The Airy-fairy and the Nitty-gritty:
Colloquial Language in Lectures on Science and Technology
Table of Contents
Introduction
Citations [1-40],[41-80],[ 81-120],[121-160].
Notes
1. General characteristics of Data
2. Colloquial Renaming
3. Metaphor
4. Evaluation
5. Management of Teaching and Learning
6. Definition of Roles of Teacher and Student
7. Definition of Subject Area
Conclusion & Reference
The following citations were collected in 1977-1993 from lectures given for Postgraduate courses in the Departments of Plant Biology, Transportation and Highway Engineering, Minerals Engineering and Computer Science at Birmingham University in the course of team-teaching work undertaken by the English for International (formerly Overseas) Students Unit. That work, as described originally in Johns & Dudley-Evans (1980) involves recording lectures in the subject departments on a weekly (and sometimes latterly fortnightly) basis: a teacher from the Unit writes an 'ephemeral' handout based on the material in the lecture, which is used two or three days after the lecture in a team-teaching session involving both the teacher from the Unit and the subject lecturer. The main focus of the work is on the students' understanding of the overall structure and meaning of the lecture, matters of linguistic detail being considered only inasmuch as they contribute to that understanding. However, it was apparent from an early stage in this work that 'technical-colloquial' language might represent a source of difficulty for the students, and where it occurs we have often included a short exercise to discover whether they know or are able to guess its meaning, and where appropriate whether they are able to 'translate' it into the more formal language used by scientists and engineers in writing about their subject. The data collates examples from the surviving handouts prepared over the past 18 years,
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Data
- It's a bit dodgy up here on the graph.
- The red carnations are a bit of an embarrassment1, a fly in the ointment2.
- If you follow Chatsfield, the line you get1 is a bit of a dog's breakfast2.
- It would be a bit of a pain to store the contents of each register separately on machines with a large number of registers.
- A regeneration process can be a bit tricky if the seeds have been collected from an outbreeding collection.
- This method is a swine to use.
- You'd be an absolute mug if you put in too many gullies.
- The acid test for graphs is to hold it up to the light.
- Optimum viabilisty of the seed is at physiological maturity. After that it's downhill all the way.
- That may sound very airy-fairy.
- There are all sorts of dodges which you will learn in time.
- It's all very well storing seed, but you've got to be sure that what's in your gene bank is still going to be alive and viable.
- We must allow some leeway because we are not sure if we have over- or underestimated the value.
- Are you with me?
- At the end of the day, the engineer has to reach a decision.
- Let me just backtrack a little.
- With our little programmable calculators these days we'll just bash in1 the values of X and Y, whip through2 that, and come out with3 a value of X squared upon Y, you know, inside three minutes. without having to remember anything else.
- I do not want to blow up the AASHO tests into a God-like being.
- These factors boil down to the capability of the analysts and the programmers.
- By and large, most studies show that oxygen is deleterious to the storage environment.
- Metaphase 1 is the stage that we're interested in. Obtaining this in anthers is by no means that easy.
- We change our tack here a little.
- The computer system chews its way through the program.
- It is possible to come up against the problem of slugging.
- I don't know what problems will come up1 ... but I'll try to help with the problems you come up with2.
- He came up with a number of ideas about the origins of crop plants.
- In practice we can't cope with all of the species.
- The word 'diversity' has cropped up in recent lectures.
- The crunch of the matter is that he was saying that centres of diversity are centres of origin.
- The use of a large freeboard area cuts down the amount of recycling needed.
- That notation is slightly dicey.
- In the design process it is always possible to ditch a particular transformation and go back to the base description. What you do with the base description is up to you.
- At a molecular level, mutations are not very common unless you do something drastic to the plant.
- Some shapes don't lend themselves to other techniques.
- If you let the design life drift up a little bit, you won't pay a penalty.
- Endosperm cells are a dumping ground for food reserves.
- We feed in different values for I into the equation.
- I don't. think many of you will want to ferret through and find the derivation of this formula.
- There are documents from the Department of Transport that firm up Lab Report 1132.
- In the Oxalis genus there is much specialisation of forms, which is geared to ensuring that outbreeding occurs.
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- I want my remarks to be geared towards a specific machine.
