A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY189 start with D start with D
Since the 1980s and the “social turn” in composition studies and other disciplines, scholars in this field have conceived writing in college as explicitly embedded in socio-rhetorical situations beyond the classroom. From this conviction develops a commitment to teach writing with an emphasis on analyzing the social and political dimensions of rhetoric.
Ironically, though a leftist himself, Tony Scott’s analysis finds the academic left complicit with the forces in American culture that tend, in his view, to compromise education. By focusing on the structures of labor and of institutions that enforce those structures, Scott finds teachers and administrators are too easily swept along with the inertia of a hyper-commodified society in which students---especially working class students---are often positioned as commodities, themselves. Dangerous Writing, then, is a critique of the field as much as it is a critique of capitalism. Ultimately, Scott’s eye is on the institution and its structures, and it is these that he finds most in need of transformation.
Dark Days in the Newsroom traces how journalists became radicalized during the Depression era, only to become targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and like-minded anti-Communist crusaders during the 1950s. Edward Alwood, a former news correspondent describes this remarkable story of conflict, principle, and personal sacrifice with noticeable élan. He shows how McCarthy's minions pried inside newsrooms thought to be sacrosanct under the First Amendment, and details how journalists mounted a heroic defense of freedom of the press while others secretly enlisted in the government's anti-communist crusade.
Relying on previously undisclosed documents from FBI files, along with personal interviews, Alwood provides a richly informed commentary on one of the most significant moments in the history of American journalism. Arguing that the experiences of the McCarthy years profoundly influenced the practice of journalism, he shows how many of the issues faced by journalists in the 1950s prefigure today's conflicts over the right of journalists to protect their sources.
Everett sketches a blank-slate picture of human cognition that focuses not on what is in the mind but, rather, what the mind is in—namely, culture. He draws on years of field research among the Amazonian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just how differently various cultures can make us think and how vital culture is to our cognitive flexibility. Outlining the ways culture and individual psychology operate symbiotically, he posits a Buddhist-like conception of the cultural self as a set of experiences united by various apperceptions, episodic memories, ranked values, knowledge structures, and social roles—and not, in any shape or form, biological instinct.
The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.
“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South examines topics the newspaper covered during its inaugural year. Kathleen Condray illuminates the newspaper’s crusade against Prohibition, its advocacy for the protection of German schools and the German language, and its promotion of immigration. We also learn about aspects of daily living, including food preparation and preservation, religion, recreation, the role of women in the family and society, health and wellness, and practical housekeeping. And we see how the paper assisted German speakers in navigating civic life outside their immigrant community, including the racial tensions of the post-Reconstruction South.
“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South offers a fresh perspective on the German speakers who settled in a modernizing Arkansas. Mining a valuable newspaper archive, Condray sheds light on how these immigrants navigated their new identity as southern Americans.
In five parts, Data Culture in Academic Libraries: A Practical Guide to Building Communities, Partnerships, and Collaborations can help you foster an institutional culture that favors the curation, creation, and wider use of datasets.
- Data at all Levels
- Data Services and Instruction
- Data Outreach
- Data Communities
- Data Partnerships
The Data Literacy Cookbook includes a variety of approaches to and lesson plans for teaching data literacy, from simple activities to self-paced learning modules to for-credit and discipline-specific courses. Sixty-five recipes are organized into nine sections based on learning outcomes:
- Interpreting Polls and Surveys
- Finding and Evaluating Data
- Data Manipulation and Transformation
- Data Visualization
- Data Management and Sharing
- Geospatial Data
- Data in the Disciplines
- Data Literacy Outreach and Engagement
- Data Literacy Programs and Curricula
We live in a data-driven world, much of it processed and served up by increasingly complex algorithms, and evaluating its quality requires its own skillset. As a component of information literacy, it's crucial that students learn how to think critically about statistics, data, and related visualizations. Here, Bauder and her fellow contributors show how librarians are helping students to access, interpret, critically assess, manage, handle, and ethically use data. Offering readers a roadmap for effectively teaching data literacy at the undergraduate level, this volume explores such topics as
- the potential for large-scale library/faculty partnerships to incorporate data literacy instruction across the undergraduate curriculum;
- how the principles of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education can help to situate data literacy within a broader information literacy context;
- a report on the expectations of classroom faculty concerning their students’ data literacy skills;
- various ways that librarians can partner with faculty;
- case studies of two initiatives spearheaded by Purdue University Libraries and University of Houston Libraries that support faculty as they integrate more work with data into their courses;
- Barnard College’s Empirical Reasoning Center, which provides workshops and walk-in consultations to more than a thousand students annually;
- how a one-shot session using the PolicyMap data mapping tool can be used to teach students from many different disciplines;
- diving into quantitative data to determine the truth or falsity of potential “fake news” claims; and
- a for-credit, librarian-taught course on information dissemination and the ethical use of information.
Data manipulation and analysis are far easier than you might imagine—in fact, using tools that come standard with your desktop computer, you can learn how to extract, manipulate, and analyze data (and metadata) of any size and complexity. In this handbook, data wizard Banerjee will familiarize you with easily digestible but powerful concepts that will enable you to feel confident working with data. With his expert guidance, you’ll learn how to
- use a single-word command to sort files of any size by any criteria, identify duplicates, and perform numerous other common library tasks;
- understand data formats, delimited text and CSV files, XML, JSON, scripting, and other key components of data;
- undertake more sophisticated tasks such as comparing files, converting data from one format to another, reformatting values, combining data from multiple files, and communicating with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces);
- save time and stress through simple techniques for transforming text, recognizing symbols that perform important tasks, a Regular Expression cheat sheet, a glossary, and other tools.
Library technologists and those involved in maintaining and analyzing data and metadata will find Banerjee’s resource essential.
This handbook begins with the theoretical background of DOP and introduces the algorithms used in DOP as well as in other probabilistic grammar models. After surveying extensions to the basic DOP model, the volume concludes with close study of the applications that use DOP as a backbone: speech understanding, machine translation, and language learning.
The Seventh Volume in the Deaf Lives Series
Elizabeth Thompson’s hearing loss was detected when she was in elementary school, and her hearing continued to deteriorate until she became completely deaf. Like many other hard of hearing and late-deafened individuals, her hearing loss complicated the general challenges of life. She struggled through school, worked as a secretary, married, had a daughter, and then found herself living as a single mother. She remarried, and soon after learned that she had contracted Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Despite these hurdles, Thompson always expressed her determination to enjoy the best life had to offer. Her astonishing exuberance might have gone unnoticed if she hadn’t accepted a new position as a reporter/columnist in 1998 for the Suburban News Publications (SNP). Day by Day: The Chronicles of a Hard of Hearing Reporter presents a marvelous blend of her experiences and best SNP columns that illustrate how she crafted her remarkable outlook.
