French and Italian, some 13 years ago, I decided it was an excellent time to start learning Spanish and I used Michel Thomas's eight-CD course. I've managed to maintain an elementary level of Spanish with very little practice, which will come in useful on this holiday. I also used the eight-CD Japanese course before my trip to Japan last year and I was impressed how much Japanese I learned — and still know. If you want a language course that teaches you the grammar and the structures, rather than giving you phrases to memorise by rote, check out the Michel Thomas courses.

My cinema attendance this year has been pretty poor, and I've had to do a fair bit of catching up on missed movies on plane rides. This means missing out on trailers, however. At this time of year, there aren't usually too many good movies coming out, but the Curzon did have quite a good trailer selection the last time I went, and it was there that I found out about Hong Khaou's new film Lilting. I was pleased to discover that I could watch the movie on Curzon Home Cinema for the princely sum of £10 — it would have been cheaper to go to an earlybird screening at the cinema, although less convenient, of course. With hindsight, I think I would probably have enjoyed the film more on a big screen — somehow, its elegant simplicity and unapologetic bluntness was wasted on my television.

As the film opens, we see an elderly Chinese-Cambodian woman, Junn (Pei-pei Cheng), sitting on the bed of what turns out to be an old people's home, talking to her adult son Kai (Andrew Leung). We soon learn that Kai died recently and Junn is struggling to come to terms with his death, especially after he had 'betrayed' her by forcing her to live in the care home because there was no room in the flat he shared with his friend Richard (Ben Whishaw).

Richard, it turns out, was more than a friend to Kai — they were a couple for several years, and it was a constant bone of contention between them that Kai couldn't quite bring himself to come out to his lonely, widowed mother. Richard is grieving too and he wants to try to help Junn in some way, but because although she speaks six languages, she knows almost no English, he hires a translator, Vann (Naomi Christie), to help out. Even so, the relationship between Richard and Junn remains highly strained; the latter is distrustful of the man who occupied so much of her son's time and attention. Vann tries to help, but sometimes only makes things worse. Vann also translates Junn's conversations with Alan (Peter Bowles), another resident at the home with whom she has become friendly. This leads to one of the most awkward film scenes I've seen all year with Richard cooking Chinese food for Vann to serve for Junn and Alan as a romantic dinner for two (plus one translator and one chef).

The performances in Lilting are really strong, with Whishaw standing out as the young man who has lost the love of his life and, faced with a crippling loneliness, is desperate to forge a connection with the only other person who cared about Kai as much as he did. Isolation is a central theme in the film. Junn has lived in the UK for decades but only knows a few words of English, and it is her need to cling to the past that heightens her sense of solitude and desolation. Richard, meanwhile, has had to hide his relationship with Kai — at least from Kai's mother — which is, in itself isolating.

But not much happens in the film. As it progresses, we do learn a little more about the characters and their pasts, but not much, and even though it only clocked in 85 minutes, I found my attention waning after the one-hour mark. The awkwardness contributed to this, I think; some scenes were quite hard to watch — intentionally so, I'm sure. The film doesn't really offer up much in the way of resolution, which is fine in itself, but although the characters are sympathetic and finely drawn, I just couldn't find myself caring about them enough to wonder about their future. I'm glad that I watched Lilting and I admired it; it just wasn't all that entertaining.

I've written before about George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal work, Metaphors We Live By, which was a key text on my semantics and pragmatics course at university. One of the key ways in which language changes, the authors argue, is through metaphors: comparisons of two concepts or objects which share some similarity of meaning and an imaginative or creative--but not real-world--link. The authors then attempt to categorise many of the most common groups of metaphors, which shape our language and the way we think: happy = up, sad = down ("you're in high spirits," "I'm feeling down"); argument = war ("I demolished his claims"); love = war ("I won his affections").

One of the biggest categories is the time = money group, of which there are plenty of examples. "He's on living on borrowed time," "stop wasting my time," "I'm investing my time in...", and so on (TheFreeDictionary has many more). The abundance of this type of metaphor does suggest that the time = money concept is well ingrained in our minds and well codified in our language. But what if it was literally true that time was money? This is the subject of Andrew Niccol's film In Time and Niccol seems to have studied the time = money chapter of Lakoff and Johnson's book at great length given how often the characters in his screenplay speak in these metaphors. Yes, we know that time is the currency in this fictional universe but we're not brain damaged; you don't need to keep beating us over the head with the metaphors (figuratively, of course)!

Linguistics aside, having time literally represent money is an interesting idea. In this alt universe, the good news is that people stop "ageing genetically" at the age of 25 but the bad news is that they only live for one more year unless they can buy themselves more time. But when a bus ride might cost you one hour on one day and, thanks to inflation, two hours the next, many people are quite literally living on borrowed time. On a practical level, introductions can be confusing when everyone looks 25. Justin Timberlake, who plays our hero Will Salas, is actually older than his on-screen mother Rachel (Olivia Wilde). And it's not obvious whether Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried) is Pete from Mad Men's mother, wife or daughter.

