From the highest of horses: a sermon to a plagiarist.

I got an email this morning from a student who failed her first assignment and partially plagiarised the re-sit. Because I'm in a preachy mood, I sent her a long, personal and emotional email about the value of education and in particular, of doing an English literature degree.

Obviously now I'm cringing at the thought of it being passed round for the cynical amusement of my students, but there's always the possibility of my words striking a chord. Embarrassing as it is, here's what I said to her, lightly edited to avoid identification.

I really want you to think about why you're here. Nobody's making you take a degree, and we operate under the assumption that you're enthusiastic about studying literature, even if individual texts aren't your favourites. If you see modules as obstacles to get over (or around), then trying to cheat or take shortcuts makes perfect sense, but we will catch you. We don't want you to treat your time here like that. We want to help you widen your intellectual horizons, to enjoy the process of learning more and thinking more. Cheating doesn't help with any of this. It might get you a degree certificate if you evade detection, but you won't come out of it educated. We aren't your judges: you should be your own judge. Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I here for the right reasons?
• Have I fulfilled my own potential?
• Am I thinking about study in the right way? 
• Are reading and writing changing me? 

At the risk of being extremely boring, let me tell you about my first degree. I got to university (not this one) on the Clearing system. I'd done well at English but never felt I was particularly good at anything and assumed everyone else was better than me. But I was lucky in one regard: all I ever wanted to do was read and think about books. Before long, I decided that to get anything out of my time at university, I had to talk about books too, in lectures and seminars and tutorials: a horrible thing for someone naturally very quiet. But enthusiasm and determination got me through: a good degree, an MA, a PhD and finally a job in academia. 

But all these things are far less important than one fact. Doing an English degree changed me in every way possible. I read more. I thought about what I'd read in lots of different ways. That meant that in a sense I knew less – because the things I assumed were totally true were revealed to be contingent on context and background. Finding new ways to think about poems and plays and novels soon meant that I had new ways to think about people, ideas, politics, belief, love, hate, sex, death, the past and the future, communities, and everything in the world about me. The world was revealed to be a much more interesting place: more difficult, sometimes terrible, always hard to understand and always changing, but definitely more interesting.  

Perhaps this sounds ridiculous to you, and on the screen maybe it is. But I know one thing for sure: if I'd copied and pasted from the web on an essay, I'd still be the idiot I was when I started my degree. So what I'm saying is: it's OK to find a lot of it difficult. It's OK to struggle, it's OK to absolutely hate some of the texts we ask you to read. It's OK to find it hard to balance academic work with all the other things in your life. We understand all that and we can help. But it's not OK to treat your time here – an opportunity to transform yourself into someone even more wonderful than you might already be – as a game with a prize at the end. Forget the degree certificate: that's just a piece of paper. It's what happens to you in-between that really matters. Give yourself a chance to be changed and amazing things will happen. I know: it happened to me, and that's why I'm in this job.  

I know this sounds really preachy and heavy-handed: you just caught me on a day when all these things are on my mind. But I and all my colleagues really want you and all the others on the course to grasp the opportunity. The worst thing for me is sitting on stage at Graduation Day and not recognising some of the people who are collecting their degrees, because they've never made an impression on us, or seeing students who could have done really well but chose not to make the effort. Don't be one of those people. You've failed this module, but you have every chance of fulfilling your potential. 

You just have to want to. 

Wonder what the Employability and Retention units will make of that? They're probably tying a noose as we speak…

Education for Dummies (i.e. the Minister for Education)

Amongst the many idiocies perpetrated by Michael Gove, that state-funded troll, is his decision to focus on

"the great works of the literary canon"

in the English GCSE. The what now? Other than 'the' and 'of', pretty much every other word in that phrase is objectionable.

What determines whether something is 'great'? Is it fame? That depends on marketing and distribution. Is it age? There's plenty of very old dross about. It's less than 100 years since English Literature itself was considered worth studying: before that only Latin and Greek texts were considered sufficiently 'great'. Are there no 'great' works in other languages? Or is English the only vehicle for literary greatness. Are 'great' works only novels, plays and poems?

What of non-fiction, or comics, or radio dramas or TV? Song lyrics? What, in fact, qualifies as a 'work', and why do we employ such a grinding term.

What's a literary canon? Big-sellers? Who determines what it is? We used to know the answer to this one. Matthew Arnold in 1869 airily defined culture as 'the best that is thought and known in the world'. Thomas Babington MacAulay announced that 'a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. This from a man who lived in India as a colonial administrator but never learned any of the native languages. F. R. Leavis actually produced a list of canonical texts in The Great Tradition. It starts like this:

"The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."

