Sociolinguistics
Nov. 18th, 2004 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenBy two thirty this afternoon, people had begun to flick on the lights in the common room and in the labs. It wasn't ever really light today - in the morning, I was sitting in English staring out the window, marvelling at the winter. It's so bleak from up there - only the highest branches of the trees are visible, and they're bare - and the sky fills the glass. It's possibly one of the things I will never forget about this school - the way the seasons change from the upstairs windows. That was before the rain came. It started raining some time later and rained continuously for the rest of the day. One of those days, clearly.
That English lesson had its odd points, certainly, even apart from the weather. Sociolinguistics, lovely word, has been dominating the syllabus lately, and today's task was analysing a transcript. Which is all very well. I analysed. But having analysed, my brain was buzzing with turn-taking and adjacency pairs and agenda-setting and backchannel feedback and interruptions, and it's very difficult to unlearn something once you've learned. Someone was saying, of the transcript, "People don't interrupt this much in real life..."
"Yes, they do," I said. "I just did."
"They don't talk...."
"...at the same time?"
It got to the point where whenever anyone said anything, I could see the transcript in my head, complete with bracket pauses and overlap square brackets. It drove me and others insane. I'm trying to forget about it. It's difficult.
Moving on. Thursday is a day I have never got the hang of. But I have a free, and I used mine to eat another enormous lemon muffin and read the Guardian cover to cover. It's always pristine because only Mr Evans and I actually read it. I said as such to Miranda, who agreed and proceeded to mock me. Not that she doesn't say the occasional mock-worthy thing herself. As she was telling me later, one such thing is, "All right, who took my empire?"
Her dad's bemused response was, "The Turks?"
So on and so forth. If there was a theme for today, it was people saying stupid things, myself included, but I don't win the prize. There was a brief episode in Chemistry (organic). Mrs Colvin has decided to move on to A2 mass spectra, which builds on AS mass spectra, and she wanted to know what we remembered, one person at a time.
"What processes occur?" she asked.
"Vaporisation," Fidan said.
"Ionisation, because electrons get fired at the sample."
"Acceleration."
"Deflection," I said, after a moment's thought, "through a magnetic field."
"Detection," said Rola. ""With the m over z value."
"Where m is?"
"Mass."
"And z?"
"Charge."
"We're good, aren't we?" said Becky O, voicing exactly what I was thinking.
Mrs Colvin was grudgingly approving. "The communal brain is working," she said, prompting general amusement.
"Can you imagine a big brain," Fidan said, "sitting there and throbbing, like a jellyfish..."
"Communal brain," I said. "This is how we can take over the world."
"Did you see that programme about jellyfishes in the sea? All in the sea, and stuff..."
"Or," I observed quietly, "communal brain attempts to take over the world and distracted by something shiny in rural Poland."
"And don't forget they're squishy and gooey and stuff..."
Later, Fidan excelled herself by stealing the small pop-bead-things used for chromosome models. She wanted to steal two, and when this desire was thwarted, went on to make life as annoying as possible for me by scribbling all over my notes. (I've found yelling, "No!" is the best solution to this). Once distracted, she started talking about some film she'd seen, "And it was rubbish but I don't want to use the c-word in front of Desdekala Rice-Oxley."
"Dedeskala?" I repeated, and started laughing. I have a horrible feeling that soon the entire school will be saying it.
Rice-Oxley herself says she thinks it sounds scholarly. I think it's hilarious. Fidan ignored me entirely and went on talking about the film, which according to Meg starred Goldie Whoopingberg.
I wonder sometimes how I ended up among these people.
That English lesson had its odd points, certainly, even apart from the weather. Sociolinguistics, lovely word, has been dominating the syllabus lately, and today's task was analysing a transcript. Which is all very well. I analysed. But having analysed, my brain was buzzing with turn-taking and adjacency pairs and agenda-setting and backchannel feedback and interruptions, and it's very difficult to unlearn something once you've learned. Someone was saying, of the transcript, "People don't interrupt this much in real life..."
"Yes, they do," I said. "I just did."
"They don't talk...."
"...at the same time?"
It got to the point where whenever anyone said anything, I could see the transcript in my head, complete with bracket pauses and overlap square brackets. It drove me and others insane. I'm trying to forget about it. It's difficult.
Moving on. Thursday is a day I have never got the hang of. But I have a free, and I used mine to eat another enormous lemon muffin and read the Guardian cover to cover. It's always pristine because only Mr Evans and I actually read it. I said as such to Miranda, who agreed and proceeded to mock me. Not that she doesn't say the occasional mock-worthy thing herself. As she was telling me later, one such thing is, "All right, who took my empire?"
Her dad's bemused response was, "The Turks?"
So on and so forth. If there was a theme for today, it was people saying stupid things, myself included, but I don't win the prize. There was a brief episode in Chemistry (organic). Mrs Colvin has decided to move on to A2 mass spectra, which builds on AS mass spectra, and she wanted to know what we remembered, one person at a time.
"What processes occur?" she asked.
"Vaporisation," Fidan said.
"Ionisation, because electrons get fired at the sample."
"Acceleration."
"Deflection," I said, after a moment's thought, "through a magnetic field."
"Detection," said Rola. ""With the m over z value."
"Where m is?"
"Mass."
"And z?"
"Charge."
"We're good, aren't we?" said Becky O, voicing exactly what I was thinking.
Mrs Colvin was grudgingly approving. "The communal brain is working," she said, prompting general amusement.
"Can you imagine a big brain," Fidan said, "sitting there and throbbing, like a jellyfish..."
"Communal brain," I said. "This is how we can take over the world."
"Did you see that programme about jellyfishes in the sea? All in the sea, and stuff..."
"Or," I observed quietly, "communal brain attempts to take over the world and distracted by something shiny in rural Poland."
"And don't forget they're squishy and gooey and stuff..."
Later, Fidan excelled herself by stealing the small pop-bead-things used for chromosome models. She wanted to steal two, and when this desire was thwarted, went on to make life as annoying as possible for me by scribbling all over my notes. (I've found yelling, "No!" is the best solution to this). Once distracted, she started talking about some film she'd seen, "And it was rubbish but I don't want to use the c-word in front of Desdekala Rice-Oxley."
"Dedeskala?" I repeated, and started laughing. I have a horrible feeling that soon the entire school will be saying it.
Rice-Oxley herself says she thinks it sounds scholarly. I think it's hilarious. Fidan ignored me entirely and went on talking about the film, which according to Meg starred Goldie Whoopingberg.
I wonder sometimes how I ended up among these people.
