It makes sense for movies shown on airplanes to be appropriate for most if not all ages. That limits the selection, needless to say. On my flight home from France, I chose Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, of which none of the reviews had reported any sexual component or aspect of violence that would warrant cutting, and I wanted a grown-up film that hadn’t been butchered.

But wait — language. At the beginning of the film, there’s the announcement that it has been modified from the original, “edited for content.” Grown-up movies are laced with spoken obscenities, what was once called blasphemy, and insulting terms. Not all of these would earn the film an R rating, but once you start substituting terms in order to get a showing on a long-distance flight, you might as well go the distance, so to speak.

You hear the substitution within the first few minutes of the movie, when Woody Harrelson explodes with “Oh, fudge!” From that line onward, fudge and flip and freak get plenty of play, as do shoot, gosh, and darn. Several things about these substitutions, which ran through the dialogue, struck me. One was that all the substituted lines were in the actors’ voices. So now I know a little secret about the movie industry. Presumably sometime before the film completely wraps up, these actors have to record versions of their lines — and sometimes it seemed as if these changes applied to more than half the spoken dialogue — with words very few adults in their situations would use. I can only imagine the fits of giggles into which Harrelson and his costar, Frances McDormand, were tempted to fall.

Another striking feature of the euphemisms was how inappropriate they came to feel. Not just because the characters in question would not be speaking this way, but also because the terms used as substitutes would never fit that way into the syntax of the sentence. A very few examples:

What the shoot you saying to me?

What the flip!

Do it to the motherlovers!

Give me my fudging gun.

Don’t be a witch.

Freak ‘em.

I’ll go out to dinner with you but I’m not gonna freak you,
Well, I don’t wanna fudge you either.

It’s all quite weird. Which brings me to my third observation: To understand what these people are on about, you sort of have to know the original words that have been dubbed over. When Woody Harrelson, speaking heatedly to his wife during family dinner, says, “Gosh darn motherlovers! Sorry, kids” — no kid innocent of what Harrelson’s character was supposed to be saying could understand what he’s apologizing to his kids for. Saying darn? And when Harrelson’s wife, after an afternoon of lovemaking, says to him, “You’ve got a nice car” and he responds, “I’m glad you like my car” — with no body language cueing, for instance that car is some kind of code for this couple — the innocent listener would be wondering what this has to do with an automobile. Aren’t these people married? Don’t they own their vehicles jointly?

Finally, it’s interesting to note the dubbing that eliminates not just vulgarities but blasphemies; as far as I know, you can exclaim “My God!” not just in the pages of The Chronicle but also in a PG-rated movie — but you won’t find the Lord’s name taken in vain by any of these fudging and flipping characters in Three Billboards. And when one of the local cops is accused of racism, there’s some discussion of how he ain’t allowed to say he’s Negro-torturing anymore; he has to say he’s people-of-color torturing. That he’s torturing seems damnable enough, but a certain bite goes out of the characterization when he uses an outdated term rather than what we call the n-word.

I’m not condemning any of this. While I’d like to see more emphasis on graphic violence in movie ratings, which sometimes seem fixated on obscene language and sexuality, it’s perfectly reasonable to adjust films that children may choose to watch while Mom and Dad sleep off the last day of a whirlwind vacation. Adjusting them in a more realistic way — having a character say, for instance, “I’ll go out to dinner with you, but then I’m going straight home,” isn’t practicable when the character’s lips are already moving to form a different sentence. But the distractions involved in watching and listening to the airplane-movie version of Three Billboards gave me new respect for the power and efficacy of certain expressions in their original form. Sometimes, there just isn’t a substitute for profanity.

Elaine’s Bizarro-world friends: Kevin, Gene, and Feldman

In a recent interview, the rapper Kanye West said being bipolar is his “superpower.”

He is not the only capeless person to recently make such a claim. The following statements were made this month:

• An article in the New Bern (North Carolina) Sun Journal declared, “Losing Things Is My Superpower.”
• A hockey writer suggested that the Vegas Golden Knights coach Gerald Griffin’s “secret superpower” is not holding players accountable for their mistakes.
• A Utah elementary-school principal told students, “Reading is a superpower for your life.”
• The director of a new movie about Fred Rogers said, “I think his superpower was this penetrative emotional honesty that disarmed people.”