The list expands, but not by very much. Few non-aristocrats, foreigners, working-class types, northerners, homosexuals or ethnic minority writers. And certainly no non-realists. I happen to like all these writers, but there's a whole world out there. Canon-building is by definition exclusionary and dubious. I teach English literature. I have to choose what my students read - I am a canon-builder. But what are my criteria? I try to represent as many walks of life as possible (something Gove would object to) but I (usually) want to engage the students by giving them texts I think are 'good' and 'relevant': both very subjective terms. It's a fraught experience. There's a limited amount of time. Who do we heave overboard when something new comes along? Should we leave a text for a decade or two after publication to see whether it's still 'important'? What if some of the readers find it offensive?

What I suspect Gove means by a canon is texts which appear not to have any subversive political or social content. No lesbians or uppity minorities. No lefty authors or chippy proletarians. He'd be a fool though: Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad are profoundly critical of their own societies, more or less openly. Away from Gove's office, we hold that meaning is created in the space between text and reader: Gove might restrict the texts students read, but he can't limit the ways in which they read them.

What's on the list now? Shakespeare will stay, despite virtually every play examining the abuse of power (shh, don't tell Michael). Of Mice and Men will have to go: Lenny will never pass the CRB check and its author was a notorious lefty. Mister Pip and Purple Hibiscus are about Johnny Foreigner and To Kill A Mockingbird is soft on crime and promotes multiculturalism. The Modern Prose section will have to go: too many of its authors are a) alive b) keep moaning about libraries and c) don't promote boarding schools and corporal punishment. Some of them may even be Guardian readers. Dylan Thomas is too Welsh and would have objected to minimum unit of alcohol pricing. Duffy is way too lesbian, JB Priestley is the kind of do-gooding liberal hand-wringer we can do without, Lord of the Flies appeals to the Hoody Fraternity whom we are no longer hugging. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is clearly unsuitable for an interventionist government which does believe in persecuting minorities, the mentally ill and women in the cause of 'mainstream society'. Out with them all!

In with? Obviously Andy McNab. Don't you know there's a war on? For the girls, obviously some Louise Mensch, some PD James and some Jilly Cooper. Biggles of course, and liberal (ho ho) amounts of Enid Blyton's boarding school novels (note: no Rowling. Subversive lefty rubbish with girls in er yah boo sucks to you). Commando comic for the dyslexic boys. Some Jeffrey Archer ('a real page-turner, you know: none of that arty-farty stuff'). And eventually, Michael Gove's memoirs, perhaps packaged as a Little Red Book to be distributed to every 5 year old on their Micro-chip-Fitting Day.

I'd love to know how this canon will be chosen. Will he just consult his old school exercise books (you just know he's got them preserved with every gold star lovingly uncreased on the page)? Or will he outsource the work to his Special Advisors on Books What Are Good For Learning You Morals And Stuff? Perhaps they could helpfully provide a list of Non-Canonical Texts. We could call it the Index Prohibitorum. Or just substitute the pensioners' Winter Fuel Allowance with a delivery of verboten books for efficient disposal. The libraries are being closed down anyway…

Finally, canons don't preserve 'the best that is thought and known'. They pickle them. They wrap them up in cotton wool. They stick books on pedestals and pretend that the books – and the societies that conserve them – are static and eternal. This is an unhealthy form of cultural onanism. Tell a kid that a book is Important and s/he will be bored by it. Put a book in its cultural context and it will appeal. Imagine giving a 15 year old a Henry James novel… ridiculous. They'll never go back to that great author again. The easiest way to kill off a book is to tell people it's Improving. And what of the texts not on the canon? Is a great work by a modern author going to be considered rubbish because Michael Gove's Panel (and you can bet it will consist of Spads, Tory Donors and Celebrity TV Talking Head From Central Casting) hasn't read it or doesn't understand it?

Tips for new students

I'm in the middle of meeting the new intake - largely indistinguishable from The Inbetweeners, which is cool. One of the things we're trying to instil in them is enthusiasm: for reading, for study, for deepening and widening their intellects. You might say that enthusiasm is what brought them here, but in this age, that's only partially true.

