Reading / Research

Do you ‘Hansardize’ or ‘Gove’? Unheard Words & applying them to uni life

The BBC has reported on Ammon Shea, the man who spent a year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover.  That’s all 20 volumes of the OED and he really went from A to Z.

The article mentions a good number of interesting words as it documents Shea’s feat.  What caught my eye especially was Shea’s list of 10 favourite words after his mammoth read.

Here is how I would put his favourite words in context of university life:

Cachinnator – one who laughs too much or too loudly
Most of us after a night in town with loads of mates and too many drinks.

Dyspathy – the opposite of sympathy
“You left the essay until the last minute, did terribly, but wasn’t allowed an extension.  Well, boo hoo you!”

Gove – to stare stupidly
Those annoying lads who stand at the side of the dancefloor, ogling the girls.  Seriously, it’s more fun if you actually interact!

Hansardize – to change one’s opinion
Frequently occurs mid-essay, rudely interrupting your flow.

Happify – to make happy
Just turning up guarantees me a pass!?  Yay!

Natiform – buttock-shaped
The tired seats in the lecture halls.

Pejorist – one who thinks the world is getting worse
The work is piling up, my girlfriend isn’t speaking to me any more (just because of a stupid drunken kiss, nothing worse…I can’t even remember her name), I can’t find the right references for my coursework, all the recommended books are already taken out by other students, I don’t have enough money to go out, my best jeans have a strange stain that won’t come out in the wash, and my housemate has found the ability to turn the sound of his music up to ’11’ when I haven’t had enough sleep.  I blame everyone except myself.

Philodox – one who is in love with his own opinion
The lecturer who won’t stop talking, who keeps plugging their own books, who regards their own theories as ‘facts’, and who doesn’t have time to actually help you get the grade.

Secretary – one who is privy to a secret
The friendly student who likes to listen and who seems to be up at all hours of the day.  You need someone to talk to at 3am, no problem.  Door’s always open!  …but how far do you trust them?

Tripudiate – to dance, skip or leap for joy
A First!?  That paper got me a First!?  Woo woo woo woo woo!  Ceeeeeeeeeeeeeelebrate good times, c’mon! Yeeeee haaaaa!!  […and so on.]

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What ‘university’ definitions would you give for any of these words?  And how would you put a university context to remord (to recall with a touch of regret), fubsy (short and stout) and assy (behaving like an ass)?

Go further than reading

It doesn’t matter how much you read and how many inspirational quotes you consume.  If you don’t analyse what you’re reading and you fail to critically engage with the texts, you won’t reap the rewards.

Photo by Chaparral [Kendra]

Put your feet up…and ENGAGE with the text… Photo by Chaparral (Kendra)

Reading the study advice on this site and elsewhere may help you gain an insight into effective ways of working, but it doesn’t fit into place just because you’ve read about it.  Again, it requires action on your part to succeed.

Picture the following situation:

You were given an assignment a month ago and you thought there was more than enough time to write it up.  Now there’s just a day to go before it’s due in and you’ve done almost nothing toward it.  You’ve read the books and been to the lectures, sure, but you’ve still got to get the essay written.

So you work the whole day and most of the night on this assignment.  Your head hurts, you dose up on caffeine and you just want it all to end.

Finally it does.  You finish the essay and get it handed in.  Not a bad job, considering.

Yeah…considering.  But you know, deep down, you could have done a lot better here.

Do you recognise yourself in that situation?

This behaviour is dangerous.  You probably know that.

But it still happens.

(more…)

A (lack of) future for books?

2008 looks like it might be the year for seriously debating the future of books.

With your degree subjects, you’ll still be used to buying textbooks, using the library for quotes, all sorts of things to do with physical books.

But when was the last time you read a book from cover to cover?  When did you last read a book for pleasure?  Are you a keen devourer of novels?  Has the state of publishing changed now that so much free information is available on the web?

When you take a blog like this one, where the advice offered is (hopefully) helpful and free of charge, there’s less chance that you’d feel as much need to seek out similar information in books.