Due to some very bad timing, Will inherits over 100 years from an old man who is bored of living but despite running to meet his mother, she "times out" seconds before he can transfer some time onto her clock. He's pretty sad for a few minutes but then realises he can finally visit some of the more exclusive "time zones," which would have cost far too much for him to even enter before, and he cheers up a little. He buys some swish wheels (cost: about 70 years) and gambles, winning a time-fortune from Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser). But before he has time to enjoy his new-found wealth, he is tracked down by Raymond (Cillian Murphy), a timekeeper, whose job is to make sure time isn't misappropriated and that arrivistes like Will learn their place in the world. If everyone could live forever, you see, why would anyone bother going to work in the factories and how could society function? Will's inheritance/winnings are confiscated by Raymond, leaving him only two hours on his clock. Nonetheless, he kidnaps Sylvia and they speed off in his new sports car, on a quest to buy themselves some time to think. Later, she inevitably comes around to Will's way of thinking and the two of them become a sort of Robin Hood meets Bonnie and Clyde, "redistributing" time in a way that leads to hella crazy hyperinflation not seen since Weimar Germany.

This is all rather silly but sometimes clunky script and the odd plot hole aside, In Time is quite fun. Timberlake and Seyfried are fine, if not outstanding, as the two leads, and most of the best scenes have Cillian Murphy in them. In any case, it definitely wasn't a waste of my time watching the film [That's enough time metaphors. Ed.]

For the first half of my undergraduate degree, I was technically a pure modern languages student (although I was taking so many linguistics papers that my purity may be doubted), studying French and Italian. In both of these first two years, I had to take one general grammar/use-of-the-language paper and one translation class for each language, along with additional literature or, in my case, linguistics papers.

In the first year, you translated into English and in the second year, you translated from English. In the translation exams you had, I think, two hours to translate two texts, with no dictionary. This is, of course, highly unrealistic given that in a real-life setting, you would have access to a dictionary and any other reference works you need. At the time, you would also be unlikely to be asked to translate out of your native language, although after having to translate ten highly technical geoscience-related press releases into French as part of my job last year, I am reconsidering this point. How well you did in the exam was a bit of a lottery depending on which texts came up--I remember getting a high first in my translation-from-Italian mock exam in my first year and then only a high 2:1 in the real thing. As for the second year, you try translating an extract from 2001: A Space Odyssey into Italian in one hour with no dictionary! Especially when you didn't even realise it was 2001 because the only identifying information was: "Author: A. Clarke."

Anyway, I always rather liked my translation classes--doing a good translation often felt like solving a tough crossword, with so many things to consider. My first year translation-from-Italian supervisor (who was in the process of translating Dante's Inferno) always insisted that we should be translating "for [our] soul" rather than for the Tripos exams we were taking. I didn't see it that way at the time but I was interested to read David Bellos's new book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, which highlights some of the trials, tribulations, joys and jubilations of translation. It was a relatively quick read for me, partly because some of the material was very familiar, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Bellos, who was brought up in England but has lived and worked extensively in the US, is used to having his English de-Britted or de-Yanked by subeditors. The resultant copy is in a language he calls Tranglish. In the book, he outlines some of the general difficulties translators face on a regular basis and then looks at some more specific cases: politics (at the EU or UN, for example), law, religion news, jokes and literature. What happens when you're translating Tolstoy into French, for example, given that some of the source texts contain sections of dialogue in French, as was standard for the Russian bourgeoisie at that time? This is an example of translation loss and you would have to add the meaning back, perhaps by using a particular dialect or register of French. And although computers can play chess, they still can't produce a very faithful translation of Proust, despite the advances made by Google Translate.

But even when you're looking at translating individual words, it's challenging when very few concepts, except perhaps biological species and some other scientific terms, have exactly the same meaning when translated into another language. The Russians have different words for light blue and dark blue (which is fine if the translator is translating a text about the sky but more difficult if she doesn't know what shade of blue is being described in the source text) and we all know about the Eskimos and their words for snow (Bellos counters this by pointing out the dozens of words we have for coffee, as anyone who has tried to order just "a coffee" in Starbucks will know).

Bellos concludes as follows: we all speak different languages but we're all really the same. So, "translation is another name for the human condition." And I think my first year supervisor would definitely concur.

Almost four years after w00t was named Word of the Year by Merriam Webster, it has finally been granted a place in the next edition of the OED. As the full list of new words hasn't been revealed on the OED's website, I have only second-hand sources like this article in the Telegraph to go on, and naturally the Torygraph was keen to highlight other trendy words, like jeggings (but not Jedward), retweet and sexting.

Interestingly, over the past four years, w00t's spelling has become more conventional; the news outlets reporting this story are all spelling it as woot, and a Google search pulls up 57.7 million hits for woot and only 17 million for w00t (most of the latter on Slashdot and 4chan). Technically, woot already appears in the OED, although it doesn't get its own entry. In the entry for wit (meaning "to know," as in "to wit"), there's a nice quotation from The Canterbury Tales featuring the word: "For aught I woot he was of Dertemouthe" (for all I know, he came from Dartmouth). It also appears as a variant form of "you will" in Middle English. "Woo't weepe, woo't fight...woo't teare thy selfe?" (will you cry? Will you fight? Will you cut yourself?). OK, so woot 2.0 isn't exactly taking the place of a word that is likely to be retweeted any time soon...