The word superpower (sometimes rendered as two words) has two different sorts of meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary defines one of them as “A nation or state with dominant power and influence in world politics; spec. the United States of America and (formerly) the Soviet Union.” Then there’s the comic-book one. The OED again: “A fictional superhuman power, esp. as possessed by a superhero; a fictional ability beyond what is possible based on scientific laws.” Thus Superman’s super strength, Spiderman’s Spidey sense, Batman’s … what’s Batman’s superpower again? I think it has something to do with brooding. Anyway, it’s this sort of power that, more and more frequently, is being metaphorically claimed by the Kanyes of the world.

The trend isn’t surprising, because comic-book heroes dominate the culture — not so much in comic books themselves as in movies based on them. The three highest-grossing films of the year feature superheroes: Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Deadpool 2. A fourth, the animated Incredibles 2, grossed $182 million last weekend, its opener, and will probably end up in at least the No. 3 spot. This glut has added to the active lexicon a new meaning for a particular cosmological word. Most of the movies involve characters from one of the two major comic-book publishers, and so one speaks of them as taking place in the DC or Marvel universe. There are other important cinematic universes as well, notably the Star Wars universe and the Harry Potter universe.

Long before this movie glut, in 1996, Seinfeld based an episode on the concept of Superman’s “Bizarro World,” where everything is parallel yet opposite to the real world. In the episode, Elaine befriended Jerry, George, and Kramer’s Bizarro counterparts — Kevin, Gene, and Feldman.

Today, superpower is hardly the only comic-book term being appropriated by the world at large. Journalists apparently can’t write “Achilles heel” anymore; they have to invoke “kryptonite,” for the one substance that could bring Superman to his knees. Especially if they are sports journalists. From a Google News search:

Comic books have always used a particular phrase for how-the-leopard-got-its-spots-type accounts of how particular superheroes got their superpowers. I’ve been encountering this a fair amount lately in noncomic contexts, including a New York Times dance review (“And some of what he’s saying is important, wisps of an origin story for hip-hop dance”) and a headline in the Toledo Blade (“Addiction origin story? Examine the Purdue [Pharma] connection on opioid abuse”).

There are plenty of other comic-book words and phrases that are ripe for the picking. I would not be at all surprised if we start hearing about regular people’s “arch-enemy,” “secret identity,” or “Fortress of Solitude.”

As for me, I don’t have an arch-enemy or a secret identity. I do, however, have three superpowers: spelling, simple arithmetic, and noticing superficial language trends. What are yours?

Remember favorite numbers? Mine was seven. I liked how it combined the magic numbers three and four; how it was prime; how it looked, especially when my first-grade teacher executed it in Palmer script; how there were five sevens in our family’s seven-digit phone number; and how, when doubled, it became the date of my birthday.

Numbers have always worked, like words, as symbols. Think of the nine muses, the seven deadly sins, the 10 commandments, the Trinity, the four directions. I remember a camp song (not from a religious camp, mind you) that culminates:

I’ll sing you twelve, O
Green grow the rushes, O
What are your twelve, O?
Twelve for the twelve apostles
Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,
Ten for the ten commandments,
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
Eight for the April rainers,
Seven for the seven stars in the sky,
Six for the six proud walkers,
Five for the symbols at your door,
Four for the gospel makers,
Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green, O
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be it so.

Other numbers are not so heavenly. I first became aware of 666 from watching the 1976 movie The Omen, when Gregory Peck discovers it on his adopted child’s scalp and knows he is the Antichrist. The number itself, however, was apparently political in origin and referred to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was considered a vicious devil by the Hebrews who wrote the Book of Revelations.

Then there’s “420-friendly,” a phrase I ran across while helping my college-age son look for apartments on Craigslist. I knew it referred to April 20, which may one day appear on your Google calendar as Pot Smoking Day. (Hey, Groundhog Day, April Fools’ Day, and the Hindu spring festival Holi are already there.) What I learned only recently is that it began as the magic moment after school let out in San Rafael, Calif., where marijuana aficionados would gather in front of a statue of Louis Pasteur, affectionately known as Louie.

I started thinking about these number codes last week, when NPR, purveyor of eclectic news, announced a feature about a license plate recalled by the State of Illinois for bearing the number 1488. Apparently that number or its variants — 14/88, 14/23, 88 — refers to white-supremacist beliefs. The 14 refers to the 14-word white-supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The 88 nods to the eighth letter of the alphabet, hence HH or “Heil Hitler.”

The Anti-Defamation League features a page devoted to numerical hate symbols, which might leave you worried that you could inadvertently signal hate just by choosing a cellphone number. Fewer numbers seem devoted to benign propositions like love or peace. There’s the iconic V sign, which originally signaled victory in World War II, with a nod to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It evolved into a sign for peace in the 1960s and continues as such, though I’m not sure anyone thinks of it as referring to the number 5. (Be sure, by the way, to make this gesture palm outward, especially in certain countries where forming the same V with your palm inward is taken as an insulting gesture.)