In her columns, Thompson presented how she handled her hearing loss as a personal guide for readers. She used every stratagem available to function full-throttle – hearing aids, FM systems, lights for alarms, TTYs, even training her dog Snert. She also gently counseled readers on how to treat deaf and hard of hearing people with practical consideration and respect. Her pursuit of a fully realized life enabled her to do what she loved most, to meet and write about inspiring persons, many of whom are profiled in her memoir. Thompson eventually underwent cochlear implantation that restored 95% of her hearing, an exalting moment for her. Yet, Day by Day celebrates the entire arc of her life, a wonderful testament to her joyous resilience.
To help us understand these attacks, Atwood presents a framework for categorizing them, built on John Nerone’s studies on assaults on American media workers. Atwood categorizes attacks against journalists as attacks against individuals, ideas, and media institutions, and undertaken to suppress reporting on certain topics and in the context of wars and other international or conflicts. Crucially, Deadline utilizes this framework to offer possible solutions to the issue of violence against journalists.
Atwood was inspired to explore the pressing issue of violence against American journalists after the tragic death of one of her colleagues at the Baltimore Sun, Rob Hiaasen, in the Capital Gazette shooting in 2018. Throughout, she demonstrates that distrust of the media and violence against the press in the United States are hardly new developments. Her work examines how intimidation, violence, and censorship have, in fact, been used against the American press since both its and the nation’s founding.
Epistemology is the study of how “knowledge” is formed. Standard epistemology isolates the “known” from the “knowers,” thereby defining “knowledge” as objectively constant. Multiple epistemologies suggest that individuals learn in different ways shaped by life factors such as education, family, ethnicity, history, and regional beliefs. In this groundbreaking volume, editors Peter V. Paul and Donald F. Moores call on ten other noted scholars and researchers to join them in examining the many ways that deaf people see and acquire deaf knowledge.
This collection considers three major groups of deaf knowledge perspectives: sociological and anthropological, historical/psychological and literary, and educational and philosophical. The first explores the adoption of a naturalized, critical epistemological stance in evaluating research; the epistemology of a positive deaf identity; how personal epistemologies can help form deaf education policies; and valuing deaf indigenous knowledge in research. The next part considers dueling epistemologies in educating deaf learners; reforms in deaf education; the role of deaf children of hearing parents in creating Deaf epistemologies; and the benefit of reading literature with deaf characters for all students. The final part explores the application of the Qualitative-Similarity Hypothesis to deaf students’ acquisition of knowledge; a metaparadigm for literacy instruction in bilingual-bicultural education; collaborative knowledge-building to access academia; and examination of the benefits and disadvantages of being deaf.
The fifth volume in the Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies series features works written from 1764 up to1840. Pierre Desloges offers a stirring paean to sign language in an excerpt from his book, the first ever published by a deaf person. Saboureux de Fontenay and Jean Massieu, two prominent leaders, relate their respective experiences in autobiographical accounts. In separate essays, Charles-Michel de l’Epée and Roch-Ambroise Sicard describe systems for teaching manual French, followed by a critique of these methods by Roch-Ambroise Bébian, a well-known hearing friend of Deaf people during that era. Ferdinand Berthier, a renowned Deaf teacher and writer in the 19th century, concludes with a history of Deaf people up to that time.
The Deaf Experience shows clearly how this extraordinary era of French deaf education influenced the adoption of the manual method by the first schools for deaf students in America, in sharp contrast to the oral movement that repressed sign-language-centered education for nearly a century afterward. Deaf studies scholars and students alike will welcome the return of this invaluable resource.
Deaf Eyes on Interpreting brings Deaf people to the forefront of the discussions about what constitutes quality interpreting services. The contributors are all Deaf professionals who use interpreters on a regular basis, and their insights and recommendations are based on research as well as on personal experiences. These multiple perspectives reveal strategies to maximize access to interpreted work and hearing environments and to facilitate trust and understanding between interpreters and Deaf consumers. Interpreter educators, interpreting students, professional interpreters, and Deaf individuals will all benefit from the approaches offered in this collection.
In his first memoir, Madan Vasishta described being a deaf boy in his homeland India, where “deaf” meant someone who is not human. After rising from herding cattle to being a respected photographer in Delhi, his first memoir concluded with his acceptance at Gallaudet College far away in America. Vasishta’s new memoir begins with his arrival in Washington, DC in 1967 with $40.00 in his pocket and very little knowledge of the new worlds he was entering.
Vasishta faced myriad challenges from the outset— he knew no American Sign Language and could not speech read, yet he found himself thrust into classes at Gallaudet two weeks into the semester. Cultural differences mystified him, such as how all American car accidents were someone else’s fault even when one’s car hits a stationary object. He was amazed that his fellow students did not deride him for his mistakes, unlike in India where he would have been scorned for his weakness. After five years, he returned home to India for a visit and was stunned to learn that he no longer fit in, that “even if you do not have an American Dream, the American Dream will have you.”
Deaf in DC follows Vasishta through half a century living in America. He witnessed the transformation from facing bias as a deaf, foreign man of color who could not get a job despite having a Ph.D., to receiving five offers as a school superintendent in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and Deaf President Now. His new memoir reflects a genuine worldview informed by the sage perceptions of a person who has lived widely in many worlds.
Vasishta’s story reflects the India of his youth, an emerging nation where most people struggled with numbing poverty and depended upon close family ties, tradition, and faith to see them through. His family’s search for a cure took him to a host of medical specialists and just as many sadhus and mahatmas, holy men and priests. The school in his small village was ill-prepared to educate deaf students then, so he herded the family cattle, usually the work of hired servants. Vasishta refused to accept this as his final lot in life and fantasized constantly about better jobs. Eventually, he moved to Delhi where his dream of becoming a photographer came true. He also discovered the Delhi Deaf community that, with his family, helped him to achieve an even higher goal, traveling to America to earn a degree at Gallaudet College.
Vasishta, a natural raconteur, imbues Deaf in Delhi with the ever-present ebullience that served him so well in his journey. Readers will savor his good humor and honest observations and look forward to his next book with great relish.
Along with volume coeditors Robert Adam, Christopher Stone, and Steven D. Collins, contributors include Markus Aro, Karen Bontempo, Juan Carlos Druetta, Senan Dunne, Eileen Forestal, Della Goswell, Juli af Klintberg, Patricia Levitzke-Gray, Jemina Napier, Brenda Nicodemus, Debra Russell, Stephanie Sforza, Marty Taylor, and Linda Warby. The scope of their research spans the world, including many unique facets of interpreting by deaf people in Argentina, Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States, establishing this work as the standard in this burgeoning discipline.