- Sometimes engineers are able to get away with poor design.
- You're letting me get away with murder on this one
- If you get behind with1 the course it will be difficult for you to catch up2.
- In my last lecture I was making the point that I wanted to get down to a little more detail.
- We're going to have to get down to the nitty-gritty at this point.
- When we recompact a soil we cannot get rid of the last 5% of air.
- He's really going to get to grips with this phenomenon.
- This sequence of symbols is gibberish.
- The chemical incompatibility system usually goes along with polymorphic flower structure.
- If the value in the accumulator is corrupted, the program will go completely haywire.
- These factors go hand in hand.
- The construction engineers are going on a jolly.
- Both the taxonomic information and the chemical information are related to the biochemical techniques being used. That goes without saying.
- A lot of this lecture will be concerned with going over ground we've covered before.
- The cells will metabolize the sucrose and convert it into starch and other cellular goodies.
- The road may be covered with gunge.
- We have hammered the AASHO tests to death.
- A device does not hang about telling the processor that it is ready.
- There are no hard and fast rules in dealing with this situation.
- I keep harping back to onions.
- The viability of the seed has a lot to do with the rate of cooling and the rate of thawing.
- Can you hazard a guess?
- Are you trying to hedge your bets?
- There is quite a hefty choice of jump instructions.
- There are no hidden tricks up the sleeve of the 900 machine.
- In the short term the equation holds up1 but we do not have the evidence to back it up 2 for long periods.
- There is no need to get hung up about1 the binary number system: you will latch on to it2 eventually.
- I'll talk about that in due course.
- In order of batting, this method is the best and that is the worst.
- In the jargon that we use, this method is 'transparent'.
- An area of the store is reserved as a jotting pad.
- At this stage I'd like to jump a little bit.
- We have in the cytoplasm A G C and T just floating around waiting to be joined together in the appropriate order.
- I'm not adopting the American spelling just out of a whim.
- The particles knock into one another.
- I won't labour this point.
- I will not be laying down the law1 about how this should be done in all cases. I shall give you guidelines2.
- The point where I left off yesterday was leaving some people a little puzzled.
- 'D4 weak' states that attributes cannot be mixed, but gives us the let-out that a candidate key of one entity may be concatenated with the candidate key of another entity, to form a compound entity.
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- Chromosomes are made of genes. Let's leave it at that.
- The long and the short of it is the extract from this leaf had very characteristic spots, very different from the ones in this species.
- Bean lumped these factors together.
- If you get single gene control of chromosome pairing during meiosis, this messes up estimates of homology between genes.
- That's a very fortunate approximation for us to be able to apply because otherwise it would be a very messy calculation indeed.
- The computer is a mindless gadget.
- What are you going to put in the filling then: mouldy old jock-straps?
- This earth road is NBG.
- The fit berween the predicted data and the observed data is not too bad, all things considered.
- I expect this will be old hat to you.
- It will be one hell of a problem if you have to put a road through loose scree.
- It is out of the question to construct a nomograph for every variety of seed.
- If our prior probability distributions are mere guesses, what we get at the end is a paper exercise.
- The switched virtual circuit, often referred to as a virtual call, requires all the paraphernalia of call establishment and call clearing procedures to establish and close down connexions for communications.
- The history of Nigeria over the past two hundred years is part and parcel of the process of industrialisation in Europe during the same period.
- There have been reports of the germination of lupin seeds estimated to be 10,000 years old. Well, you pay your money and you take your choice whether you believe that. [Also: 'You pays your money and you takes your choice'].
- This is a point we'll pick up later on.
- Very fine solids are picked up in the cyclone.
- It's a piece of cake.
- It is difficult to pin down the factors involved.
- Let's play around with this subject for a while.
- We get one value of flow and space mean speed to plug into a speed/flow relationship.
- The protoplast will swell and pop out of the cell wall.
- The Canadians argued that there is precious little difference between the dummy section and the other section.-
- Separation of the sexes is a pretty efficient way of ensuring that a good deal of of outbreeding goes on.
- We can produce a stab at a chart looking like that.
- One of the functions of the polymerase is to proof-read the new strand.