As for w00t, I still use it occasionally, although much less than I used to. And I definitely still use Bridezilla, 3G and backstabbing, all of which were added to the OED last year (the latter seemed to arrive several decades late), but I've still never heard anyone use a-life, bum rap or panga...

Edit: I've now found a post by the editor, Angus Stevenson, on the OUP blog about this. I do subscribe to this blog but I must have missed this post. Perhaps he should have put textspeak (which was, I thought spelled txtspk; see this post) or one of the other newly accepted words, into the title.

Another week, another ape-related movie. Of course, the release dates of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (ROTPOTA) and Project Nim were nicely coordinated in the UK, and it's not difficult to see the similarities--arrogant man takes baby chimp, raises him as human and is then suitably shocked when cute baby chimp becomes seriously aggressive adult chimp--but only ROTPOTA is fictional. Some spoilers may follow, although let's face it: it is over 40 years since the original Planet of the Apes.

The arrogant human in ROTPOTA is Will Rodman (James Franco), a scientist working on a promising new Alzheimer's drug, ALZ112, at a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco. His father (John Lithgow) has Alzheimer's and this clouds Will's judgement enough for him to think that n=1 is good science. Based on the fact that one chimp (named Bright Eyes because of the way the ALZ112 made her eyes turn a bright, clear green) has shown a remarkable recovery after being treated with the drug, Will persuades his boss Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) to go ahead with the flashy press conference and start pitching to investors. Unfortunately, part way through the pitch, Bright Eyes goes wild, breaking free of her cage and smashing through the glass into the meeting room, baring her teeth at all and sundry and knocking down anyone who tries to stop her. It later emerges that her aggression was probably due to the fact that she thought her newborn baby was being threatened, rather than because of ALZ112, but it's too late--the trials are halted and all the apes are put down.

One of the lab technicians finds Bright Eyes' baby and persuades Will to take him home for a few days until a space at a primate reserve opens up. A few days later and Will has fallen in love and ends up keeping the chimp, whom he names Caesar. It turns out that effects ALZ112 had on Bright Eyes have been passed on to Caesar (it's unclear whether this is through the bloodstream or because of epigenetic changes; I'm trying to avoid passing judgement on the science in this movie) and he becomes super intelligent. For eight years or so, he and Will have a great time, signing to each other (Caesar also seems to understand when Will talks), visiting Muir Woods and chatting up cute vets like Caroline (Freida Pinto).

My photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in the mist

Meanwhile, based on the progress Will has observed in Caesar, he starts treating his dad with ALZ112 and wow, Pops makes a startling recovery. But wait, because this really isn't a good movie week for big pharma: Will's father's immune system starts to fight back against the "ALZ112 virus and Will decides they need to use a stronger form of the drug. Jacobs is impressed (although not wild about yet another n=1 trial) and agrees to start trials of a stronger form of the drug, ALZ113, on chimps. Even though one of the lab technicians breathes in some of the gas containing the ALZ113 and gets very sick very quickly.

Caesar, now eight or so, is getting too big to keep in the house and after he bites the finger off an aggressive neighbour who was attacking Will's dad, Caesar is taken away to a primate centre. Will and Caroline only see a large enclosure with lots of toys and rocks and not the cage into which Caesar is later shut. Initially bullied by the other ape inmates, the charismatic Caesar gets them on side by bribing them with cookies and then later with his presumably rousing sign-language speeches. And because this is a film and not reality, he "learns" to speak (even though chimps don't have the right vocal anatomy to speak). He can say, "no" and "war" and, later, "Caesar is home." And so it is here that the eponymous rise of the planet of the apes begins.

Franco and the other human leads were fine but as with Project Nim, this movie aroused almost no sympathy in me for the humans and plenty for the apes, particularly Caesar, who goes on to shun, although not kill, Will (in fact, he prefers to leave the killing to the other apes), in favour of his new ape buddies, whom he leads into battle against the people of San Francisco. SF was a good city to choose given that the Golden Gate Bridge, on which the grand finale takes place, is a dramatic setting and is also often shrouded in mist, giving the apes a crucial advantage. ROTPOTA had a compelling storyline, nice character development (of the apes, at least), and it managed to be fun, while still having some more moving scenes. I just don't think I can watch any more films with mistreated animals for the time being, even if the animals in question are CGI!

I first came across Project Nim during my the year of my degree. As background reading for my intro to linguistics courses, I had, of course, picked up a copy of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which includes a section on how human language differs from animal communication systems. Later, when I had transferred to the linguistics Tripos, I learned more about Nim in my language evolution and language acquisition lectures. At the time, I was more interested in Alex the parrot but Nim's story is actually more compelling--and sadder--than the linguists had me believe.

 In the 1970s, it seemed, a group of linguists and psychologists tried to raise a baby chimpanzee (nicknamed Nim Chimpsky; tee hee) as a human and, more specifically, to teach him American Sign Language. Initially hailed as a success, with Nim apparently learning dozens or even hundreds of signs, the project picked up a lot of media coverage but ultimately the principal investigator, Herbert Terrace, admitted that scientifically, the project was a failure. Nim hadn't learned as many signs as originally thought and many of the signs weren't ASL signs, resembling instead those made by chimps in the wild. More importantly, the signs that Nim did produce weren't combined systematically in anything even vaguely resembling the structure or grammar seen in human languages. He might sign something along the lines of, "Nim eat Nim eat," or "Banana me me me eat," whereas even a two-year-old human child uses a far more sophisticated language. Meanwhile, as Nim grew older, he grew smarter and learned how to manipulate his human trainers into giving him exactly what he wanted, so the claim that he knew and understood a language in the same way humans do, is flawed.