The text is augmented by direct links to clips in nine ethnographic films, analysis of selected film excerpts and screenshots, and compelling data visualizations. QR codes throughout the book link to the film clips to create this dual narrative experience. Deaf Mobility Studies is an expansive odyssey through the complexities and opportunities inherent in deaf international mobility.
Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration © 2024 by Gallaudet University is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Deaf Space in Adamorobe reveals one example of the considerable variation in shared signing communities regarding rates of sign language proficiency and use, deaf people’s marriage rates, deaf people’s participation in village economies and politics, and the role of deaf education. Kusters describes spaces produced by both deaf and hearing people as a cohesive community where living together is an integral fact of their sociocultural environments. At the same time, Kusters identifies tension points between deaf and hearing perspectives and also between outside perspectives and discourses that originated within the community. Because of these differences and the relatively high number of deaf people in the community, Kusters concludes it is natural that they form deaf spaces within the shared space of the village community.
This is the second volume in the Early Papers in Deaf Studies series, which consists of reissued works originally published by the Gallaudet University College for Continuing Education but long out of print. The aim of this series is to restore these foundational papers to the scholarly community. Deaf Studies for Educators is available in both print and open digital formats, ensuring broad access to this important contribution to the literature.
In Dear World, Kylie Cardell is sensitive to how changes to our notions of privacy and the personal—spurred by the central presence the Internet has come to occupy in our daily lives—impact how and why diaries are written, and for whom. She considers what these new uses of the diary tell us about the cultural politics of self-representation in a time of mass attention to (and anxiety about) the personal. Cardell sees the twenty-first-century diary as a vibrant and popular cultural practice as much as a literary form, one that plays a key role in mass-mediated notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truth. Dear World provides much-needed new attention to the innovation, evolution, and persistence of a familiar yet complex autobiographical mode.
Thousands of debaters at all levels have relied on this practical guide for reference and instruction in argumentation and communication since it was first published in 1961. Now in a third, fully revised edition featuring restructured chapters, updated examples, and the addition of parliamentary debate as a form, The Debater’s Guide continues to be the leading handbook for helping both novice and advanced students develop the skills necessary to successfully apply the basic principles of debate.
Cutting through theory with clear explanations and specific applications, this compact volume with a broad scope offers students and teachers no-frills assistance in resolving the major problem faced by debaters: the need to present arguments forcefully and cogently while reacting effectively to criticism. Readers are advised on matters from budgeting time in a debate to speaking in outline form through a well-organized series of explanations, specific examples, and graphic presentations related to both policy and value issues.
Beginning with a clear explication of basic principles, The Debater’s Guide presents chronologically the steps of building a debate case, reviews the strategy of planning for refutation and defense, and offers sound advice on presenting the case in oral discourse. Expanded contents pages and effective use of subheadings allow for quick reference to any particular aspect of debate, making it an excellent classroom text as well as a valuable, hands-on tool during actual debates. A glossary of key terms used in debate complements the volume.
With straightforward explanations and specific applications geared toward contemporary debate practice, this compact volume offers students and teachers clear-cut assistance in resolving the key problem faced by debaters: the need to present arguments forcefully and cogently while reacting effectively to criticism. Beginning with a candid explanation of the basic principles of debate, The Debater's Guide then introduces the steps to building a case, from reviewing strategies for refutation and defense to engaging in cross-examination, solid research, and critical thinking. It advises readers on a wide range of important topics, from budgeting time in a debate to speaking in outline form by using a well-organized series of explanations, specific examples, and graphic presentations related to both policy and value issues. The authors apply these concepts to a variety of formats and situations commonly found in high school and collegiate debating.
Avoiding jargon and complex theory discussions, The Debater's Guide offers sound advice on presenting an effective case in oral discourse, helps students build their understanding of how and why debate functions, and provides a solid foundation for success in any format. The expanded contents pages and new subheadings allow for quick reference to any particular aspect of debate, making this new edition an excellent choice for classroom use as well as a valuable hands-on tool during debates.
Based on painstaking research in government archives, collections of private and court papers and documents won by the author in a landmark Freedom of Information Tribunal against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the book illuminates a shadow world of bribery and elite enrichment.
Deception in High Places charts British government involvement in arms trade corruption and presents the fullest history yet of bribery in Britain’s arms deals with Saudi Arabia. It includes the backstory of the controversial termination of a Serious Fraud Office corruption investigation following pressure by the Saudi Royal Family and the British establishment.
Tanita Saenkhum follows eleven multilingual students who made their decisions about placement into first-year composition courses during one academic year at a large public university. She identifies the need for the process of making placement decisions to be understood more clearly, describes how to use that knowledge to improve placement practices for these students—particularly in advising—and offers hands-on recommendations for writing programs.
Decisions, Agency, and Advising is a significant contribution to the field and particularly valuable to writing program administrators, academic advisors, writing teachers, researchers investigating second language writing and writing program administration, composition and second language writing scholars, and graduate students.
Mock trial—Roman style.
Roman secondary education aimed principally at training future lawyers and politicians. Under the late Republic and the Empire, the main instrument was an import from Greece: declamation, the making of practice speeches on imaginary subjects. There were two types of such speeches: controversiae on law-court themes, suasoriae on deliberative topics. On both types a prime source of our knowledge is the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Spaniard from Cordoba, father of the distinguished philosopher. Towards the end of his long life (?55 BC–?AD 40) he collected together ten books devoted to controversiae (some only preserved in excerpt) and at least one (surviving) of suasoriae. These books contained his memories of the famous rhetorical teachers and practitioners of his day: their lines of argument, their methods of approach, their idiosyncrasies, and above all their epigrams. The extracts from the declaimers, though scrappy, throw invaluable light on the influences that colored the styles of most pagan (and many Christian) writers of the Empire. Unity is provided by Seneca’s own contribution, the lively prefaces, engaging anecdotes about speakers, writers, and politicians, and brisk criticism of declamatory excess.
Mock trial—Roman style.
Roman secondary education aimed principally at training future lawyers and politicians. Under the late Republic and the Empire, the main instrument was an import from Greece: declamation, the making of practice speeches on imaginary subjects. There were two types of such speeches: controversiae on law-court themes, suasoriae on deliberative topics. On both types a prime source of our knowledge is the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Spaniard from Cordoba, father of the distinguished philosopher. Towards the end of his long life (?55 BC–?AD 40) he collected together ten books devoted to controversiae (some only preserved in excerpt) and at least one (surviving) of suasoriae. These books contained his memories of the famous rhetorical teachers and practitioners of his day: their lines of argument, their methods of approach, their idiosyncrasies, and above all their epigrams. The extracts from the declaimers, though scrappy, throw invaluable light on the influences that colored the styles of most pagan (and many Christian) writers of the Empire. Unity is provided by Seneca’s own contribution, the lively prefaces, engaging anecdotes about speakers, writers, and politicians, and brisk criticism of declamatory excess.