- In the type B roaster, part of the gas stream is pulled out through the second cyclone, where calcine is drawn off.
- I've pulled the figures out of the air1, but they correspond roughly to what happens on the ball-park2.
- CCITT rapidly decided that they would put all their effort and all their eggs into the attractive basket of1 the device-independent interface, and leave people with hard-wired terminals to sort things out as best they could2.
- The difficulty of getting material at the right stage for the study of meiosis puts people off these studies.
- In certain cases DNA can put up with one incorrect base pair.
- Let me first recap.
- It would be very remiss of us to lose sight of that.
- Read it through quickly: if you have done some statistics before, it may ring some bells.
- I've run off copies of last year's handout.
- We shall run through the method, using these data.
- Don't shirk these problems.
- We can use gradient factors as a way of shortcutting the tedium of all the calculations.
- You can then shove the whole lot into a tube.
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- The Z80 is just a machine for shuffling patterns of bits at very high speed.
- On this question I'm sitting on the fence.
- I'll give you the skeleton1, you've got to put the flesh on it2.
- What I've done is skipped the step of equation two.
- Is the project slipshod, or does it use modern management techniques?
- These values could be slotted into the equation.
- In cut areas the soil has been smashed about.
- There is one slight snag here.
- Sob stories about how hard you're working are like water off a duck's back.
- When you study plant species with inflorescence you find that once you've done it once, you have something to go on.
- The main purpose of the December test is not to sort the wheat from the chaff.
- In order to avoid a spurious air of authority attaching to that particular figure for Mean Expected NPV, you could look at it in terms of accumulated probability distribution.
- Sometimes we want each sample to stand by itself.
- We do not know whether the seal will stand up over a long period.
- Who would like to start the ball rolling?
- I've just stuck up a few references on the board.
- There are many ways of tackling this kind of work.
- We are going to take a fairly relaxed view of the taxonomy, as there's a certain amount of controversy.
- If we take Harlans's view as valid then we have to take on board more recent findings.
- So you're not prepared to take the plunge?
- What I'm going to do this morning is take you through the task of the road engineer.
- Fines are taken away from the roasting operation through the cyclone.
- I have taken the odd liberty with that.
- This takes a tremendous load off my shoulders.
- The whole line I've been taking is that the model should express our understanding of the real-world system.
- Commercial programs throw a wobble from time to time. [also 'throw a wobbly'].
- There is little evidence as to how much oxygen is needed to keep a seed ticking over.
- Decisions concerning road geometrics tie in closely with the topography of the region.
- We'll toss in a few more bits.
- I probably touched on embryo genesis, and we will pick it up from that point.
- There is a trade-off between convenience and accuracy in deciding how large the sample should be.
- There's nothing tricky about this.
- Alston and Turner's book was way ahead of its time.
- The Romans weren't too far off.
- What it boils down to in the end is that we want to see how these roads perform.
- It's difficult to know what they're on about in this diagram..
- I think that really wraps up that part of what I want to do.
- We start from a prose specification that you get given on a plate.
- It is important to make sure that your leg is not being pulled.
- By dividing the world up into lots of other areas you can zoom in on some areas better than in Vavilov's system.
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Notes on Data
1. General Features
From a linguistic point of view, the most striking feature of the colloquial language in
the citations is the large number of phrasal verbs - eg bash in (17), come up (25:1),
come up against (24), come up with (25:2, 26), cope with (27), crop up (28), drift up
(35), feed in (37), ferret through (38), firm up (39) etc. and also nominalisations
based on phrasal verbs - eg let-out (80), trade-off (151), and verb+noun collocations:
eg change tack (22), get down to detail/the nitty-gritty (45, 46), go haywire (51),
hazard a guess (63), labour a point (77), lay down the law (78), throw a
wobble/wobbly (146), etc. Other fixed phrases and expressions in the data include a
fly in the ointment (2:2), go over ground (that has been) covered before (55), you
pay(s) you money and you take(s) your choice (96), and in (110:1) a variation on the
proverb Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Another feature of the data worth noting is the use of colloquial quantifiers and
modifiers - eg a bit (of) (2-5), by and large (20), by no means that (21), hefty (65),
one hell of a (91), precious little (104), pretty (105).