So, I knew that Project Nim had failed scientifically but I didn't know just how badly the people working on the project failed Nim. This is where Project Nim, a documentary directed by James "Man on Wire" Marsh, comes in, and Marsh tells a fascinating, strange and often sad tale, starting with Nim's traumatic separation from his mother at ten days old, before being brought to the Upper West Side apartment of Stephanie LaFarge, a grad student in psychology, who had three children and four step-children. She was a former student--and former lover--of Herbert Terrace and her role was to treat Nim as she would a human baby and to teach him sign language. She even breast-fed him (as her then 12-year-old daughter says, wryly looking back on that time, "It was the '70s...").

Nim and one of his teachers; photo by Susan Kuklin

But as one of Nim's newly recruited teachers, an undergraduate research assistant, Laura Ann Pettito, who was later to become another one of Terrace's student-lovers, put it, "[the LaFarge apartment] was chaos." In fact, so was the whole project at that point: no systematic note-making, no journals, no schedule, no plan. This was why Pettito and several other teachers were brought in: to try to bring some method to the madness and eventually, Terrace took Nim away from LaFarge and installed him, along with Pettito and the rest of the rolling cycle of teachers, in a giant country mansion owned by Columbia University. LaFarge had always resented Pettito's increasing role as Nim's surrogate mother and so was devastated when Nim was taken away, although, as Pettito points out quite smugly, Nim didn't seem that fussed to leave LaFarge.

The rest of Nim's story is rather sad. Once he'd reached the age of five, he was strong and aggressive, had very sharp fangs and had a habit of biting people really hard. To the distress of the teachers who had come to love Nim, Terrace announced that the project was over and they all flew Nim back to the Oklahoma primate centre where he was born. The spoiled, only-child chimp, used to wearing clothes, sleeping in beds and living with people was forced to get used to a sparse, cramped cage, but he did at least make one friend--a cheerful young hippy named Bob.

All was well until the primate centre went bust and the animals had to be sold to an animal research lab. Nim underwent various experiments but thanks to a lawyer who was able to drum up plenty of media interest, he was eventually released and bought by a Texas animal sanctuary. As the only chimp, however, Nim wasn't happy there. He smashed several TVs and killed a barking poodle by tossing it against a wall. Bob wasn't allowed to visit either. Eventually, though, the ranch was taken over, Bob was allowed to visit and the owner was encouraged to buy several chimp friends to keep Nim company. But he died from a heart attack at the age of 26 (chimps tend to live to about 40 in the wild, but can live to be 60 in captivity).

Despite his habit of mauling people who wrong him, Nim comes off very well from Marsh's movie, which is more than can be said for most of the humans. In their present-day voice-overs, those involved in Nim's life are very quick to criticise and denigrate others. Terrace, in particular, comes across as arrogant and sleazy, while LaFarge and Pettito snipe and attempt to one-up each other on camera. It's easy with hindsight to say how little thought went into how raising a chimpanzee as a human might affect the chimp, especially if it came to the point where he had to return to live with other chimps, but this seems to be true. Nim certainly never forgave LaFarge for "abandoning" him: when she came to visit him at the ranch, at least ten years after she last saw him, he appeared to recognise her although wasn't very happy to see her. She went into his cage and he attacked, dragging her around by the ankle before eventually letting her go. He didn't want to kill her, it was thought, but he did want to show her who was boss.

These days animal ethics committees exist to regulate experiments involving animals, although unlike the Declaration of Helsinki for research involving human subjects, there is no worldwide body to do the equivalent for animal research. Efforts to determine similarities between human language and animal communication systems continue, meanwhile: Klaus Zuberbühler's group have detected some sort of very rudimentary syntax in gibbons and Campbell's monkeys, for example.

The real reason we are so interested in animal languages, of course, is that we still don't really understand how our own ability to talk and verbally communicate with one another evolved, the underlying basis for language, or how children acquire language. I tend to fall in with the Michael Tomasello camp, whereby humans' ability  to acquire a language comes from general enhanced cognitive ability, with pattern finding and analogy skills being particularly important. But that's a blog post for another time...

To all those Americans who complain about or wonder at the obscure vocabulary found at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, I would offer in return the word commencement. It took quite a few US college movies before I realised that commencement, somewhat counter-intuitively, is something in which you participate at the end of your degree rather than the beginning. Perhaps its etymology derives from the fact that those who have graduated are just about to commence the rest of their lives. The OED claims it was originally a Briticism anyway:

The action of taking the full degree of Master or Doctor; esp. at Cambridge, Dublin, and the American universities, the great ceremony when these (also, in some cases other degrees, esp. in U.S., that of Bachelor) are conferred, at the end of the academical year.