As a political constituency, white conservative evangelicals are generally portrayed as easy to dupe, disposed to vote against their own interests, and prone to intolerance and knee-jerk reactions. In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin challenges this assumption and moves beyond these overused stereotypes to develop a refined explanation for this constituency’s voting behavior.
This volume offers a fresh perspective on the study of religion and politics and stems from the author’s personal interest in the ways her experiences with believers differ from how scholars often frame this group’s rationale and behaviors. To address this disparity, Martin examines sermons, drawing on her expertise in rhetoric and communication studies with the benefits of ethnographic research in an innovative hybrid approach she terms a “digital rhetorical ethnography.” Martin’s thorough research surveys more than 150 online sermons from America’s largest evangelical megachurches in 37 different states. Through listening closely to the words of the pastors who lead these conservative congregations, Martin describes a gentler discourse less obsessed with issues like abortion or marriage equality than stereotypes of evangelicals might suggest. Instead, the politicaleconomic sermons and stories from pastors encourage true believers
to remember the exceptional nature of the nation’s founding while also deemphasizing how much American citizenship really means.
Martin grapples with and pays serious, scholarly attention to a seeming contradiction: while the large majority of white conservative evangelicals voted in 2016 for Donald J. Trump, Martin shows that many of their pastors were deeply concerned about the candidate, the divisive nature of the campaign, and the potential effect of the race on their congregants’ devotion to democratic process itself. In-depth chapters provide a fuller analysis of our current political climate, recapping previous scholarship on the history of this growing divide and establishing the groundwork to set up the dissonance between the political commitments of evangelicals and their faith that the rhetorical ethnography addresses.
Linguists have typically posited phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels, each with its own distinct vocabulary and organizing principles, but in Deconstructing Morphology Rochelle Lieber persuasively challenges the existence of a morphological level of language. Her argument, that rules and vocabulary claimed to belong to the morphological level in fact belong to the levels of syntax and phonology, follows the work of Sproat, Toman, and others. Her study, however, is the first to draw jointly on Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory of syntax and on recent research in phonology.
Ranging broadly over data from many languages—including Tagalog, English, French, and Dutch—Deconstructing Morphology addresses key questions in current morphological and phonological research and provides an innovative view of the overall architecture of grammar.
"Deeds Done in Words is a thoughtful survey of how a democracy uses language to transact its business. Based on an enlivened understanding of genre theory and on numerous pieces of original criticism, Campbell and Jamieson vividly show how central public discourse has become the lifeblood of the American polity."—Roderick Hart, author of The Sound of Leadership
"The rhetoric that issues from the White House is becoming an ever more salient part of what the presidency means and does. This acute inquiry provides a great many insights into the forms, meanings, and functions of presidential discourse. It is an enlightening contribution to our understanding of American politics."—Murray Edelman, author of Constructing the Political Spectacle
Chapter by chapter, Deep Rhetoric develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, Crosswhite restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, Crosswhite returns them to their common moorings and shows us an invigorating new way forward.
Contributors of varying status in different types of programs across many kinds of institutions describe various forms of bullying, including microaggressions, incivility, mobbing, and emotional abuse. They define bullying as institutional racism, “academic systemic incivility,” a crisis of insularity, and faculty fundamentalism. They locate bullying in institutional contexts, including research institutions, small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and writing programs and writing centers. These locations are used as points of departure to further theorize bullying and to provide clear advice about agentive responses.
A culture of silence discourages discussions of this behavior, making it difficult to address abuse. This silence also normalizes patterns and cultivates the perception that bullying arises naturally. Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace helps the field to name these patterns of behaviors as bullying and resist ideologies of normalcy, encouraging and empowering readers to take an active role in defining, locating, and addressing bullying in their own workplaces.
Contributors: Sarah Allen, Andrea Dardello, Harry Denny, Dawn Fels, Bre Garrett, W. Gary Griswold, Amy C. Heckathorn, Aurora Matzke, Staci Perryman-Clark, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Erec Smith
In Defining Reality, Edward Schiappa argues that definitional disputes should be treated less as philosophical questions of “is”and more as sociopolitical questions of “ought.” Instead of asking “What is X?” he advocates that definitions be considered as proposals for shared knowledge and institutional norms, as in “What should count as X in context Y, given our needs and interests?”
Covering a broad scope of argument in rhetorical theory, as well as in legal, medical, scientific, and environmental debates, Schiappa shows the act of defining to be a specialized and learned behavior, and therefore one that can be studied and improved. In response to theories that deem discourse to be persuasive, the author asserts that all discourse is definitive discourse that contributes to our construction of a shared reality.
Defining Reality sheds light on our methods of creating common truths through language and argumentation and forces us to reconsider the contexts, limitations, and adaptability of our definitions. Hinging on a synthesis of arguments regarding the significance of definitional practices, the book is bolstered by a series of case studies of debates about rape, euthanasia, abortion, and political and environmental issues. These case studies ground Schiappa’s concepts in reality and delineate the power of public discourse within legal contexts. Ranging widely among disciplines from philosophy and classical philology to constitutional law and cognitive psychology, this study substantially contributes to the scholarship of rhetoric and argumentation, particularly as they function in the realm of public discourse.
White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations.
In Del OtroLado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border, author Susan V. Meyers draws on her year-long ethnographic study in Mexico and the United States to analyze the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students on both sides of the border.
Meyers begins by taking readers through the historical development of the rural Mexican town of Villachuato. Through a series of case studies spanning the decades between the Mexican Revolution and the modern-day village, Meyers explores the ever-widening gulf between the priorities of students and the ideals of the public education system. As more and more of Villachuato’s families migrate in an effort to find work in the wake of shifting transnational economic policies like NAFTA, the town’s public school teachers find themselves frustrated by spiraling drop-out rates. Meyers discovers that students often consider the current curriculum irrelevant and reject the established value systems of Mexico’s public schools. Meyers debunks the longstanding myth that literacy is tied to economic development, arguing that a “literacy contract” model, in which students participate in public education in exchange for access to increased earning potential, better illustrates the situation in rural Mexico.