Also in the 1960s, we learned from Three Dog Night that

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one

Sheesh. Let’s get some love going in the numbers, folks. I propose starting with seven. Who’s got other magic combinations to recommend?

U. of Barcelona

What was it like studying at a Spanish university?

Soto-González: The matriculation process went smoothly and classes were not as demanding as I expected. The professors are not strict with attendance or class participation. Sadly, the courses were given with a slightly Eurocentric perspective. Aside from the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba, they knew very little, especially on themes relating to art. The difference between my Spanish peers and Latin-American/Asian peers was noticeable with respect to grades, interactions with professors, and overall treatment: Xenophobia can still be a serious institutional problem.

Fernández de Jesús: At the beginning it was challenging. It took time to get used to the teaching style, since it is different from Puerto Rico, and at the same time I was adapting to a new country. After those early difficulties, things got easier, and overall the experience was satisfying.

How did professors and students respond to Puerto Rican Spanish? 

Soto-González: Often I had to explain the political relations between Puerto Rico and the U.S. for people to understand my constant use of Spanglish — and how I could change from one language to another in the same sentence without any problem. My peers loved it, and actually asked for help with their English. On the other hand, professors didn’t like it, and instead asked that every international student take a Catalan-language course (because we were in Catalonia, not Spain) and improve our Castilian.

Fernández de Jesús: Students and professors seemed confused by my accent, since Puerto Rican Spanish is not very common there. Puerto Rican immigrants are rare in Spain, and not many Spaniards have traveled to Puerto Rico. I was asked if I were Canarian, Andalusian, Cuban, or Dominican, and every so often Colombian or Venezuelan. Many people said my accent was funny in a positive way.

Did you experience any confusion because of the variances in Spanish between Spain and Puerto Rico?

Soto-González: I experienced many difficulties adapting to the language, even though it’s my native tongue. Even simple words were sometimes complicated. I expected “¡oye tío!” and lots of swearing but was surprised at the constant use of Catalan in Spanish — catañol. So it was not only a question of regionalisms and different words, there was another language mixed in the matter.

I had peers from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico, and for the first six months almost every conversation involved the “weirdness” of Castilian and the difficulties of the Catalan. But once we adapted, we started learning and using new words in our vocabulary.

Some professors didn’t know how to say some things or communicate a thought in full Castilian Spanish. In written assignments, they had to ask us individually what we meant because they didn’t understand us and we didn’t understand them. That was a fundamental factor in the learning and grading process; some faculty opted for ignoring more than half of the class and did not read their assignments.

There were also variances in Spanglish. It was surprising that Spaniards use many words from English that we don’t use in Puerto Rico. Like “bol” instead of “envase,” referring to a bowl, and “footing” in Spain means “jogging” rather than what it means in English. They also modify the spelling of some English words to make them more pronounceable in Spanish, like “cúter” for “cutter”.

Fernández de Jesús: The variance was confusing at the beginning, yes, but only with a few people, mainly the elderly. It was mostly related to pronunciation. The common struggle I had was that people asked me to repeat and to speak slower because it was hard for them to understand my accent. But I did not interpret this as people trying to correct me; it was just a normal issue when people with different dialects of a language interact.

My Spanish went through some changes, especially in vocabulary. There are many words in Puerto Rican Spanish that have other meanings or are different in Spain’s Spanish. I incorporated some Spanish phrases and words as a substitution for their Puerto Rican equivalents. I still even use some of them. My syntax changed in past and future conjugations: Spaniards tend to use the compound past (present perfect) for recent events and the simple future, in contrast to the simple past (preterit) and the occasional phrasal future tense of Puerto Ricans (estarán llegando instead of the Spanish llegarán). My accent and pronunciation changed slightly.

I had Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Argentinian, Chilean, and Dominican friends and classmates. They suffered fewer changes in their way of speaking Spanish, basically because they had other people of their respective countries to talk to in the area, while I did not.

Did you ever have to change a word or phrase to reduce the influence of English in your Spanish? 

Soto-González: There’s no doubt that Spanglish is a way of life. I came to reason with myself, and became very cautious about my expression depending on with whom I spoke. At the beginning I tried speaking only full-on Spanish; it didn’t work. The occasional “so…” and “anyway…” and “OK …” were constantly present. When I forced it, I couldn’t even translate them to Spanish. But in the end my Spanglish was more useful than anything: All of my peers said they envied it. Even with my faulty Spanglish-to-Spanish translations, my Castilian with these nuances seemed more complex, more eloquent, and sometimes more expressive than that of my Spanish peers and professors.