Maria Edgeworth has something to say about this in Patronage. Alfred is a young lawyer - but he's capable of improvement:

Alfred had reason to be more and more convinced of the truth of his father's favourite doctrine, that the general cultivation of the understanding, and the acquirement of general knowledge, are essential to the attainment of excellence in any profession, useful to a young man particularly in introducing him to the notice of valuable friends and acquaintance.

She's right. When people (hello, my parents) can't understand why someone would want to take and English degree rather than something more job-specific, there's your answer. Intellectual curiosity, and awareness of the world and the human condition, combined with the critical skills which help you look beneath the surface of particular, local objects, will take you a long way.

This is what I want my students to acquire. It's more than turning up to lectures and writing down the bits you can't remember: it's following the byways, checking up on things classmates mention, chasing ideas and arguing about them passionately. It doesn't matter if you hate the texts I love and love the texts I hate: what matters is that you develop a sense of discrimination grounded in wide reading and close attention. To the books!

I'm feeling a little welmish today

Emma has drawn my attention to SavetheWords.org, a promotional gimmick by the OED to draw attention to itself by highlighting the rapidity with which words are falling out of use.

For instance, my friend Mark is suffering from a range of illnesses at the moment. He has also recently suffered feline bereavement. This leads me to suspect that he's contracted pilimiction - the presence of hair-like bodies in the urine, which leads me to suspect that he has eaten his cat.

My favourite words are 'fescue' (a teacher's pointer and also a generic term for a family of grasses) and 'defenestrate' (to throw someone through a window). Neither are obscure, but they're satisfying. So is 'micturate' (to urinate) and 'osculate' - to kiss. I basically like words ending in -ate. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a move to de-Latinise English in favour of Saxonification, influenced by the English sense of kinship with Germany (from where they'd acquired their royal family). Hardy, Dickens and rather late to the party, Orwell (see his 'Politics and the English Language') contributed to this effort:

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers 

Predictably enough, Wor(l)d War 1 put an end to that in any meaningful fashion, though Poul Anderson's 1989 Uncleftish Beholding tries to explain atomic theory in Germanic words only. See also Cowley's (dubious) How We'd Talk If The English Had Won In 1066 (dubious because 'England' was a series of Anglo-Saxon and Norse states, all with close ties to European nations, including the Normans. 'English' is a very retrospective term for 1066.

Your contributions please.

While you think about them, this is what Orwell has to say about writing in 1946. How I wish I could stamp this onto essays:

 As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? 

Orwell also knows that language is a disguise for atrocity - think of the current collateral damage, for instance:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.  

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. 

This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. 

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.  

 And remember, during this period of adjustment, we're all in this together. Shut up about control orders, start paying your graduate contribution and supporting the war on terror. Support the Big Society and Welfare Reform. Doesn't all that sound better than a depression in which we abandon the poor, tax students to the hilt and bomb Muslim countries into behaving?

Dear me. I really should do some work. Got a bit carried away. Do use the comments section to add your favourite obscure words and weaselly uses of language.

Other peoples' lives

One of the things I love is the serendipity which arises from casual use of language. I saw this in a supermarket small ad this weekend:

One pram for sale. Ex-con used once.

Delightful. What a backstory. Why did an ex-con use it just once? Was it his getaway vehicle? Was he caught? Or did he go straight after using it for one final job, wheeling away ingots of gold wrapped up in a baby-gro?

Or perhaps 'ex-con' means 'excellent condition'. In which case, a much sadder tale unfolds. Why use a pram only once unless death, adoption or social services or some other separation intervene?

The Last Airwhat?

In a lesson for us all (linguistics? cultural imperialism? economics and hegemony?), M Night Shyawhatever's latest film has been released in the UK. It is, by all accounts, mind-numbingly boring (the Irish Times called it a 'North Korean adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita' and 'so misconceived and shabby that it comes as a surprise when they actually make it through to the end credits') and apparently racist (good people - white, bad people - Asian, just like that Indiana Jones one set in India).


It's called The Last Airbender.


Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. For UK English speakers, is that 'bender' is a rather old-fashioned and/or Northern term for homosexuals. Not the worst one, more a playground term.


This makes watching the film a very different experience for British people than it does for Americans.


Have a read of this review in the Guardian by the excellent Peter Bradshaw - one of the funniest I've ever read.

For a British audience, the film's language is inadvertently flavoured by associations and nuances that are vulgar, abusive, and very, very unfortunate indeed.

At the cinema showing I attended, the British crowd reacted derisively at key dialogue moments. One wise old lady says solemnly to a young man: "I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny." One character tells another wonderingly: "There are some really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone." Another whispers tensely: "We want to minimise their bender sources." A key figure is taken away by brutal soldiers, one of whom shouts cruelly: "It's a bender."

