First Lecture

This year I'm making the most of being home for a whole 12 months by doing lots of teaching as well as lots of writing. Last week I was fortunate enough to give a lecture in the subject that I'm tutoring for! The subject is all about linguistic diversity, and it's designed for students who are at the end of their undergraduate course.

The class I had to take was on cross-linguistic variation in event description. I was lucky enough to be able to base it on two of my favourite areas of research - evidentiality and gesture. I used lots of real examples and all of my favourite examples. I was amazed at how quickly an hour of talking could go! Hopefully the students also found it relatively painless...

What a Shocker of a gesture

It looks like it's taken some front page gesture news to shake me out of my lethargy and get back into the swing of posting.

Over on The Age website this afternoon Jarryd Blair made a public apology following a 'hand gesture' that he made while his team were being photographed following their pre-season cup win. You can read the story here. Obviously events in Japan mean that it didn't stay as the main story for long - but longer than any other gesture related events in recent times.

The story centres around whether it was an offensive gesture or not. The offensive gesture in question is colloquially named as the 'shocker' which, if you're not too faint-hearted you can read about the meaning of here. Which, if you read it, gives some idea why people might have found it offensive.

But there are some questions - such as whether he was really making that gesture. Blair's thumb is not curled back and his two fingers aren't quite brought together. His apology conveniently sidesteps mentioning whether he knew the offense caused by his gesture, instead labelling his own actions as merely "careless and inappropriate."

But lets assume that he did intentionally pull that gesture, I'm sure the large majority of people would have been oblivious. This is an emblematic gesture, and like the 'peace sign' or rotating your finger near your temple to indicate 'crazy' the meaning of these gestures is only apparent if you already knew it. As far as the rest of us were concerned he's just doing a bad impression of a heavy metal music fan.

The irony is that the prudish folk who made this an issue by forcing an apology from Blair have made the event into a news item and drawn the attention of people who, like me, were happily ignorant of this little gesture until today.

The awkward turtle

This week's random Friday post comes back to an old pet topic of mine - gesture. It also comes back to a rather new pet topic of mine - no longer feeling particularly young.


a while ago language log had a post about the word 'awkward', looking at its current usage and how it's extended its meaning and application of late:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2154


One thing that caught my attention was how the phrase 'awkward turtle' has been coined, as though it were some kind of aquatic guardian of unfortunate situations. Invoking the 'awkward turtle' is often accompanied a symbolic turtle gesture with one hand placed palm down over the other hand, also palm down, and the thumbs are rotated to represent a swimming turtle. Most interestingly, now this gesture is performed without speech.

Interestingly, although the origin of this gestural practice is said to be in US colleges, the gesture is not actually the American Sign Language (ASL) sign for turtle, this is:

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/t/turtle.htm


Apparently the 'awkward turtle' sign is actually ASL for platypus, although I can't find a picture to attest to that. The sign though, is the Auslan sign for turtle:

http://www.signplanet.net/SubTools/SubSignSingle.asp?SignID=259


I thought it was a pretty cute gesture, and I thought I'd ask my little sister if she'd heard of it. The reply was an exasperated sigh and an incredulous stare, as though I must be living the life of a hermit to not know about the awkward turtle. Yup - I now know only what's hip if a bunch of professors half way around the world inform me .

Shake It

As the mid-trip frivolity continues, I'm going to make a few more not-so-work related posts. Obviously, the theme will still be linguistic; this is "Lozguistics" after all. "Loz eats her way through all the cafes in Thamel", or "Loz buys outrageous amounts of clothing and books and makes herself feel better by telling herself she's just helping the local economy" would be whole blogs in themselves.

Before I dedcided it was a great idea to take up field-work on a Tibeto-Burman language - with no real experience in either fieldwork or Tibeto-Burman studies - I did a lot of undergrad work with gesture. Although the only work I do with gesture now is try and convince my supervisor to publish papers so I can get my name on them, I still have more than a passing interest in the field.

In Nepal, acsent is deomstrated by shaking the head from side to side. I've decided to get in on this, to varying sucess. Firstly, it made me feel dizzy for quite a few days. Secondly, I occationally get confused and shake my head to mean 'no' instead of yes. Thirdly, I still feel like I'm signaling ambivilance, which is what I'd use the gesture for at home.

Still, it's been rather fun, now I just have to get used to saying 'la' instead of 'yeah' while back-channeling.