I realized in Spain that my English was excellent, and that sometimes it was easier to communicate in that language instead of Spanish.

Fernández de Jesús: Yes, this happened often. Otherwise they would not understand what I was meaning. I even learned the Spanish equivalent of some words and phrases which I did not know, since I always used them in Spanglish. On the other hand, I was surprised by the fact that some words that we mostly use in Spanish in Puerto Rico, in Spain they used them in Spanglish, like “stop” instead of “pare” for the traffic sign, “marketing” instead of “mercadeo,” “flipar” (“flip out”) instead of “caerse para atrás” or “entusiasmarse,” among other examples.

It was a great linguistic experience. My vocabulary and perceptiveness developed, and I can also say that now I can speak two varieties of Spanish.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.

Bureaucratic language is everywhere. I don’t object to it, for I rely on bureaucrats to help us understand our laws and regulations. The secret is writing these explanations in language that average readers can understand. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. For instance, if you’d like to get a hunting or fishing license out here in Montana where I live, it’s not easy. I don’t hunt or fish, but I’m amazed at the language hoops that hunters and fishermen (fishers?) have to jump through to get that license.

The first step is to sign what the state calls a “conservation form.” It’s a small slip of paper about the size of a gas-station receipt that you can pick up at some hardware stores. Even though its title might suggest a type of environmental protection, this document really wants to find out whether or not you have a legal residence in this state. You have to sign your name on it before you can move on to the next step of getting the license. Here’s what that conservation form says:

I hereby declare that I have been a LEGAL resident of the state of Montana, as defined by MCA 87-2-102 for at least 180 consecutive days. All statements on this form are true and correct. I understand that if I subscribe to or make any false statement on this form, I am subject to criminal prosecution.

Signature

Since you probably don’t want to be prosecuted as a criminal, the first question you might ask is, “How do I know what a LEGAL resident means?”  OK, the form you just signed refers you to the Montana statute so we can assume you’re supposed to either already know what this statute says (unlikely) or you’re supposed to go look it up (even more unlikely). But you’re in the hardware store, you want to get a license, and it isn’t convenient to go look up the statute. So you sign it anyway and don’t even think about how can you possibly be in any jeopardy of criminal prosecution.

Another problem is that you might think you’re a “legal resident” when you’re actually not. The fact that you have a home in North Dakota in addition to the one you have in Montana puts you smack dab in the midst of legal jeopardy. Statute MCA 87-2-102 contains a number of behavioral residence requirements that you didn’t know about, such as the need to have your vehicle licensed in Montana and have a voting record there and in no other state.

If by chance you happen to have been reading Black’s Law Dictionary lately, you may know that it takes a very dim view of the word, “residence,” especially in statutes that intend to mean “domicile.” Under the heading, “residence,” Black’s says:

Personal presence at some place of abode with no present intention of definite and early removal, with purpose to remain for an undetermined period, not infrequently, but not necessarily combined with design to stay permanently … residence is something more than mere physical presence and something less than domicile … the terms ‘resident’ and ‘residence’ have no precise legal meaning … a person may have only one legal domicile at one time, but he may have more than one residence.

Brian Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (1995) cites law cases that say “domicile” and “residence” are often confused as synonyms. He says this alleged synonymy is dead wrong:

More specifically, “domicile” means the place with which a person has a settled connection for certain legal purposes, either because his home is there, or because that place is assigned to him by the law.

And for “residence,” Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers this definition:

residence: the act of dwelling in a place for some time; living or regularly staying at or in some place for the discharge of a duty or the enjoyment of a benefit; the place where one actually lives as distinguished from one’s domicile or place of temporary sojourn

So it’s beginning to look like the term on that little conservation form ought to be “domicile,” not “residence.” Are you in jeopardy of criminal prosecution because this form uses the term “legal resident” instead of “domicile?” If you find time to look up the Montana statute, you’ll find that it uses “residence,” not “domicile,” so this simple little form may not be alone in misunderstanding the legal term. Even statutes can be badly written.

Again reflecting the state statute, that little form asks you to claim that you “have been a legal resident of the state of Montana for at least 180 consecutive days.” You now can wonder when those 180 consecutive days are supposed to have started and ended. You also can wonder if it’s OK to have taken short business trips and vacations during that 180-day period, violating the requirement of “consecutive.”  So what does “consecutive” mean? For example, suppose you’ve lived in Montana for at least 180 consecutive days (assuming this is somehow defined) during several different years, including this one, and you’ve also lived in your other home in North Dakota for at least 180 consecutive days during some of those years. Does this form refer to this year only? If so, why didn’t it say so?

