Linguistics and language

Poetry, music, and an ethics of care

25 May 2020 5 Comments

Sophia Wilson

In February 2020, as a Covid-19 outbreak had led to lockdown in Wuhan and was sparking alarm around the globe, a small audience gathered in a Dunedin Methodist church for an evening of conversation between Behrouz Boochani and Professor Alison Phipps. Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish refugee, journalist and film maker who recently achieved both fame and literary acclaim from within the walls of Manus Island Detention Centre for his novel No Friend but the Mountains. Professor Alison Phipps is the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow. She was in Dunedin as the 2019 De Carle Distinguished lecturer at the University of Otago. Present also were Neil Vallely (Centre for Global Migrations, University of Otago), Ali Mostolizadeh, (Translator and PhD candidate in Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo) and respected Dunedin poets Emma Neale and Rhian Gallagher.

It’s not often a discussion about human rights abuses and serious political regression ends with a celebration of poetry and music, but given the guests, this was a natural outcome.

The evening’s conversation embraced issues of race, colonialism and the purpose of language. Medicine, in particular psychiatry, wove its way through the narrative, not as an altruistic, heroic vehicle for healing, but as a spectre of oppression and control.

Trivial pursuits?

26 November 2018 14 Comments

Sue Wootton

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Secondary school students in New Zealand have recently finished sitting their end of year external examinations. One of those papers was a Level 3 History exam, in which final year students were asked to respond to this quote from Julius Caesar: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”.

After the exam, 1300 students signed a petition asking that markers not downgrade their answers if they hadn’t understood the meaning of the word ‘trivial’. The gist of their argument was that ‘trivial’ is not a word that seventeen and eighteen-year-old English speakers in 2018 can be expected to know, and therefore, for fairness, a definition should have been included in the exam paper.

[Read more…] about Trivial pursuits?

“Poetry and Mindfulness”

19 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.” – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.

We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.

We are not alone: poetry in medicine

10 September 2018 2 Comments

Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers

The day I flew to Dunedin to begin my first year studies in the health sciences, my wonderful best friend came to Wellington airport to see me off and gave me an article he’d been nagging me to read for ages. It was Leslie Jamison’s essay The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison explores the complexities of giving and receiving empathy through stories of her experiences as a medical actor playing a standardised patient, and as a patient herself. It turns out my best friend was right, of course; I read the whole essay twice through on the plane, and so began my love affair with medical creative writing.

Mother language medicine

3 September 2018 5 Comments

Tui Bevin

Tui and her father Kaj Westerskov in Naenae 1955 — Tui Bevin and her father Kaj Westerskov in Naenae (New Zealand) 1955

My father lost his English three times. Once, he reverted to his mother language when he was very ill in intensive care while visiting Germany, but his English returned as he recovered. However he lost it twice more before he died in Dunedin Hospital ten years later.

Dad grew up in Denmark and lived in New Zealand for his last fifty years. His enjoyment of words, languages and bilingual jokes is an important part of how I remember him. It’s not surprising therefore, that the issue of language emerged when I wrote a series of poems about my parents.

A urine sample? You’re taking the piss.

13 June 2016 1 Comment

Dr Jo Oranje

As a New Zealander, it is perfectly conceivable that I might feel pissed off at having to piss off when it pisses down while I’m on the piss at a piss up. And if I’m unexpectedly asked by a medical professional to provide a urine sample, I might retort: “You’re taking the piss!” If my doctor or nurse speaks English as an additional language (EAL) and is unfamiliar with this idiom, she might interpret this literally: “Yes, that’s exactly my intention.” But this assumes the practitioner is aware that ‘piss’, in this context, is a noun. In fact, ‘piss’ is one of those complex English words that can operate in many word categories. In the sentences above, piss has taken roles in verb phrases, noun phrases and an adjectival phrase. I didn’t pluck this one word out of the air (or pull it out of my finger, as my Polish neighbour says).