Why shouldn’t academics act like other workers and take time off during the semester?, Mary Werner, a pseudonymous professor of English at a liberal-arts college in the East, asks in the latest First Person column:
So here’s a radical idea: How about we start splitting up our vacation time, taking some during the summer, when we’re doing research, and some during the academic year, when we’re teaching?
What would happen if we acted like other employees, and other professionals, and just took time off during the semester? We would have to ensure that the work got done in our absence, of course. That would mean different things in different disciplines, but in mine it would probably mean arranging for a guest lecturer or a film or giving a research assignment to be done while I was away, or arranging for extra class time when I returned.
Is it likely that our students would suffer irreparable harm if we took vacation time the way other professions do — in the middle of work that goes on while we’re gone? What happens when doctors take vacations? Their patients don’t stop needing medical help; other doctors cover for them. Are we more indispensable than doctors? Than secretaries?
Share your thoughts.
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32 Responses to Taking Time Off
jffoster - September 11, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Suspect I do that the kind of case exemplified by Stefan Fatsis’ sentence — your first example–is from the pseudo-cleft type of sentence ‘What the reality is is that…..’ where the ‘What..’ has been ommitted or deleted. The first _is_ is the verb of _reality_ and the second is the verb of
[What] the reality is,, i.e. the entire Noun Phrase. I am not sure that kind of explanation will account for all types of “..is is..” occurrences though.
NB incldentally that morphological / syntactic agreement is a redundancy system. In the following English sentence, count how many time plurality of the subject is indicated.
_These three prescriptive grammarians are out to abolish Linguistics.
Plurality of _grammarians_ is indicated on the noun itself, in the copula _are_, and in the numeral word _three_ and in the demonstrative _these_ (v *This.).
marcleavitt - September 11, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? I couldn’t resist.
dank48 - September 12, 2011 at 8:30 am
If only poetic license could explain them all.
johnbarnes - September 12, 2011 at 10:08 am
“a boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon whereby you feel you need to say something multiple times to make your point” is an abuse of the fable; it is in no way about repetition to make a point. The point is precisely that there was no point.
This is a fable-abuse that is new to me, but joins the ever-swelling swarm of other fable and parable abuses, along with the more established “lion’s share,” “sour grapes,” “oil on troubled waters,” and “sheep and goats” misreadings.
darccity - September 12, 2011 at 10:33 am
Over decades of writing exams, I’ve found that it is better to be redundant, superfluous, and repetitious in wording exam questions. Redundancy provides the emphasis to prevent students from not noticing a crucial qualifier or caveat. In my more challenging conceptual courses, different students may relate better to the alternative word choice — so I use both. At the opposite extreme, the practice keeps the smarter students from trying to read too much into a question. A related benefit is by saving these tired old bones from climbing over book bags to answer the same questions about “what I meant by question.” Otherwise, the student evaluations call the exams “tricky” and, more importantly, your tests are not really testing the material. Or what does your test test?
darccity - September 12, 2011 at 11:42 am
Oh, and I forgot to mention more areas for redundancy in academia. On research surveys, “you only get one bite of the apple,” so even after extensive pre-testing your questionnaire, some respondents will misread anything that isn’t overly clarified. Moreover, when you submit your research for publication, the unpaid peer reviewers and grant funding gatekeepers tend to dense unless you hit them in the head with anything important or conceptual. Redundancy may be essential for your annual reports to Peter Principle administrators. When interviewing with the press, staying on message requires endless repetition and restating in every possible permutation or they misquote you (they will anyway).
Scott Fisher - September 12, 2011 at 11:48 am
Like many people, you’ve misquoted Stein. The actual line (from “Sacred Emily,” 1913) is “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” where the first Rose is a person. This changes it from mere redundancy to something more like a lyrical echo, a repetition for the sheer musicality of the phrase.
andreology - September 12, 2011 at 12:16 pm
How about the repetition of adjectives, as in “It’s not a job job; it’s an internship.”
xhzhang - September 12, 2011 at 1:36 pm
This remind me of George Carlin’s Brain Droppings…there is a few pages of examples of such “annoying” Redundancies throughout the book. Fun read.
Daniel Rubin - September 12, 2011 at 2:06 pm
This makes me think of ”Live and Let Die’s” lovely, lyrical, “If this ever-changing world in which we live in…”
22156392 - September 12, 2011 at 2:12 pm
The increased usage of these redundancies is almost disisying, as in the onset of a disisease. Let’s “return back” to those farmer-in-in-the-dell days when “the is stands alone.”
benyagoda - September 12, 2011 at 2:25 pm
According to my sources, she later restated the quote in a number of different versions, including the one I quoted.
strateia8 - September 12, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Funny, I just ran across a redundancy in a well-established textbook: “During the decade of the 1990s information literacy became the major initiative of instruction…” (Kuhlthau, Seeking Meaning, p. 11). Good book information-wise, but tics like this are distracting.
sahara - September 12, 2011 at 2:48 pm
I will use your delightful piece in my teaching-thanks.
darccity - September 12, 2011 at 2:50 pm
how about the “reason why”? — like fingernails scraping on the board.