Meyers next explores literacy on the other side of the border, traveling to Marshalltown, Iowa, where many former citizens of Villachuato have come to reside because of the availability of jobs for unskilled workers at the huge Swift meat-packing plant there. Here she discovers that Mexican-origin families in the United States often consider education a desirable end in itself rather than a means to an end. She argues that migration has a catalyzing effect on literacy, particularly as Mexican migrant families tend to view education as a desirable form of prestige.
Meyers reveals the history and policies that have shaped the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students, and she raises important questions about not only the obligation of the United States to educate migrant students, but also those students’ educational struggles and ways in which these difficulties can be overcome. This transnational study is essential reading for scholars, students, educators and lawmakers interested in shaping the future of educational policy.
In Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes, Patricia Roberts-Miller argues that much current discourse about argument pedagogy is hampered by fundamental unspoken disagreements over what democratic public discourse should look like. The book’s pivotal question is, In what kind of public discourse do we want our students to engage? To answer this, the text provides a taxonomy, discussion, and evaluation of political theories that underpin democratic discourse, highlighting the relationship between various models of the public sphere and rhetorical theory.
Deliberate Conflict cogently advocates reintegrating instruction in argumentation with the composition curriculum. By linking effective argumentation in the public sphere with the ability to effect social change, Roberts-Miller pushes compositionists beyond a simplistic Aristotelian conception of how argumentation works and offers a means by which to prepare students for active participation in public discourse.
Candice Rai’s Democracy’s Lot is an incisive exploration of the limitations and possibilities of democratic discourse for resolving conflicts in urban communities. Rai roots her study of democratic politics and publics in a range of urban case studies focused on public art, community policing, and urban development. These studies examine the issues that erupted within an ethnically and economically diverse Chicago neighborhood over conflicting visions for a vacant lot called Wilson Yard. Tracing how residents with disparate agendas organized factions and deployed language, symbols, and other rhetorical devices in the struggle over Wilson Yard’s redevelopment and other contested public spaces, Rai demonstrates that rhetoric is not solely a tool of elite communicators, but rather a framework for understanding the agile communication strategies that are improvised in the rough-and-tumble work of democratic life.
Wilson Yard, a lot eight blocks north of Wrigley Field in Chicago’s gentrifying Uptown neighborhood, is a diverse enclave of residents enlivened by recent immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. The neighborhood’s North Broadway Street witnesses a daily multilingual hubbub of people from a wide spectrum of income levels, religions, sexual identifications, and interest groups. When a fire left the lot vacant, this divided community projected on Wilson Yard disparate and conflicting aspirations, the resolution of which not only determined the fate of this particular urban space, but also revealed the lot of democracy itself as a process of complex problem-solving. Rai’s detailed study of one block in an iconic American city brings into vivid focus the remarkable challenges that beset democratic urban populations anywhere on the globe—and how rhetoric supplies a framework to understand and resolve those challenges.
Based on exhaustive field work, Rai uses rhetorical ethnography to study competing publics, citizenship, and rhetoric in action, exploring “rhetorical invention,” the discovery or development by individuals of the resources or methods of engaging with and persuading others. She builds a case for democratic processes and behaviors based not on reflexive idealism but rather on the hard work and practice of democracy, which must address apathy, passion, conflict, and ambivalence.
The volume includes biographical and historical background on Demosthenes and his political situation; a structural analysis of On the Crown; and an abstract of Aeschines’ speech Against Ctesiphon to which Demosthenes was responding. Four essays by contributors analyze Demosthenes’ speech using key elements of rhetoric defined by Aristotle: ēthos, the speaker’s character or authority; pathos, or emotional appeals; logos, or logical appeals; and lexis, a speaker’s style. An introduction and an epilogue by Murphy frame the speech and the rhetorical analysis of it.
By bringing together contextual material about Demosthenes and his speech with a translation and astute rhetorical analyses, Demosthenes’“On the Crown”:Rhetorical Perspectives highlights the oratorical artistry of Demosthenes and provides scholars and students with fresh insights into a landmark speech.
The design of information literacy instruction and the building of it are two distinct skillsets and processes; yet all too often everything gets mashed together, creating needless confusion and stress. In this book Turnbow, an instructional designer, and Roth, an instructional technologist, suggest a better way to organize the work. They shed light on the people, processes, and resources required to create a sustainable portfolio of online instruction. With the goal of fostering conversations in your library about the most streamlined and effective ways to get the work done, they provide guidance on such topics as
- design and development processes, complete with “I.D. in Action” examples and sample design documents;
- thumbnail descriptions of ADDIE, SAM, and design thinking methods;
- creating learning objects;
- types of software tools and how to evaluate them;
- crafting the best documentation of your work for efficient maintenance and reuse;
- adapting assessment to your learning outcomes and purpose;
- when to design for performance support, an underutilized method in libraries; and
- starting points for those interested in developing instructional design and development skills.
Demystifying the instructional design and development process used to create online learning objects, this book will help you understand how instructional design principles and approaches can benefit your learners.
A careful analysis of the rhetorical thought of René Descartes and of a distinguished group of post-Cartesians. Covering a unique range of authors, including Bernard Lamy and Nicolas Malebranche, Carr attacks the idea, which has become commonplace in contemporary criticism, that the Cartesian system is incompatible with rhetoric.
Carr analyzes the writings of Balzac, the Port-Royalists Arnauld and Nicole, Malebranche, and Lamy, exploring the evolution of Descartes’ thought into their different theories of rhetoric. He constructs his arguments, probing each author’s writings on rhetoric, persuasion, and attention, to demonstrate the basis for rhetorical thought present in Descartes’ theory of persuasion when it is combined with his psychophysiology of attention.
Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today.
Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.
Design is central to the appeal, messaging, and usefulness of books, but to most readers, it’s mysterious or even invisible. Through interiors as well as covers, designers provide structure and information that shape the meaning and experience of books. In The Design of Books, Debbie Berne shines a light on the conventions and processes of her profession, revealing both the aesthetic and market-driven decisions designers consider to make books readable and beautiful. In clear, unstuffy language, Berne reveals how books are put together, with discussions of production considerations, typography and fonts, page layouts, use of images and color, special issues for ebooks, and the very face of each book: the cover.
The Design of Books speaks to readers and directly to books’ creators—authors, editors, and other publishing professionals—helping them to become more informed partners in the design of their projects. Berne lays out the practical steps at each stage of the design process, providing insight into who does what when and offering advice for authors on how to be effective advocates for their ideas while also letting go and trusting their manuscripts with teams of professionals. She includes guidance as well for self-publishing authors, including where to find a designer, what to expect from that relationship, and how to art direct your own book.
Throughout, Berne teaches how understanding the whats, hows, and whys of book design heightens our appreciation of these cherished objects and helps everyone involved in the process to create more functional, desirable, and wonderful books.