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2. Colloquial Renaming
There is some renaming of the entities involved in science and engineering through
evaluative classifying terms - eg goodies (56) (positive evaluation), dumping ground
(36), gunge [in this context, the waste tyre rubber that sticks to the surface of the
road], mindless gadget (86) (negative evaluation). The major renaming, however, is of
the processes and relationships and engineering, this being the major function of the
phrasal verbs discussed above.
Physical processes (possible formal equivalences shown in parentheses):
chews it way through (23) [executes], cuts down (30) [reduces], get rid of (47) [expel], floating around (74) [in suspension], knock into (76) [collide with], picked up (98 [recovered], pop out of (103) [extrude from], pulled out (108) [withdrawn], taken away (142) [removed, extracted], ticking over (147) [viable]
There is also some renaming of the Thinking processes involved in doing science eg:
back up (67) [support], pin down (100) [identify], put up with (112) [tolerate], together with a number of expressions that express a non-specific notion of Association: goes along with (50), go hand in hand (52), has a lot to do with (62), part and parcel of (95), tie in closely with (148).
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3. Metaphor
A good deal of the language (including much of the renaming discussed above) is
metaphorical, metaphor being used to `humanise' scientific concepts and activities. Thus
computers (memorably) chew their way through programs (23), values are fed (37) and
slotted (102, 126) into equations, devices do not hang about waiting for data (59),
polymerase proof-reads strands of DNA, and bits are tossed into a binary description (149).
The sources of metaphor reveal much about the ethos of the academic/professional field. For
example, the male domination of engineering is shown by the number of metaphors drawn
from sports and games - eg baseball (109:2), card games (121), cricket (70), field sports (38),
football (137), horse-racing (32, 64), motor-cycling (146), sailing (22, 139), swimming (140)
and wrestling (48). The locker-room reference in (87) could, of course apply to any number
of sports, though a check with the lecturer confirmed our initial suspicion that he had rugby
football in mind. There are also a number of metaphors that refer to general mayhem and
violence - eg bash (17:1), whip (17:2), shove (120), murder (43) and smash (127). Hobbies
that serve as sources of metaphor include conjuring (66) and photography (160).
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4. Evaluation
A striking and - I believe - important feature of the colloquial language in the lectures is that
much of it is highly evaluative. A useful way of analysing evaluative language is to attempt to identify the criteria (expressable in terms of binary positive/negative opposites)
on which the evaluation depends. In these data the most important criteria appear to be Easy
v. Difficult, Reliable v. Unreliable and Practical v. Theoretical (ie colloquial references to
theory tend to be negative rather than positive):
Easy
dodges (11), let-out (80), piece of cake (99), given on a plate (158).
|
Difficult
a pain (4), tricky (5, 152), a swine (6), by no means that easy (21), come up against [a problem] (24), can't cope with (27), one hell of a problem (91), out of the question (92), paraphernalia (94), snag (128). |
Reliable
acid test (8), firm up (39), holds up (67), not too bad, all things considered (89), something to go on (130), stand up (134), your leg is not not being pulled (159 ). |
Unreliable
dodgy (1), a dog's breakfast (3), dicey (31), gibberish (49), go completely haywire (51), mess up (84), messy (85), NBG (88), remiss (114),
slipshod (125), spurious air of authority (132), throw a wobble/wobbly (146). |
Practical
acid test (8), nitty-gritty (46), on the ball park (109:2). |
Theoretical
airy-fairy (10), It's all very well ... but ... (12), paper exercise (93), pull figures out of the air (109:1). |
Notice that an evaluation may refer to more than one pair of ciriteria - eg. an acid test is both
Reliable and Practical. While I have classified dodgy as Unreliable, it could doubtless also in
some contexts also mean Difficult, and pari passu tricky might in other contexts take on the
evaluation Unreliable.
It is not possible to demonstrate a clear binary choice with other evaluations that play an
important role in the data.. For example, the positive evaluation Of central importance (at
the end of the day (12), boil down to (19, 155), by and large (20), crunch of the matter (29),
nitty-gritty (46), the long and the short of it (82), skeleton (123:1)) is - perhaps surprisingly - not matched in the data
by any corresponding negative evaluations with the meaning Of peripheral importance,
with the possible exceptions of paraphernalia (94), and, at a pinch, ferret through (38) (ie the
action necesary to find derivations and other possibly peripheral information). Note that flesh
(123:2) is clearly in metaphorical contrast with skeleton (123:1) , but equally clearly is
positive.