And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse. By the end of the film, I felt like a bit-part player in some feature-length adaptation of Viz comic – Springtime for Finbarr Saunders, perhaps. This scene will inevitably be repeated in every cinema in the land showing The Last Airbender. For Friday and Saturday night showings, the police may have to be called.

But at least this linguistic lurch provided some interest in a film that is mind-bendingly boring, with an utter lack of narrative drive, an absence of jeopardy or anything at all being at stake, or of interest, in any way whatever.

It is incredible how awful the once feted director M Night Shyamalan has become and how he is still allowed to make big-budget films. I didn't think it was possible for him to make something worse than his Lady in the Water or The Happening. But he has managed it.

An ugly, surly, sullen, selfish spirit, / Who Satan's worst perfections does inherit

Brilliant first couple of papers - covering French-British impressions, and then a virtuoso run through Czech terms for each other and foreigners. Potentially dry, you'd think, but no - fascinating, wry and witty. Now I'm in FW's paper on Defoe's satirical poetry. That gentleman thought little of the poor, the Welsh or the foreign - despite mocking the British people's xenophobia. His The True-Born Englishman, is a doozy.


Some extracts:

Pride, the first peer, and president of Hell, 

To his share Spain, the largest province, fell. 

Lust chose the torrid zone of Italy,  

Where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy: 

Where swelling veins o'erflow with livid streams, 

With heat impregnate from Vesuvian flames: 

Drunkenness, the darling favourite of Hell,  

Chose Germany to rule; and rules so well,  

No subjects more obsequiously obey,  

None please so well or are so pleased as they. 

Ungoverned Passion settled first in France,  

Where mankind lives in haste and thrives by chance; 

A dancing nation, fickle and untrue,  

Have oft undone themselves and others too; 

By Zeal the Irish, and the Russ by Folly:  

Fury the Dane, The Swede by Melancholy, 

By stupid Ignorance the Muscovite;  

The Chinese by a child of Hell called Wit.  

Wealth makes the Persian too effeminate,  

And Poverty the Tartars desperate;  

The Turks and Moors by Mah'met he subdues,  

And God has given him leave to rule the Jews. 

Rage rules the Portuguese and Fraud the Scotch,  

Revenge the Pole and Avarice the Dutch. 

So that's all the foreigners Defoe could think of - you'll have to read the rest to find out what he thought of the English. The title of this post is a mere introduction…

Guten Morgen, ich bin deine Lehrer

I met the new students of English today. They are, of course, a delight, though I have to ask: what is it with Nazis, guys? Favourite book, The Diary of Anne Frank, favourite film, Schindler's List etc. etc. etc. Clearly the A-level curriculum is run by somebody very weird indeed…

Everything you know is wrong. Discuss.

Maurice Charlesworth was my philosophy lecturer at Bangor University. He was, to me at least, something of a legend. He came to work dressed in a brown suit with brown shirt, tie, socks, shoes and briefcase. He was perhaps the world's only Tasmanian nationalist, had a dry and cruel sense of humour which he directed particularly towards the Christian section of the student body, and told us that he took a few minutes during his wedding reception to prove the non-existence of God to his new mother-in-law. He also dealt with people signing in as Donald Duck by undertaking graphological analysis of the entire class. His favourite illustration of the degenerate nature of our times was to remind us that whereas he used to employ a psychologist in his philosophy department, he was now the philosopher in the psychology department.

All this is tangential, however. The abiding memory I have of Maurice is his mantra that a class has failed if the participants think they understand what's just happened, and that the world is just as they thought. He always managed to leave me exhilarated, confused and inspired - the mark of a great teacher, I think. Every session left us drunk with intellectual curiosity and wonder.

Maurice's philosophy colleague, Ed Ingram, was equally bizarre and brilliant, though totally contrasting. Ed wore shorts and vomit-inducing Hawaiian shirts. He clearly had an absolutely brilliant time in the 60s or 70s, and had barely recovered. He was a former computer programmer who handled all the science-related philosophy with amazing precision and joy. We'd turn up, have our heads completely messed up by quantum physics and the like, then go for a soothing drink. We'd then meet Ed in the street and he'd ask us things like where he lived, or what day it was. Between them and Tony Brown, my learned, kind and wise English tutor, these people made teaching a potential avenue for me - shame the only quality I share with them is a gift for sarcasm…