Through grounded case studies of multilingual technical communication projects in the US, Mexico, and Nepal, Laura Gonzales illustrates the multiple tensions at play in transnational research and demonstrates how technical communicators can leverage contemporary translation practices and methodologies to engage in research with multilingual communities that is justice-driven, participatory, and reciprocal.
Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication is of value to researchers and students across fields who are interested in designing projects alongside multilingual communities from historically marginalized backgrounds.
Every culture throughout history has obsessed over various “end of the world” scenarios. The dawn of the Atomic Age marked a new twist in this tale. For the first time, our species became aware of its capacity to deliberately destroy itself. Since that time the Bomb has served as an organizing metaphor, a symbol of human annihilation, a stand-in for the unspeakable void of extinction, and a discursive construct that challenges the limits of communication itself. The parallel fascination with and abhorrence of nuclear weapons has metastasized into a host of other end-of-the-world scenarios, from global pandemics and climate change to zombie uprisings and asteroid collisions.
Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age explores these world-ending fantasies through the lens of psychoanalysis to reveal their implications for both contemporary apocalyptic culture and the operations of language itself. What accounts for the enduring power of the Bomb as a symbol? What does the prospect of annihilation suggest about language and its limits? Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, this study expands on the theories of Kenneth Burke, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and many others from a variety of disciplines to arrive at some answers to these questions.
Calum L. Matheson undertakes a series of case studies—including the Trinity test site, nuclear war games, urban shelter schemes, and contemporary survivalism—and argues that contending with the anxieties (individual, social, cultural, and political) born of the Atomic Age depends on rhetorical conceptions of the “real,” an order of experience that cannot be easily negotiated in language. Using aspects of media studies, rhetorical theory, and psychoanalysis, the author deftly engages the topics of Atomic Age survival, extinction, religion, and fantasy, along with their enduring cultural legacies, to develop an account of the Bomb as a signifier and to explore why some Americans have become fascinated with fantasies of nuclear warfare and narratives of postapocalyptic rebirth.
- a history of archives, including the roles of historical societies and local history collections in libraries;
- new sections on community archives, diversity, and inclusion;
- conducting a survey and starting an archival program;
- selection, appraisal, acquisition, accessioning, and deaccessioning;
- important points of copyright, privacy, and ethics;
- arrangement of archival collections, with a discussion of new theories;
- description, including DACS, EAD, and tools such as ArchivesSpace;
- access, reference, and outreach, with a look at how recent innovations in finding aids can help researchers;
- preservation, including guidance on how to handle rare books, maps, architectural records, and artifacts;
- digital records, addressing new and popular methods of storage and preservation of email, social media, image files, webpages, Word documents, spreadsheets, databases, and media files;
- disaster planning, security, and theft prevention;
- metrics, assessment, establishing employee procedures and policies, working with interns and volunteers, and other managerial duties;
- public relations and marketing, from social media and the Web to advocacy; and
- professional guidelines and codes, such as the newly developed SAA Statement of Core Values of Archivists.
This book applies a systematic communication theory to the 30-plus years of development experience in India.
Never before has development been treated from a communication perspective. This perspective demonstrates that the role of communication in development is not limited to the technology of satellites or to the economics of mass media; it is a way of thinking about the interaction among all agents involved.
The empirical data describe patterns of social realities, actions, and communication networks among planners, contact agents, and the masses in two Indian communities. The result is an analytical review of development theories and practice in India.
This study is practical as well as theoretical. The authors show how the theory of the “coordinated management of meaning” applies to large-scale social interactions. They also offer specific recommendations for Indian development planners.
Editing is a tricky business. It requires analytical flair and creative panache, the patience of a saint and the vision of a writer. Transforming a manuscript into a book that edifies, inspires, and sells? That’s the job of the developmental editor, whose desk is the first stop for many manuscripts on the road to bookdom—a route ably mapped out in the pages of Developmental Editing.
Author Scott Norton has worked with a diverse range of authors, editors, and publishers, and his handbook provides an approach to developmental editing that is logical, collaborative, humorous, and realistic. He starts with the core tasks of shaping the proposal, finding the hook, and building the narrative or argument, and then turns to the hard work of executing the plan and establishing a style.
Developmental Editing includes detailed case studies featuring a variety of nonfiction books—election-year polemic, popular science, memoir, travel guide—and authors ranging from first-timer to veteran, journalist to scholar. Handy sidebars offer advice on how to become a developmental editor, create effective illustration programs, and adapt sophisticated fiction techniques (such as point of view, suspense, plotting, character, and setting) to nonfiction writing.
Norton’s book also provides freelance copyeditors with a way to earn higher fees while introducing more creativity into their work lives. It gives acquisitions, marketing, and production staff a vocabulary for diagnosing a manuscript’s flaws and techniques for transforming it into a bestseller. And perhaps most importantly, Developmental Editing equips authors with the concrete tools they need to reach their audiences.
Developmental editing—transforming a manuscript into a book that edifies, inspires, and sells—is a special skill, and Scott Norton is one of the best at it. With more than three decades of experience in the field, Norton offers his expert advice on how to approach the task of diagnosing and fixing structural problems with book manuscripts in consultation with authors and publishers. He illustrates these principles through a series of detailed case studies featuring before-and-after tables of contents, samples of edited text, and other materials to make an otherwise invisible process tangible.
This revised edition for the first time includes exercises that allow readers to edit sample materials and compare their work with that of an experienced professional as well as a new chapter on the unique challenges of editing fiction. In addition, it features expanded coverage of freelance business arrangements, self-published authors, e-books, content marketing, and more.
Whether you are an aspiring or experienced developmental editor or an author who works alongside one, you will benefit from Norton’s accessible, collaborative, and realistic approach and guidance. This handbook offers the concrete and essential tools it takes to help books to find their voice and their audience.
A contemporary of Mark Twain, Bierce brought his biting humor to bear on spoof definitions of everyday words, writing deliberate mistranslations of the vocabulary of the establishment, the church, and the politics of his day, and shining a sardonic light on hypocrisy and deception. These columns formed the beginnings of a dictionary, first published in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book, which stopped at the letter L, and five years later as a full A–Z text known as The Devil's Dictionary. More than one hundred years later, Bierce’s redefinitions still give us pause for thought: interpreting reporter, for example, as “a writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words”; un-american as “wicked, intolerable, heathenish”; and politics as “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” This timely new edition of Bierce’s irreverent and provocative dictionary is the perfect gift for misanthropes and word lovers alike.
Applies linguistics methods for a richer understanding of literary texts and spoken language.