And what about the fact that by signing this form you’ve agreed that “all statements on this form are true and correct”? You have to wonder how you’re supposed to know whether all the statements made by the unknown bureaucrat who wrote this form are true and correct. Again you’d have to look up the statute to discover whether the conservation form reflects it accurately. You wonder if this is your responsibility. If you’re supposed to take it on faith that the statements made by the writer of this form are accurate and true, we’ve already seen that it includes a questionable legal definition of “residence” and a pretty vague statement about “180 consecutive days.”

It’s about that time of the academic year when eager young Ph.D.s and A.B.D.s spend more than they can afford to attend the annual meetings of their disciplines with the goal of landing a job for the coming year.

Advice to them about how to be interviewed isn’t hard to find, but there isn’t as much information to help faculty members conduct these interviews. They do it anyway, however, some better than others. Their purpose is to find out what the candidates know and whether they look like a good fit for their department. In my experience, the best interviews are rather informal and the worst are more like catechisms.

I will never forget one at my own university in which the interviewee was seated in the center of a circle, surrounded by professors bombarding her with disconnected and often irrelevant questions.  After the applicant was excused from the room, I was furious with my fellow faculty members for how badly they had treated this excellent candidate. In spite of their rude interview tactics, they agreed with me that she was a good fit for the job and exactly the person we needed. They shamefacedly agreed with my criticisms of the way they treated her, and we hired her; she soon became one of the leaders in our field. That job interview easily qualified as the worst one I have ever experienced.

My memory of that disastrous event remained with me as I spent the second half of my academic career working in the area of language and law, in which detectives interview suspects. Here the reverse is true about training manuals. Interviewing guidelines abound for law-enforcement officers but, as far as I know, there are no available instruction manuals for suspects who find themselves at the mercy of unfair techniques that are even worse than that interview endured by my department’s job applicant.

A detective’s proper purpose is to find out what happened during what is called an “information interview,” and, if possible, to elicit the suspect’s confession. After I retired, I reviewed some of the many cases I’d worked on and looked for the best and the worst interviews. There is considerable competition for my worst-police-interview award, but the 1979 interview of a Florida homeless man named Jerry Townsend is the easy winner.

Since the local police were unable to solve the murders of a number of prostitutes, they trolled the streets for suspects and hit gold when they interviewed a mentally retarded man who admitted every accusation they made. Over five consecutive days the police partially tape-recorded interviews, sometimes at the police station, but mostly as the two detectives drove Townsend around to visit the sites of the murders, during which they frequently turned their tape-recorder off and on. During the many times the tape recorder was stopped, the detectives failed to follow the accepted protocol of noting that the recorder had been turned off and then back on again. Whether or not any electronic signatures of these on/off occasions were discoverable, one could easily notice this by sharp breaks in syntax, sudden topic changes, and by the unusual variations of the background noises.

For example, a rumbling noise from a nearby train was audible when Townsend started his sentence “No, I — ” followed by a clicking noise.  But when the tape went back on, the rest of his sentence had no relationship to the question he was trying to answer. At another time Townsend said that one of the prostitutes was a black girl driving a white car but after an audible on/off click, he then said she was a white girl driving a black car. Sometimes when the detectives accused Townsend of the murders, an off/on click followed and his response was not recorded.

Many such unidentified breaks led to the obvious conclusion that the detectives were tailoring Townsend’s responses to fit their theory that he was guilty of the murders. This manipulation of the tape recorder made it surprisingly easy to get Townsend to appear to have admitted to the first murder, which encouraged them to ask him about the several other unsolved cases remaining on their books. Then, as they drove Townsend around to the places where the bodies were found, Townsend was consistently wrong about the details. Each time he erred, we could hear breaks in the tape, after which he then corrected his wrong information to make it fit what the detectives apparently wanted to hear.

Before trial, Miami’s court-appointed psychologist gave Townsend a battery of tests and concluded that he had “a low level of mental functioning and/or brain damage.” He diagnosed Townsend’s drawing of a human figure as at that of a 3- or 4-year-old and his reading ability as second-grade level, adding “within a range of mental retardation.” A second court-appointed psychologist came to essentially the same conclusions.

Undaunted by these psychologists’ evaluations, the prosecutor then hired his own psychologist who claimed that the suspect operated at the level of a 19-year-old. This psychologist was not licensed and could not be used as an expert witness at trial, but the judge still allowed him to testify about his assessment. Since he didn’t qualify as an expert, the defense was prohibited from cross-examining him.