This is a rather long-winded way of introducing a book called Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan. I read about Sullivan's latest novel, Maine, which sounded like my kind of novel but as it hasn't been published in the UK yet, I sought its predecessor. I knew from the blurb that Sullivan's first novel would be even more of my kind of novel and sure enough, it was. OK, superficially, the description makes it sound as though it might be Sex and the City: The College Years:

Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn't have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with her grandmother's rosary beads in hand and a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiance she left behind in Savannah; Sally, pristinely dressed in Lilly Pulitzer, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a "Riot: Don't Diet" T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately.

I never watched SATC but even I could see that Celia, the writer who loves to observe other people, is a Carrie-a-like and hard-working, career-focused Sally turns out to be a lot like Miranda. But Commencement is really much more like Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group, though. At the start of the novel, four years after their commencement graduation, April, Bree and Celia are returning to their college for the wedding of their best friend Sally. They were all very close while at university but since then, life has intervened. The point of view in each of the sections alternates through each of the girls and we learn that they are a little nervous, as well as excited, about their reunion with their college--and with one another. They often jump back to reflect on their time time together at college and on some of the important events of their friendship.

Stuck in the worst four rooms in one of the nicest dorms in the all girls' Smith College, the four girls meet on their first day and despite their differences, they soon become the best of friends (now this sounds like Sweet Valley High, but that is an unfair comparison). Irish-Catholic Celia, who comes from a big Boston family, chose to go to Smith because it was the best school she got into. She feels like she's the most normal person at Smith and mourns the lack of men on campus. After college, she yearns to be a writer but is stuck working for a crappy publisher and has to make do with writing about her graduating class for the alumnae magazine. While dying to meet a nice bloke, she also wishes that she was still the most important woman in Bree's life.

Beautiful, sensitive Southern Belle Bree's mother attended Smith and wanted her daughter to do the same even though Bree's fiancé chose to go to school back in Georgia. The long-distance relationship doesn't work out but although her parents can forgive her calling off the wedding, they can't forgive her falling for someone completely unexpected, i.e. a woman, namely Lara, who is unlike anyone she has ever met. To Celia and Sally's wonder, Lara follows Bree to Stanford, where Bree completes her law degree. But she isn't sure whether she can give up the rest of her life--especially her disapproving family to whom she has always been close--for a life she still isn't convinced is really her.

Sally almost gave up her place at Smith after her beloved mother was discovered to have cancer and died very suddenly but does decide to go in the end. She aces all of her premed classes but is having trouble with her token poetry class until her much older poetry professor effectively promises her a good grade if she comes and tidies up his office while he reads Auden and Keats to her, quoting selectively from them to give her the impression his wife is dead rather than teaching on campus. Their affair continues for three years until she graduates and he breaks it off. She doesn't think she'll find anyone but then, after graduation, she meets Jake, randomly in a coffee shop and then, suddenly, they are engaged and then married, with more big decisions to come. Sally often acts as the mother of the group but she worries her friends will disapprove of Jake because he's too straightforward--historically, they've all opted for complicated, heart-wrenching and inappropriate relationships.

Tough, radical April wanted to go to a college that wasn't completely dominated by traditional patriarchal values. She's really asexual rather than homosexual and doesn't have a lot of time for men. She works two jobs to pay her way through university, getting no financial support from her mother (and she never knew her father). She finds her niche at Smith and becomes one of the most popular women, leading many feminist movements and organising countless rallies and events. But after graduation, her activism leads her to lose her way and she ends up living with and working for a woman who ends up putting April's life at risk as they campaign to raise awareness for women's rights and issues like the kidnapping of women into the sex trade.

April's sections are, objectively, the most interesting, but subjectively, I found myself rushing through to get back to the other girls' chapters, perhaps because I can relate to them more (I'm probably a cross between Sally and Celia, of course). I liked the back-and-forth, achronological structure, with the narrative sometimes jumping back to an event we've already seen but looking at it from the perspective of one of the other girls, and certain throwaway comments taking on a much greater significance later on when we understand them better. I can definitely sympathise with some of the problems the girls face at a single-sex college, having gone to an all-girls' secondary school. I would never have chosen to go to an all-girls' college (not even if I had to choose between Newnham, say, or a non-Oxbridge university), partly because after seven years of female company, I was fed up of having to make the effort to meet guys.

Commencement is a well-written, neatly structured and convincing account of the college experience and friendship of four very different women. All four characters have their flaws but, without wishing to sound too trite, in each other, they gained something potentially far more valuable than their degree during their time at Smith. Lucky them--but I still wouldn't switch my co-ed gaggle of university friends for a close, all-female cohort.

As I have mentioned a few times, I don't make New Year's resolutions but this year, I did want to travel to some new places. Much as I love visiting New York and Cannes, I missed the more exploratory travelling I did while at university — Cuba, Hong Kong and Mexico, for example. All of the guidebooks say that you should visit Stockholm in the summer (so too do the locals) but because Sweden is a winter country in my mind, it is best experienced in winter.

During the five-ish years since my graduation, I've tried to keep my love of linguistics alive via Language Log, my favourite spoof linguistics journal SpecGram and via the occasional vaguely related article published in the journal for which I work. Oh, and the odd British Library exhibition. Although I sometimes miss it, it's not like being a quantum physics student who has to go cold turkey because, hey, language is all around us (quantum physicists would try to convince me that you can't run away from physics either).