Sylvia Newman - September 12, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I can’t agree that “completely erased” is redundant. Have you never had a bad eraser? Most things I try to erase leave a trace or shadow of the original. Come to think of it, the times I have succeeded at completely erasing something are few. And what about in archaeological terms–are not some civilizations partially erased and others completely?
dheidenreich - September 12, 2011 at 5:59 pm
The first “job” is a noun turned into an adjective, while the second “job” is a noun.
maryuhl - September 12, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for disparaging the annoying use of “fellow” to accentuate the closeness of a relationship! This practice has rankled me for a long time.
I recall a useful repetition of a phrase in a delightful episode of _The Wonder Years_. The middle schoolers used repetition to voice an intensified feeling. It isn’t enough to have a girl “like me”; Kevin asks if she “likes me likes me.” Knowing she finds him a pleasant fellow (“likes me”) does not satisfy; he wants t know if she is attracted to him (“likes me likes me”).
Of course, we are no longer tweens, so we should be beyond this now, especially in public discourse.
BullHubbard - September 13, 2011 at 11:35 am
I completely agree that “[a] word like classmate has a certain heft to it; the fellow chips away at its power and leaves the whole language a tiny bit diminished.” I feel the same way about the construction “proceeded to [verb]“– “Phil proceeded to bash his attacker in the head with a length of pipe.” Verbs (in this example “bash”) are killed by their conversion into infinitive objects.
rosemaryfeal - September 13, 2011 at 12:37 pm
The thing of it is is that I don’t get the main point of this article. Can you repeat it again?
mstripling - September 13, 2011 at 1:10 pm
My favorite Gertrude Stein: “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” A perfectly apt, full-favored redundancy.
duppy_conqueror - September 13, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Daniel, I always thought the song went, “If this ever-changing world in which we’re living…”
but if I’ve had it wrong for the past 38 years, I guess I will just have to Live and Let Die.
jdelap - September 13, 2011 at 3:26 pm
“Tiny bit”? Is there such a thing as a big bit? Hmm.
jffoster - September 13, 2011 at 9:22 pm
Only if you have a horse with a big mouth.
Guest - September 13, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Haha, great article. Believe it or not, though, I am having more problems with the new pithiness that’s been the rage on Facebook. Everyone wants to have zinging Brit-style wry one-liners. I like redundancy better, especially because it doesn’t bother the listener or the reader unless you point it out.
johnbarnes - September 14, 2011 at 8:18 am
I really like the repetition-reality maneuver in speech, perhaps because a couple of friends who use it in speech can be charming with it. My favorite, which I use in my copy editor notes as an example of what to leave alone, was “She had a total mental breakdown. Well, not a totlal mental breakdown total mental breakdown, but still, pretty much a total mental breakdown kind of a thing.”
Not sure I’d want to see that in a dissertation, however.
IkeRoberts - September 14, 2011 at 9:43 am
“Palimpsest” a cool word for describing (often metaphorically) the traces left behind when something is incompletely erased.
lchowe - September 14, 2011 at 10:37 am
The type of redundancy described here is only “superfluous” if we assume that each element in a construction (e.g., “fellow classmates” or “is is”) retains the semantic “heft” ascribed to it by some lexicographical source. Instead, these cases demonstrate what (some) linguists like to refer to as semantic “bleaching” or “weakening” whereby an element (i.e. word, construction, etc.) becomes increasingly less specific. Thus, while it may have been the case that “classmate” referred specifically to another student in the speaker’s academic cohort, it does not require this meaning now since a high school senior can easily, in the right context, talk about freshman as his or her “classmate”. The “fellow” in “fellow classmates” does not detract from the “power” of “classmate”; on the contrary, it attempts to reinforce it.
As the author points out, these examples are by no means “heinous”, nor are the even the most obvious cases of the fact that words are sometimes pressed into the service of other words needed a lexical boost. An analogous example to the “is is” issue occurs with “whether (or not)” (see below). For some, even the first “or not” is redundant since “whether” already evokes more than one proposition. It seems clear, however, that sometimes one “or not” just isn’t enough.
“Empowering the worker to make a determination as to whether or not they want to contribute these compulsory union dues or not makes a lot of sense.” (2011, NBC Meet the Press, from the Corpus of Contemporary American English)
“We have to make a choice as people whether or not we’re going to survive or not.” (2010, Fox’s Glenn Beck, from the Corpus of Contemporary American English)
macbaldy - September 14, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Can’t see that “is, is” rises to the level of a redundancy; it’s simply nonsense. Figures of speech run-amok are sloppy language at best; they cultivate ambiguity and insecurity of usage. It’s the vernacular, non-standard speech. In print, it’s ludicrous.
superdude - September 15, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Or a large drill.
davi2665 - September 15, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Eschew adumbrative obfuscation and repetitiously redundant obnubilation.
fercho - September 15, 2011 at 7:47 pm
Why do stewardesses tell us to wait for the plane to come to “a complete stop”?