Linguistic analysis also could have made important contributions by demonstrating how the detectives used coercive interview strategies and manipulated the tape-recorder to create the odd question/answer sequences. But judges have the right to exclude any expert witnesses offered by the defense, including linguists. Townsend’s defense lawyers did the best they could with the information I gave them, but Townsend was convicted and served 22 years in prison before DNA evidence was discovered to prove that another man had committed the murders. The many interviewing contradictions, coerciveness, and recording flaws in this case produced one of the worst police interviews I ever experienced.

Fortunately, we can expect this season of academic job interviews to be not nearly as bad as the two worst-case scenarios of the job applicant surrounded by faculty members who peppered her with irrelevant questions and the coercive police interview of the suspect Jerry Townsend.

For very different reasons, both sets of interviewers were looking for a perfect fit. The police sought only the perfect fit of someone to admit the crime and were willing to do anything to find it. They were superficially friendly, knowing that this would lead to cooperation, and they tricked Thompson in order to satisfy their need to get a confession.

The faculty interviewers almost missed that good fit by the inept way they went about trying to find it. The formal setting inhibited natural conversation and was more a catechism than an interview. They spent far too much time grilling the candidate about whether she knew as much as they did rather than trying to discover how what she knew would fit and even supplement the department’s needs. They were aggressive rather than friendly, providing a poor vision of any future cooperation with them. They must have confused this interview with a Ph.D. oral exam.

As both of these interview examples illustrate, we can certainly do better.

Roger Shuy is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University, where he created and led its doctoral program in sociolinguistics.

A topic sometimes discussed in the faculty lounge is the dreaded Ph.D. oral exam. As a faculty member who has chaired and otherwise participated in many of these events, I’m tempted to think that I’ve seen them all. I don’t recall ever being taught about how to chair one, and I’m sure that I was never instructed in how to take one effectively.

As far as I know, there is no standard practice about how to conduct or take an oral exam for the Ph.D. Variations appear to be wide. I was told of one very informal one that took place in a coffee shop. At the opposite extreme, I was a member of one in which 10 examiners caused it to continue for six hours with no breaks. My own oral exam took place 60 years ago and lasted four hours, accompanied by the comings and goings of various faculty members, some from whom I’d never even taken courses. Three of the 10 questioners were from other departments that seemed to be not very related to my field of study. I survived it, but I’ll certainly never forget it.

My experience with fellow faculty members has been that some try to replicate their experiences during their own orals. Some prefer to test students’ memories of details. Others pose problems that require students to think on their feet. Still others request students to evaluate the importance, strength, or weakness of the course information the students purportedly had acquired. And some ask how the examinees plan to use their accumulated knowledge and skills in the future.

Many students develop such a deep dread of this event that they put it off for as long as possible, which tends to increase their anxiety, create the possibility of memory loss, and ignore any new developments in the field that took place during their delay.

The saddest oral exams are ones in which the committee has no real choice but to fail students because of their poor performances. It’s not hard for faculty members to accept at least some of the blame because they should have noted such weaknesses while those failed students were still taking their courses. Maybe they didn’t give their students sufficient opportunities to perform orally in the classroom. They may wonder whether they made it clear that successful students, besides absorbing the content of the field, also have to be able to engage in intelligent discussions about it.

Policies about failing the oral exam vary among departments and universities. Some professors insist that the orals are the capstone of Ph.D. studies and if students fail, it’s all over for them.  My inclination is to give the failed students a second chance now that they’ve tasted what the committee wants of them. Sometimes I’m right and the student does very well the second time, while those who fail it again at least can know that the faculty members have bent over backward to let them redeem themselves.

It’s appropriate for a committee to worry about students who fail their orals, but the worst cases are those who are so terrorized that they go blank and can’t manage to utter anything useful. The exam committee may believe that these students had learned enough to represent their competence, even though it didn’t help to give them subtle hints about how to answer. This tense occasion simply traumatized them.

I’ve experienced a few such cases, and I can’t say that things worked out well for most whose minds went blank. One examinee told me afterward that he didn’t really want to get a Ph.D. because it would stigmatize him with his peers. He simply wanted to go back to his former high-school teaching job. That was his privilege, and it may have been wise in his case. After another student retook her oral exam and repeated her emotional inability to demonstrate what she knew, she decided to give up the idea of getting a Ph.D. That too was her privilege, and it also may have been wise. A third examinee declined our offer to let her retake her orals but then sent a series of hate-filled letters to her committee members, telling us how we had ruined her life. That was hard to for us to take.