In a sense, all linguistics is popular--of the people--because almost all of us read, write and speak at least one language and so it is a universally relevant subject. Nonetheless anyone who has had to explain, on countless occasions, that studying linguistics doesn't mean learning languages can appreciate the need for something like the new online magazine, Popular Linguistics, which seeks to do for linguistics what ScciAm* did for, er, quantum entanglement. Perhaps eventually, they will bring to the masses the parts of linguistics I found really dull--syntax, mainly--as well as those that captured my interest (that said, I did perk up when I misread the intro to one of the articles in the Ling101 section as, "We hear from Cormac McCarthy, who explains morphology in Understanding Linguistic Theory").

You only need to search the BBC News website to see which kinds of language-related stories interest people:

1. Weird words: quirky etymologies, Words of the Year, slang, regional variations, jargon
2. Language change: language death, the rise of txt spk, accents
3. Discoveries of new languages or dialects (especially those with crazy-ass features like no words for numbers)
4. Animal communication (preferably cute animals)
5. Why are English people so crap at learning languages?

Back when I was a linguistics student, I found my friends tended to like hearing about the same kinds of story: weird words, weird languages, weird psycholinguistics shit. Berlin and Kay's work on colour terms and how they vary cross-linguistically always went down well; my synecdoche banter, not so much. I did used to annoy my friends by crying out with glee every time they made a nice speech error that I could use as an example in my psycholinguistics exam.

With sections like "language and cognition" and "language and history" I'll definitely be checking out Popular Linguistics. Of course, if there were a Popular Linguists section, my vote would go to Steven Pinker...

* misspelling intentional.

This week's email from Grammar Girl, my weekly source of grammar tips, had the subject line, "How Do You Pronounce 2011?" Bearing in mind my sort-of New Year's resolution to pronounce the year "twenty eleven" and not "two-thousand-and-eleven," I thought this mailing was perfect for me. On opening the email, however, I soon realised that GG was resolving the issue of whether to pronounce it "two-thousand-and-eleven" or "two-thousand-eleven." She says either way is correct, incidentally, although the former is much more common in Britain and the latter in the US (I'd say the former is near ubiquitous in the UK).

It seems she tackled the issue that interests me last year and goes on to say:

Last year people argued about how to pronounce 2010, and I expect the controversy to continue in 2011. One linguist thinks the difficulty of pronouncing "and eleven" will drive people to say "twenty eleven."

Indeed, I also hoped that the additional syllables in "eleven" would encourage me to stick to the "twenty eleven" pronunciation but I'm glad I'm not alone. So far, I haven't had many opportunities to say 2011 but I think I've managed to make most of them syllable-lite. Hopefully, I'll have it nailed by the end of the year; bring on twenty twelve. At the moment it's so much easier in France where they say, "deux mille onze"; not so much in 1999, where the year was pronounced, "mille-neuf-cent-quatre-vingt-dix-neuf."

As a linguist and pedant, who, as a child who used to read the OED for fun, I've often considered that I would be well suited to a career in sub-editing. In my current job, my writing is run past our sub-editors and it always makes me very happy when my text doesn't need any edits but I have never been sure whether I would take pleasure from perfecting (or, at least, standardising) other people's language or whether it would be torture to see so many mistakes and inconsistencies in the spelling and grammar.

Recently, I discovered a blog written by a sub-editor who likes to rant and while cruising through the archives, I read about a play called Subs, which is, funnily enough, about a team of three sub-editors at the magazine Gentlemen Prefer... As the play was on last summer and in a small theatre in Kilburn, I assumed I had missed out but coincidentally, it re-opened this week for a second run and I trekked up the Bakerloo Line this evening to see it.

Although the sub-editors at Gentlemen Prefer... ("the only magazine with a three-point ellipsis in its title") don't exactly exist in perfect harmony, they get along OK. There's the chief sub, Derek, who likes putting his deputy, Finch, in his place. Derek is smug and cocky but feels his manic-depressive wife and their children are holding him back from being promoted. Finch, meanwhile, is an obnoxious, self-deprecating Welshman, who is jealous of James--the bright young junior sub, who is favoured by Derek and loved by everyone else. In anticipation of his potential promotion, Derek hires Anna, a young, pretty freelancer, who may become permanent if Derek gets his way. Even Finch cheers up after Anna's arrival, although he's sure she'll never be interested in him. But men's magazine publishing is a dog-eat-dog world and we're left to wonder who is betraying whom.

I expected a lot of in-jokes but Subs is as much a play about the state of the publishing industry in general as about sub-editors. Some of the things that happen at Gentlemen Prefer... wouldn't be out of place in my office, although I work for quite a different publication. But there were some good lines ("What's the house style on G string?" is the opener) and Michael Cusick was particularly good as the irascible Finch. Whoever was in charge of props should have kitted out the subs with Macs, though; they would never use such crappy-looking PCs at Gentlemen Prefer...

The British Library has been doing well with its exhibitions of late; last year's Henry VIII-fest was good and I enjoyed Magnificent Maps earlier this year, although I could have done with a longer visit (Strange Maps does not satisfy all of my cartophilic needs). And now they have an exhibition called Evolving English, for which I've been waiting eagerly for several weeks.