Dialect and Dichotomy outlines the history of dialect writing in English and its influence on linguistic variation. It also surveys American dialect writing and its relationship to literary, linguistic, political, and cultural trends, with emphasis on African American voices in literature.
Furthermore, this book introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis of literature. Next, it proposes theoretical principles and specific methods that can be implemented in order to analyze literary dialect for either linguistic or literary purposes, or both. Finally, the proposed methods are applied in four original analyses of African American speech as represented in major works of fiction of the American South—Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Dialect and Dichotomy is designed to be accessible to audiences with a variety of linguistic and literary backgrounds. It is an ideal research resource and course text for students and scholars interested in areas including American, African American, and southern literature and culture; linguistic applications to literature; language in the African American community; ethnicity and representation; literary dialect analysis and/or computational linguistics; dialect writing as genre; and American English.
examination of issues that affect design education, research,
and inquiry into their effects on the practice of design. Michigan
Publishing, the hub of scholarly publishing at the University of Michigan,
publishes Dialectic on behalf of the AIGA (American Institute of
Graphic Arts) Design Educators Community (DEC).
examination of issues that affect design education, research,
and inquiry into their effects on the practice of design. Michigan
Publishing, the hub of scholarly publishing at the University of Michigan,
publishes Dialectic on behalf of the AIGA (American Institute of
Graphic Arts) Design Educators Community (DEC).
In Dialectical Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey argues that the historical conflict between rhetoric and dialectic can be overcome in ways useful to both composition theory and the composition classroom.
Historically, dialectic has taken two forms in relation to rhetoric. First, it has been the logical development of linear propositions leading to necessary conclusions, a one-dimensional form that was the counterpart of rhetorics in which philosophical, metaphysical, and scientific truths were conveyed with as little cognitive interference from language as possible. Second, dialectic has been the topical development of opposed arguments on controversial issues and the judgment of their relative strengths and weaknesses, usually in political and legal contexts, a two-dimensional form that was the counterpart of rhetorics in which verbal battles over competing probabilities in public institutions revealed distinct winners and losers.
The discipline of writing studies is on the brink of developing a new relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, one in which dialectics and rhetorics mediate and negotiate different arguments and orientations that are engaged in any rhetorical situation. This new relationship consists of a three-dimensional hybrid art called “dialectical rhetoric,” whose method is based on five topoi: deconstruction, dialogue, identification, critique, and juxtaposition. Three-dimensional dialectical rhetorics function effectively in a wide variety of discursive contexts, including digital environments, since they can invoke contrasts in stagnant contexts and promote associations in chaotic contexts. Dialectical Rhetoric focuses more attention on three-dimensional rhetorics from the rhetoric and composition community.
In this landmark volume of contemporary communication theory, Ronald C. Arnett applies the metaphor of dialogic confession—which enables historical moments to be addressed from a confessed standpoint and through a communicative lens—to the works of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed to an era of postmodern difference with his notion of "a world come of age." Arnett’s interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and scholarship in contention with Nazi dominance offer implications for a dialogic confession that engages the complexity of postmodern narrative contention.
Rooted in classical theory, the field of communication ethics is abstract and arguably outmoded. In Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, Arnett locates cross-cultural and comparative anchors that not only bring legitimacy and relevance to the field but also develop a conceptual framework that will advance and inspire future scholarship.
This book articulates an ethics for reading that places primary responsibility for the social influences of a text on the response of its readers.
We write and read as participants in a process through which we negotiate with others whom we must live or work with and with whom we share values, beliefs, and actions. Clark draws on current literary theory, rhetoric, philosophy, communication theory, and composition studies as he builds on this argument.
Because reading and writing are public actions that address and direct matters of shared belief, values, and action, reading and writing should be taught as public discourse. We should teach not writing or reading so much as the larger practice of public discourse—a discourse that sustains the many important communities of which students are and will be active members.
Dip into the Dictionary of American Regional English and enter the rich, endlessly entertaining, ever-changing world of American speech. Learn what a Minnesota grandma is making when she fixes lefse, what a counterman in a Buffalo deli means by kimmelweck or a Hawaiian baker puts into a malassada. Find out what kids on the streets of New York are doing when they play Johnny-on-the-pony or off-the-point, what Southerners do when they use their tom walkers, what the folks in Oklahoma and Texas celebrate on Juneteenth and those in some parts of Wisconsin at a kermis.
Like its enormously popular predecessors, this volume captures the language of our lives, from east to west, north to south, urban to rural, childhood to old age. Here are the terms that distinguish us, one from the other, and knit us together in one vast, colorful tapestry of imperfect, perfectly enchanting speech. More than five hundred maps show where you might be if you looked in a garden and saw moccasin flowers, indian cigars, or lady peas; if you encountered a bullfrog and cried, "jugarum!"; or came upon a hover fly and exclaimed, "newsbee!" And here, at long last, is an explanation of what the madstone and the money cat portend.
Built upon an unprecedented survey of spoken English across America and bolstered by extensive historical research, the Dictionary of American Regional English preserves a language that lives and dies as we breathe. It will amuse and inform, delight and instruct, and keep alive the speech that we have made our own, and that has made us who we are.
With this fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, readers now have the full panoply of American regional vocabulary, from Adam's housecat to Zydeco. Like the first four volumes, the fifth is filled with words that reflect our origins, migrations, ethnicities, and neighborhoods.
Contradicting the popular notion that American English has become homogenized, DARE demonstrates that our language still has distinct and delightful local character. If a person lives in a remote place, would you say he's from the boondocks? Or from the puckerbrush, the tules, or the willywags? Where are you likely to live if you eat Brunswick stew rather than jambalaya, stack cake, smearcase, or kringle? What's your likely background if your favorite card game is hasenpfeffer? bid whist? sheepshead? Whether we are talking about foods, games, clothing, family members, animals, or almost any other aspect of life, our vocabulary reveals much about who we are.
Each entry in DARE has been carefully researched to provide as complete a history of its life in America as possible. Illustrative citations extend from the seventeenth century through the twenty-first. More than 600 maps show where words were collected by the DARE fieldworkers. And quotations highlight the wit and wisdom of American speakers and writers. Recognized as the authoritative record of American English, DARE serves scholars and professionals of all stripes. It also holds treasures for readers who simply love our language.
This companion volume to the Dictionary of American Regional English vastly enhances readers' use of the five volumes of DARE text. Those who want to investigate the regional synonyms for a rustic, or a submarine sandwich, or that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street can search through the five volumes and compare the distributional maps. Or, with this volume, they can open to a page with all those maps displayed side by side. Not only is it an extraordinary teaching tool, it is also a browser's delight.