As traumatic as the Ph.D. oral exam may be, many survive it and go on to have good careers. But others may recall it as one of the most difficult experiences in their lives. I know that my own exam certainly was. I sailed through most of it until during the third hour my mind went blank on one question. As I left the room while the committee deliberated my fate, I sat in the hallway, expecting them to fail me. Fortunately, my committee passed me, telling me that I couldn’t be expected to endure the dreaded oral exam without at least one slip-up. We all shook hands, and I guess they were right because I went on to have a pretty good academic career. Maybe that’s how the dreaded oral exam ought to work.
Roger Shuy is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University, where he created and led its doctoral program in sociolinguistics.

Lloyd’s in the early 19th century (above). The insurance business has been around longer than the word “coverage.”

Curricular conversations nationwide lament, cheer, and debate the decline of something once called, without irony, “coverage.”

More than a decade ago, a senior art historian confided to me that “coverage is dead.” Art history required new ways of thinking about what gets taught and how.

Many of us, though, may still think in terms of some sort of coverage.

We will cover the history of trade wars since 1918. We will cover the development of the concept of modernity. We will cover the many ways people have created families.

These ideas of coverage, bound to a belief in some sort of completeness, turn on chronology, if not history.

This coverage is a metaphor. It feels spatial.

And so we debate whether ideas and events can be coherently structured to “cover” the subject, as if teaching were something like facing a dingy room with a paintbrush and a can of fresh paint.

But there is another kind of coverage that has become a signal characteristic of  modern life: the desire to be shielded from misfortune and accident by providing financial or in-kind compensation.

In the marketplace of ideas, we grapple with the idea of coverage.

In the marketplace of the marketplace, almost every mechanical or electronic purchase comes with an insurance plan of some kind, offering something called protection.

It is, or so the manufacturer hopes, an offer you can’t refuse.

The Oxford English Dictionary assures us that the earlier sense of coverage is about protection, not completeness. Although the insurance business has been around for centuries (think Lloyd’s of London), the term “coverage” doesn’t emerge until 1912.

Here’s the OED’s earliest example: “There will be nineteen policyholders disillusionized and disgusted with the limited coverage contract.”

Note to language historians: “Coverage” enters the English language already as a form of disappointment. (Also, I love the term “disillusionized.”)

The other, spatial sense of coverage arrives by 1930, when the term is used to identify the range of radio transmissions. The following year, the term appears in reference to journalistic coverage of an event.

Satisfying completeness, comforting risk-protection: Our sense of coverage seems to invoke two complementary ideas, and each feels a bit like a dream.

In some ways, the classroom is a space where both dreams meet: the dream of completeness and the desire to be kept safe, perhaps from ignorance, perhaps from uncomfortable or dangerous ideas, perhaps from one’s own weaknesses.

I’ll couple coverage with safety and placed them on the same rug so that I can pull it out from under both.

Coverage isn’t bad or dead, but it feels increasingly like the wrong term  for what we do, and for what we promise. No class covers everything. All by itself, no class can guarantee anything, either.

Teaching is so complicated, so high-wire, so very much about inventing the moment while orchestrating the exchange of  knowledge that those of us who do it know instinctively that every class is different, every class a risk.

If I’m right, the idea of coverage is overdue for a dismantling. Not that the teacher doesn’t want to explore questions and energize students, but the dream of completeness is just that, and if coverage lures us into thinking that that’s what we’re doing, then we need another term for what we do.

And so the beginning of an imagined course description: “In this class, we will risk thinking together about some questions that have formed and are changing the world in which you live, right now, today.”

The risk of thinking, the sometimes scary openness of questions. No assurances.

Yes, a few students may be, like those 1912 policyholders, “disillusionized and disgusted with the limited coverage.”

It isn’t easy not to pretend to completeness, but isn’t completeness — or coverage — a fantasy anyway?

The Thinker, a pencil-tip sculpture by Jasenko Dordevic

Two years ago, the Technical University of Munich’s language center hosted a conference about university-level writing in a second language. Things didn’t start out well when our keynote speaker, Leslie Sage, an editor at Nature, appeared to undermine some of our work as language instructors. Asked how much scientists should worry about the quality of the English in their journal submissions, he responded, “We really don’t care.” Cue nervous laughter from the audience.

Of course it was more complicated than that. Sage’s caveat was that Nature editors don’t care about the writing “if the science is clear.” And what makes science clear in a journal submission other than the writing? Still, at Nature at least, the staff put a lot of time into fixing mangled and opaque language — upward of 100 hours for one paper, according to Sage.