Susie Dent, Peter Gilliver, Vicky Coren, Philip Gooden & Simon Heffer

Alongside the exhibition, the BL are running a series of talks and events and today, I attended the English Language Question Time, along with a couple of friends. On the panel were: Susie Dent (of Countdown and OED fame), Peter Gilliver (of the OED), Philip Gooden (who has written books about the English language), and Simon Heffer (Telegraph hack and author of the Torygraph's style guide). Vicky Coren (whom I met over 10 years ago when she came to do a small session about feature writing with a few girls from my class) was chairing the discussion.

We had the opportunity to submit questions for the panel in advance but because I forgot I was going to the event until late last night, I failed to do this. As the average age of the audience was about 75, several questions in, I was worried that the whole 90 minutes were going to be filled with complaints about the shocking state of the English language today from Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells and colleagues. "Isn't it very annoying that everyone pronounces KILometre as kilOMeter?" demanded one man, who was really quite angry. "Why do people insist on overusing absolutely when a simple "yes" or "I agree" will do?" was another. "Can the panel pronounce the words consume, presume and assume?" (This last question concerned the "dreadful" pronunciation of assume as aSHOOM rather than assYOOM.)

The OED faction of the panel emphasised that their role is to describe the language, not to prescribe (preshcribe?), although the questioners received more support from Heffer. Fortunately, however, more interesting questions were selected:

• Should English be simplified for non-native speakers and if so how? (Dent was working on a German dictionary at the time of the German spelling reforms and said although simplifying English spelling would help learners, she was against doing so because you would lose some of the history and richness.)
• Will txt spk encroach on English to further domains and is this a bad thing? (Dent pointed out an example of a 19th century postcard with the abbreviation "gr8" for great, suggesting that such abbreviations are not just a recent innovation; no once mentioned this but the use of the ampersand for and does the same trick and no one would blame the iPhone for that).
• Do the panel think Blair and Cameron had de-poshing elocution lessons (delocution?) to try to convince people they were down with the kids (with their t-dropping and glottalising, for example)?.
• Which features of the panel's own idiolects draw most disapproval? (Most of them thought their language was too long-winded and too pedantic; Coren defended a Grauniad sub-editor, who was derided at his leaving do for his overly pedantic emails but Coren came down in his favour, saying that his job required it.)
• Which examples of "management speak" most irritate the panel? (Heffer hates "to grow a business"; Gooden doesn't like "wake-up call" or "limited edition"; and Dent dislikes verbing ("bandaiding" or "solutioning," for example), although she added that Keats was a common culprit.)

Now that my days of quirky linguistics studies are long behind me and I have to make do with proper science, I still enjoy reading linguistics-related articles in the news.  Daniel Gilbert's NYT article, Magic by Numbers, was fun. Although I haven't been into numerology since the '90s, I can't deny that certain numbers do have certain, irrational properties in my mind. I don't like even numbers because of a vague feeling of irritation they inspire in me. On the other hand, I particularly like seven and 13 and numbers with lots of sevens in them; nine and three, meanwhile, are lower down my table of awesome numbers.

So, I can see that irrational feelings about numbers might affect the way we behave. I'd like to think that the phonetics of numbers in prices wouldn't affect my decision to buy or not buy something but marketing people are sneaky and if they're willing to slip in all sorts of super-seductive and sexy fricatives to get me in the mood for chocolate (or whatever), then why not slip in a few more by making the price £6.66? Consumers [heart] fricatives (like /s/, /f/ and my favourite, [ʒ]) and front vowels, according to a Journal of Consumer Research study; or at least, those sounds make them think of smaller prices. Stops (like /t/, /p/ and /k/) and back vowels (like the /u/ in goose) make people think of large, expensive things. Maybe people think I'm a little taller than I am because there are two stops and only one fricative in my name: [bɛks]. In any case, I don't like being manipulated in the supermarket, so to speak, which means I end up acting irrationally when it comes to price.

Phoneticians got to feel important again today with all the media coverage of a new exhibition on the continuing evolution of the English language at the British Library. Hopefully, they will record my RP/SSBE accent and me reading Mr Tickle for posterity. Oh, and I don't like to prescribe but it's totally sez, ayt, MIS-chiv-us, huh-RASS, GA-ridge, SKED-ule and aitch. And yes, I know my own idiolect with its mix of old and new variants is the perfect example of Britain's changing speech.

I've been called a grammar nutter before (a pedant too, although I take that as a compliment) but the truth is I am, like many linguists, a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. Still, it irritates me more when people make grammatical mistakes when trying so hard to avoid "things wot they've heard iz wrong." The classic example of this is when people say "I" instead of "me" because they've heard that saying "me" is bad (saying "Alex and me went to the cinema" instead of "Alex and I..." is supposedly bad therefore one should also say "he came to the cinema with Alex and I" --technically, one shouldn't). This is hypercorrection. It doesn't just happen in English either, although is common in the speech of those who wish to sound as though they are from a higher social class.

As a child, I was precociously good at spelling. So much so that at age ten, I was pointed towards the Oxford English Dictionary and told to pick my own spellings to learn each week. No one taught me IPA, however, which meant that although I could spell Madagascar, chlorofluorocarbon and other similarly lengthy and/or difficult words, I never found out how to pronounce them. I was fifteen before I found out that Madagascar isn't pronounced ['mah-duh-guh-''saah-kuh] and that [in-dikt-munt] is usually pronounced [in-dite-munt]. Even now, from time to time, I will say a word I've seen in writing but never heard in speech before and will be me with stares and then laughter.