The user who wants to know what words characterize a given state or region is also in luck. The Index to the five volumes not only answers that question but also satisfies the reader's curiosity about words that have come into English from other languages, and words that vary with the speakers' age, sex, race, education, and community type.
And those who simply love to explore the variety and ingenuity of American expression will be seduced by the lists of answers to the DARE fieldwork questions. Dust balls under the bed? Americans have at least 176 names for them. Names for a heavy rainstorm? There are more than 200, including the fanciful frog-strangler, goose-drownder, lightwood-knot floater, and trash-mover. More than 400 questions and all of their answers are included in this treasure trove of American linguistic creativity.
Every page in this new volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English makes it wonderfully clear that regional expressions still flourish throughout the United States.
Depending on where you live, your conversation may include such beguiling terms as paddybass (North Carolina), pinkwink (Cape Cod), or scallyhoot (West); if you're invited to a potluck dinner, in Indiana you're likely to call it a pitch-in, while in northern Illinois it's a scramble; if your youngsters play hopscotch, they may call it potsy in Manhattan, but sky blue in Chicago.
Like the popular first three volumes of DARE, the fourth is a treasure-trove of linguistic gems, a book that invites exclamation, delight, and wonder. More than six hundred maps pinpoint where you might live if your favorite card games are sheepshead and skat; if you eat pan dulce rather than pain perdu; if you drive down a red dog road or make a purchase at a racket store; or if you look out your window and see a parka squirrel or a quill pig.
The language of our everyday lives is captured in DARE, along with expressions our grandparents used but our children will never know. Based on thousands of interviews across the country, the Dictionary of American Regional English presents our language in its infinite variety. Word lovers will delight in the wit and wisdom found in the quotations that illustrate each entry, and will prize the richness and diversity of our spoken and written culture.
Volume I of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), published to wide acclaim in 1985, captured the wondrous variety and creativeness of American folk words and expressions and tickled the imagination of lovers of language around the world. Decades in preparation, the DARE corpus reflects the liveliness of English as it is spoken on America’s main streets and country roads—the regional metaphors and similes passed along within homes and communities.
Like its popular predecessor, Volume II is a treasury of vernacular Americanisms. In Virginia a goldfinch is a dandelion bird, in Missouri an insufficient rain shower a drizzle-fizzle. Gate was Louis Armstrong’s favorite sender (a verbal spur to a sidekick in a band), a usage that probably originated from the fact that gates swing. Readers will bedazzled by the wealth of entries—more than 11,000—contained in this second volume alone. The two and a half pages on “dirt” reveal that a small marble is a dirt pea in the South. To eat dried apples, a curious rural euphemism for becoming pregnant, appears in the five pages on “eat.” Seven pages on “horn” and related words take readers on a tour of the animal and nether worlds: horned lark, horned frog, horned pout (look that one up), and that horned fellow, the devil.
Initiated under the leadership of Frederic G. Cassidy, DARE represents an unprecedented attempt to document the living language of the entire country. The project’s primary tool was a carefully worded survey of 1,847 questions touching on most aspects of everyday life and human experience. Over a five-year period fieldworkers interviewed natives of 1,002 communities, a patchwork of the United States in all its diversity.
The result is a database of more than two and a half million items—a monument to the richness of American folk speech. Additionally, some 7,000 publications, including novels, diaries, and small-town newspapers, have yielded a bountiful harvest of local idioms. Computer-generated maps accompanying many of the entries illustrate the regional distribution of words and phrases.
The entries contained in Volume II—from the poetic and humorous to the witty and downright bawdy—will delight and inform readers.
How do Americans really talk—what are their hometown, everyday expressions in the many regions and sections of this huge country? The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), twenty years in preparation, answers these questions. It gives visible proof of the diversity—and the vitality—of American folk language, past and present.
DARE includes thousands of words and phrases not found in conventional dictionaries, and out-of-the-way meanings for common terms. Here are local names for familiar objects, from old cars to frying pans to dust-balls under the bed (176 names for these); for plants, animals, and critters real and imaginary; for rainstorms and heat waves; for foods, clothing, children’s games and adults’ pastimes; for illnesses and traditional remedies. Here are terms—salty, sarcastic, humorous—by which people describe each other, their physical appearance, characters, emotions, states of mind. Here are metaphors and similes galore.
In Wisconsin a man whose motives are suspect “has beans up his nose.” In Georgia a conceited person is “biggity”; someone important or self-important in the Northwest is “bull of the woods.” A close friend may be “bobbasheely” (Mississippi) or an “ace boon coon” (New York City). West of the Appalachians the old saw “I wouldn’t know him from Adam” becomes “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s off-ox” (or, in the South, “from Adam’s housecat”). These and some twelve thousand other expressions are identified and explained in the first volume of DARE.
While DARE is the work of many dedicated people, it owes its existence to Frederic G. Cassidy, who in 1963 agreed to organize the project, raise funds for it, and serve as Editor-in-Chief. Cassidy trained teams of fieldworkers and equipped them with a carefully worded questionnaire: 1,847 questions grouped in 41 broad categories ranging over most aspects of everyday life and common human experience. From 1965 to 1970 the fieldworkers conducted week-long interviews with natives of 1,002 representative communities in all fifty states. The two and a half million items gleaned from the fieldwork, coded and computer-processed, are DARE’s primary data base, a rich harvest of regional Americanisms current in the seventh decade of this century. Earlier collections have been drawn upon as well, notably the 40,000 expressions recorded by the American Dialect Society since 1889; and some 5,000 publications, including regional novels and diaries and small-town newspapers, have been combed for local idioms.
A unique feature of the dictionary is the computer-generated maps that accompany many of the entries to show the geographical distribution of the term. The base map is schematic, distorting the areas of the states to reflect their population density.
Volume I includes extensive introductory material on DARE itself and on American folk speech. Its entries, from Aaron’s rod to czarnina, cover nearly a quarter of the total DARE corpus.
Each entry contains examples of Ch’orti’ sentences along with their translations. Each term is defined grammatically and linked to a grammatical index. Variations due to age and region are noted. Additionally, extensive cultural and linguistic annotations accompany many entries, providing detailed looks into Ch’orti’ daily life, mythology, flora and fauna, healing, ritual, and food. Hull worked closely with native speakers, including traditional ritual specialists, and presents that work here in a way that is easily accessible to scholars and laypersons alike.
This book has famously inspired a wealth of thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben, François Jullien, and many others. In this new volume, Benveniste’s masterpiece on the study of language and society finds new life for a new generation of scholars. As political fictions continue to separate and reify differences between European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian societies, Benveniste reminds us just how historically deep their interconnections are and that understanding the way our institutions are evoked through the words that describe them is more necessary than ever.
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