You probably won’t find editors quite as generous elsewhere. But an even more compelling reason for caring about writing emerged later in the conference. In a panel discussion with working scientists, we heard how early in the scientific process writing plays a role. “The best way to develop good ideas is to sit down, start to write them down, see how they link together,” said Jonathan Finley, a TUM professor of physics. Writing “helps you dump your thoughts, arrange them, see what links to what, see what the context is. … The research is not just done in the lab, it’s absolutely done on paper and during the writing process as well.”

Klaus Diepold, a computer and electrical engineer who leads the university’s department of data processing, agreed. When you get to the end of a research project, he said, there’s a lot of “blood, sweat, and tears” left over from the work itself, and if you only start writing then, that’s what your reader will get — confusing, boring, or possibly irrelevant blood, sweat, and tears. If you had started writing earlier, when the ideas were first forming, you would have on paper some of the stuff that makes science sparkle: the ideas.

This may seem a jump, but Finley and Diepold articulated the reason (or rather, one of several reasons) I was so sad to learn this month that this blog is coming to an end, the victim of a resources and strategy review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Its last day is December 21. You’ll be hearing more about this over the next two weeks, as the longer-serving regular bloggers say farewell. In the meantime, I wanted to speak more as a reader than the occasional writer.

For the seven and a half years it has run, Lingua Franca has been a blog about “language and writing in academe,” but you could argue that our topics sometimes strayed. What’s so Ivory Tower about presidential speaking styles, language peeves, or retroflex consonants?

The question focuses too much, I think, on the Leslie Sage/Nature end of the scientific process. What Lingua Franca has offered me as a reader is a look over the shoulders of academics as they do what Jonathan Finley described — put ideas on paper, arrange them, see what they connect to, explore the context. The posts are not, of course, raw first drafts or jotted-down notes, but they’re also not peer-reviewed publications. The blog has thus been a unique space connecting as broad as possible an audience with scholars ready and willing to share the way they think (and the way they think about language, to boot, which for me is thinking about thinking).

This comes at a time when the way scholars think is often overlooked by a shrinking pool of news outlets, ignored by clashing politicians, or feared by students. The blog Lingua Franca has been a small and entertaining spark of a solution to a wide range of problems facing academics, their institutions, and our society. I hope its spirit, at least, will thrive elsewhere.

In March 2017, Kory Stamper’s book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, was published to great and justified acclaim.

The book, a delightful inside look at the lessons she learned as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, was a best book for both Publishers Weekly and Amazon. It was an Adult Crossover Nonfiction Plus choice for the Junior Library Guild, though with the “potentially sensitive areas” of “strong language, mild sexual themes.”

Asked how a book about dictionaries could have “mild sexual themes,” Stamper wrote  via email: “The book just has strong language and no ‘mild sexual themes.’ Though there is that entire chapter on ‘bitch.’” Lexicographers, she explains, can’t shy away from words that some might find offensive.

Yesterday, in a phone interview (she had called me to ask about Word of the Year), I learned that Word by Word lacked a chapter — and one of the best at that. Her editor removed it from the book, she said, not because it was deficient but because it was so good. He marked a big X on the first page of the chapter and told her, “This is the first chapter of your next book.”

And what will that next book be?

It’s about words for colors, Stamper said, and the people who devised them. In the first part of the 20th century, stimulated by the war efforts of both world wars, scientists tried to determine precise and reliable standards for measuring and describing the colors of the spectrum. The wide-ranging book will deal with the lexicographical challenges of using words to describe colors. “For instance,” Stamper explains, “what’s the actual difference between scarlet, vermilion, cherry, and cerise if the best you can do in a one-line definition is ‘a moderate red’?” The book doesn’t have a publication date yet, but 2020 seems likely.

She left Merriam-Webster in March 2018 to concentrate on her writing and her new position as executive director of the Dictionary Society of North America. And she does have another book waiting patiently after this one — a novel that she has been working on for some 18 years. “It’s about family and identity,” she said.

I’m indebted to Kory because her book inspired me to try to match her brilliance and playfulness in my favorite review, written for Lingua Franca back in June 2017.

That’s one thing I’ll miss about our blog, the opportunity to seek out the stars of our profession. I’ll also miss the variety of language topics this blog has inspired me to cover these seven-plus years, like the loss of thou; Teflon and Velcro writers; selfie, a word for a whole generation; Edward Ruloff, the 19th century murderer-linguist; an error in the Latin inscribed on an arch at the University of California at Berkeley; David Barnhart’s Trumptionary; and zhouzh. What a trip!