Most recently, though, I've been a victim of orthographical hypercorrection. On the radio, I've often heard people mentioning [mef-uh-drone] and as many people in southern England pronounce th as f, I assumed this drug was spelled methedrone. I was hypercorrecting, of course, and am clearly a massive snob for assuming that everyone else is just labialising their dental fricative (th is pronounced by pushing air past the tip of the tongue against the teeth; f involves blowing air past the teeth against the lower lip).

On the other hand, mephedrone has been in the news a lot recently. Both methadone and methedrone are also drugs and I have potentially heard them mentioned on the news in the past. I have definitely been hypercorrecting recently but this error may have been reinforced by having heard the other two words in the past.

It isn't easy studying linguistics at university. Not only do you have to keep on coming up with creative answers to the frequently asked question, "so which languages do you speak?" (pi?) but often, you can't even find your textbooks in a library or a bookshop (linguistics books are found variably with the philosophy, modern languages, psychology, science and even new age sections). No matter how many times you explain that linguistics is "the science of language" or that it involves the study of the evolution, structure, form, history, acquisition and variation of language (among other things), you are invariably met with a look of scepticism. "That's a real subject?"

There is help, however. Or, at least, company. I was in my third year at university when I discovered the Speculative Grammarian (AKA SpecGram), a wonderful, hysterical, satirical, online linguistics journal. A fellow linguist (yes, linguist; linguistician is such an ugly word) pointed me in the direction of the Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics page and once I'd stopped laughing, I managed to move my mouse pointer towards some of the earlier issues of the journal and it's been keeping me in in-jokes ever since. Some of my favourite articles include:

• Why Linguistics Is Not a Science and Why Linguistics Doesn't Care (some variation of the essay title, "linguistics is a science; discuss" was guaranteed to come up in my Ling101 exam).
• What Is Linguistics Good for, Anyway? (picking up chicks, apparently; damn. To be followed by Love Queries of a Linguist and How They Do It in Linguistics.
• Murphy’s Law as Applied to Field Linguistics (this is why Chomsky wasn't interested in the language spoken by real people).
• Autodescriptives (this will be wholly unfunny to anyone who has no knowledge of linguistic processes but contains a list of words describing sound changes that have themselves undergone the sound change; rhotacism, for example, means "bunging in an extra r sound" so in this article, it is written as rhotarcism. This article was one of my main revision sources before my historical linguistics exam).

A couple of years ago, my logical sensibilities were offended by the fact that the film Atonement could win the Best Film BAFTA but fail to win the Best British Film category at the same award ceremony. If a film is the "best film" of all of the films in the world, how come it isn't the "best film" in Britain too? Did the Best Film category at the BAFTAs only consider non-British films? Obviously not, given that Atonement won the Best Film category.

This year, there has been a rejig in the names of the categories and the film An Education is nominated both for Best Film and for Outstanding British Film. The rewording is better, to some extent, because semantically, at least, there isn't a logical contradiction, as with saying something is the "best film" but not the "best British film." However, I would imagine that the Outstanding British Film award will be given to the most outstanding British film rather than just any old outstanding British film and so I'm still not entirely happy.

Luckily, this year, An Education is the only film nominated in both categories and as Avatar is bound to win Best Film, these logic fails probably won't be an issue, other than to pedants like me.

The nominees for this year's BAFTAs do at least correlate more closely with my own selections of the best films and best actors/actresses from the past year: three of my top six films of last year are nominated for Outstanding British Film (if you count my honourable mention) and Nowhere Boy was pretty good too, although nowhere near as good as An Education, Moon or In the Loop.

There was a piece in today's Evening Standard about the fuss over the BBC's pronunciation of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince in "the English way" (rhyming Prince with wince) rather than the Haitian way (rhyming Prince with the way someone from Yorkshire with a cold might say dance). I was surprised to hear the city pronounced to rhyme with wince on the Today Programme today--in fact, I did wince--but it really shouldn't come as a surprise.

After all, radio presenters don't talk about the wonderful bike rental scheme in Paree or the football team Bayern München and for good reason--different languages have different sets of phonemes and so international pronunciations help non-polyglots to understand the places people are talking about.

It's not just us lazy, self-centred English that do this either. The French enjoy the cheap shopping available in Londres and might go for a weekend break in Cornouailles--these are even spelled differently. And there's the schoolboy's favourite, Sussex, which, when pronounced en français, is homophonic with a certain way of expressing oneself orally.

My favourite was always the admittedly rarely used Nouveau York, Frenchifying the "New" but not taking the Latin for York (Eboracum) and carrying out 2000-odd years worth of sound changes (producing something like Eboraque). The Italians, meanwhile, call the Germans i Tedeschi, which requires some serious historical knowledge to work out.

In fact, given that Paris, Brussels, Milan and other commonly used place names always get Anglicised pronunciations in this country, it seems that people who only use the non-Anglicised versions for more unusual place names are clearly only showing off. So, I don't think English radio and TV presenters do need to nasalise their Princes unless they are also going to pronounce --or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at all, for that matter.