When you multiply that situation many times – and I’m sure many of you read several academic productivity blogs – there’s even less need to consult the printed tomes available.

Then there’s the web in general, with zillions of words to read.  Magazines and newspapers are also competing for our time.  As are non-physical e-books.  Of course, you’ve got other forms of entertainment that don’t even require much reading.  There’s so much more around us that takes us away from the desire of reading a good book.

This is a real shame.  Books are important.  Both fact and fiction books have their place, but they’re slowly being shut out.

To be fair, even I read fewer books than I used to.  But considering how many books I enjoyed in the past, even reducing that number by half would keep me within the realms of a bookworm!

It’s not to say that new technologies don’t have a place.  And it’s not to say that the concept of ‘books’ shouldn’t be evolving.  We’ve seen the concept of ‘music’ evolving to the point where the market is still in a confused daze.

But for me it all boils down to one thing…you can’t smell the freshness of a new blog post.  But I’m sure you can tell the quality of a book from how good it smells…

E-Book Readers – The Future or a Damp Squib?

There’s been a lot of hype about Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle.

Amazon Kindle

There are already many sites talking about the device (and that’s just a random selection), so I’ll let you read up on it elsewhere if you don’t know about it already.  But I was wondering just how practical something like this would be for the student population in the UK.

For many years, I was excited by the possibilities of having a device the size of a book that held many electronic books.  Certain devices suggested the future was just around the corner, but nothing gained momentum.  If I wasn’t particularly bothered by what was happening, I can’t imagine how bored the uninterested people were!

Recently, a number of news stories have been whipping up as much frenzy as they could about e-book devices and electronic ink.  The frenzy didn’t whip up much to be honest, but it was obvious that both gadget and book lovers alike were keeping their eyes open for something that stopped them in their tracks.  Maybe the future was arriving, albeit slowly.

And finally, succeeding in creating more column inches than all the previous e-book offerings put together (he said totally unscientifically and with no proof whatsoever…), the Amazon Kindle comes along to save the world and stop the relentless destruction of trees for entertainment purposes.

At this point, I realised something surprising.

I still wasn’t excited.

Not one ounce of me craved one of these devices.  It just didn’t seem right any more.

I considered why I’d had such a sudden change of heart.  Yet deep down, I had to be honest with myself and say that I never had been that excited about the prospect of an e-book reader.  It was something I thought I should be interested in.

Don’t get me wrong.  My ambivalence wasn’t due to the love of hard copy.  I didn’t crave the smell of paper from a new book purchase.  It had nothing to do with books in that way.

It was more to do with the ease of reading anything I want from a computer anyway.

And I don’t think that’s missing the point.  If I wanted to read electronic text on the train or bus, I’d use a laptop.  And while on holiday, I don’t expect to be reading several hundred books.  If anything, I’ll read one or maybe two.  Not exactly a big deal when you consider packing an e-reader would be about the size of a book anyway.  And holidays for many people are about getting away from technology.  Going a bit old-school!

With an e-reader, would any changes occur to student life?  Well, I can’t imagine this device would help browsing through a textbook or flicking through several tomes to grab some quick ideas.  And so what if you can do a text search within the e-book?  It just doesn’t fit in with study.  Well, not mine anyway.

Maybe I’m being too harsh and not embracing the possibilities.  But the more I think about it now, the more I believe I was misguided in my thoughts a few years back at uni.

I don’t buy many newspapers and magazines any more, because I read them on the web.  That includes subscriptions, so I’m not just scouting for freebies either.  Despite enjoying the reading of electronic material, as opposed to the printed word, I’d still rather do so from a computer screen rather than a small, handheld screen.  And if I want to search some text books, I hope that I have access to them as PDF documents.  It’s not generally the case, but I don’t usually need to search many text books anyway.  It’s never the way I’ve liked to study.

Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps I just study and read differently to some others who would adore the Amazon Kindle.  Or maybe we’re all in the same boat.  How do you feel about e-book readers?

And what would you like to see on a customised e-reader to suit your lifestyle?  Would ANYTHING win you over?

Am I just being a spoilsport, or do you agree with me?