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5. Management of Teaching and Learning
- Most of the lectures were interactive in the broad sense that students were were
expected to (and often did) interrupt with questions and comments, and many of them
were interactive in the narrower sense that the lecturer would check the students' understanding (14) and put questions, ask for ideas etc. Thus we find the lecturer prompting responses to his/her questions (63, 135), the prompts including comments on the students' failure to respond (14) or to choose between alternative courses of action (64), or making an ironic suggestion of an absurd response (87).
- The lecturer refers retrospectively to the teaching that has taken place (58, 79, 150:1),
the previous introduction of a particular topic or term (28, 61), or his/her preparation for
the lecture (116, 136), summarises the previous argument (145), or indicates that a topic
has been completed (81, 115, 157).
- The lecturer refers prospectively to a new topic to come (22, 48, 73, 117, 101 - the last depending on the metaphor `toy = topic'), sometimes apologetically (90), or to a later
reintroduction of the current topic (97, 150:2) or to the purpose of course requirements
such as tests and examinations (131).
- The lecturer makes a reference that is both retrospective and prospective - for example
to introduce a recapitualation or summary of what has gone before (16, 19, 45, 55, 82,
113, 155) or to remind students of a previous prospective comment (45).
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6. Definition of Roles of Teacher and Student
This important function overlaps with the management-centred language discussed above,
and the subject-centred langiuage examined below:
- Role of teacher
- The teacher should not be expected to give authoritative answers to all
questions (78:1, 122), and in what (s)he does say may well be talking nonsense (43).
His/her role is to provide a an outline (20, 29), it being for the students to provide detail/exemplification (78:1, 123), and to show how theory can be applied in practice
(141). (S)he will provide help as needed (25:1), but may be unmoved by appeals for
sympathy by students over the amount of work they have to do (129).
- Role of student
- Students should think for themselves and reach their own conclusions
(32:2, 96). It is important that they do not get behind with the course (44): they may get
discouraged, but will understand eventually (68), and will - given a few dodges - be able to carry out procedures (11).
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7. Definition of Subject Area
As comments on the role of the teacher emphasise that (s)he is not to be taken as an
infallible source of knowlkedge or of answers to practical problems, so also the subject as
enshrined in standard tests (18), procedures (32:1) and textbooks (3, 156) is not infallible, nor
are good ideas always new ideas (153, 154). Theory needs the support of evidence and
practice (2, 67, 93, 109, 130), general principles have to be considered in the light of detailed
practical considerations (45, 46, 156), solutions may be only approximate (106), and
procedures should never be applied too rigidly (32:1, 35:1, 60, 143). Although some
procedures may (despite what the student thinks) be easy (99, 152) or can be made easier
(119), others are in practice complex (94) or difficult to carry out (5, 6, 21, 27).
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Conclusion
I hope it will be be clear from the above analysis that the colloquial language used by lecturers in science and engineering is not an embarrassing 'aberration' from the 'correct' language as used in written texts, but that it has an important function in explaining scientific and engineering processes, in evaluation, and in talking about and defining the business of teaching and learning. Indeed, it would be possible to go further and suggest that it may have the 'hidden' purpose of introducing students to the sort of language that they will need in their professional careers - as a highway engineer, say, communicating with other highway engineers on site, or as the director of a gene bank talking to colleagues at a international conference.
Such considerations suggest that 'technical-colloquial' should be given more attention than it has been hitherto in teaching English for the purpose of following academic courses in Great Britain and other countries where English is the first language.
Reference
T.F. Johns and A. Dudley-Evans, 'An Experiment in Team-teaching of Overseas Students Postgraduate Students of Transportation and Plant Biology' ELT Documents 106: Team Teaching in ESP, The British Council, ETIC, London, 1980. Reprinted in J. Swales (ed.) Episodes in ESP Pergamon Press, London, 1985.
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Last updated 7th February 1996 |