First hit for the muscles
Today it’s good to feel worked from training. I started back training last night at the new Fort William bouldering wall. Campusing felt really alien! I enjoyed it so much though. If I can achieve my goal of getting a proper run of training over the next few months it will feel pretty strange to be in good shape for the first time in ages. That feeling of being stronger than ever before on the rock is something magical and I’ve not felt it for a long time.
My strongest memory of this was when I was 17 and going to the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow to train Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then climbing at Dumbarton Rock all weekend. I used to warm up and do an hour and half bouldering, then head downstairs to the weights gym for 2.5 hours of seemingly endless sets of lat pull downs. It was a proper old school free weights gym. If I wasn’t psyched as a mad thing I would have been too scared to go in there. Everyone except me and Claire were massive scary powerlifter types. Maybe I soaked up some of the testosterone haze that floated freely in that place? After my arms were melted I headed back up for another 2 hours mileage bouldering and then 40 minutes on the track before closing time. I’ll never forget pulling back onto the autumns project ‘Pongo’ at Dumbarton the following spring. I just could not pull on the holds but now I could easily float up it like magic!
Right, I’m off back round to the boulder wall to attack that board again. Glynn from Scarpa passed by today to drop off Scarpa’s new Veroche shoe which I can’t wait to try out – they look amazing. I’ll post up a review asap. Anyway, here are a couple more beta hits from the new problems I set at the Fort William Wall. I’ll get some more filmed tonight hopefully.
My strongest memory of this was when I was 17 and going to the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow to train Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then climbing at Dumbarton Rock all weekend. I used to warm up and do an hour and half bouldering, then head downstairs to the weights gym for 2.5 hours of seemingly endless sets of lat pull downs. It was a proper old school free weights gym. If I wasn’t psyched as a mad thing I would have been too scared to go in there. Everyone except me and Claire were massive scary powerlifter types. Maybe I soaked up some of the testosterone haze that floated freely in that place? After my arms were melted I headed back up for another 2 hours mileage bouldering and then 40 minutes on the track before closing time. I’ll never forget pulling back onto the autumns project ‘Pongo’ at Dumbarton the following spring. I just could not pull on the holds but now I could easily float up it like magic!
Right, I’m off back round to the boulder wall to attack that board again. Glynn from Scarpa passed by today to drop off Scarpa’s new Veroche shoe which I can’t wait to try out – they look amazing. I’ll post up a review asap. Anyway, here are a couple more beta hits from the new problems I set at the Fort William Wall. I’ll get some more filmed tonight hopefully.
New Scottish bouldering film – Elements
I’ve just got the new Scottish bouldering film Elements up on my shop page finally. Pete Murray has been working on this for the past year so It’s great to see it finished. Because of the beauty of the settings and the variety of the rock, Scottish bouldering always leaves quite an impression on you. Pete has tried to explore our connection with the rock and our moves on it, as well as showing off the new venues that are seeing the action right now. There are lots of new faces in the film including Ben Lister and Mike Lee putting up new problems all over the country. You even get to see Ben putting up a new 7c on a Gritstone crag ten minutes from Glasgow!! My own feature is a repeat of a very special boulder problem for me –Deep Breath Font 8a in Glen Nevis. A perfect line I came back to year after year. And when I finally did it, it was effortless!The philosophy lost me at times although the interview with a Scottish ecologist was entertaining! It was really the pure bouldering footage that I enjoyed in this film. More power to your camcorder Pete.
Climbing Deep Breath Font 8a, Glen Nevis for the Elements filmYou can get hold of a copy (with my ebook companion How to Climb Hard Trad as ever free) from my webshop.
ENA6 - Investigating Attitudes to Offensive Language
OK, so no takers for the last one on Language Change, so how about this one?How would you go about investigating people's attitudes to offensive language?
I'm after a 5 point answer using this structure:
- AIM/ANGLE
- METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
- FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
- CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
- WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND
Bearing down on the Skeleton boulder projects
Bear Trap Prow V12 Photo: Claire MacLeodIt has proved somewhat difficult to get any work done over the past week what with the endless days of perfect conditions here. Thankfully the rain is coming tomorrow coinciding nicely with my work trip to England.
I have been bouldering a lot. First up I had a lovely day at the Skeleton Boulder and finished the Bear Trap Prow project following the true line of the prow, which went at around V12, I think. It was good to feel the aggression of unleashing full explosive power on the rock again, after the tricky balance of keeping it reserve on long sport routes earlier this spring. I missed the feeling of getting psyched up to squeeze every last muscle fibre. Claire got some nice footage of ‘release of tension’ screams on my failures from the last move of the prow.
Waterfall Arete Font 5+. Does it get any better? Photo: Claire MacLeod
Today I spent three more hours cleaning some lovely easier problems, a couple of classics, maybe a V8 or so and some other things for next session. I also went over to the other big boulder nearby and managed the stunning crackline there despite Joe noising me up every two seconds (see video). It went at Font 7bish??
Dude Direct V9ish, Ruthven BoulderAfter Pete’s stag do in Aviemore on Sunday I visited the Ruthven boulder for the first time. After a loooong warm up to wake up a hungover body, I looked at a nice bulge called ‘The Dude’ There was an obvious direct version of it with a large dyno to be done. An hour of repeatedly throwing myself towards this blind target was rewarded when I eventually hit the hold dead on for a nice V9 or so (easier for giants I reckon).
Last night I saw the rough cut of the Don’t Die film of our first ascent of Don’t Die of Ignorance which was kinda shocking in places but also really funny. I’m off round to Heather Hat HQ now to record some more audio for that film. Maybe see you in Oxford on Friday…
Claire having fun on Ben Nevis
New Fort William Bouldering Wall
I’m pretty psyched to announce that Fort William has a new indoor bouldering facility at Calluna (Alan Kimber’s place). Alan’s built a brand new building with accommodation for climbers and excellent bouldering walls. The wall was constructed over the winter by Scott Muir. Since late February, I have been setting the whole wall with over 60 problems from V0 to V11. It’s got a main area with a large steep wall (37degrees over) and vertical and slabbed walls with an excellent campus board and fingerboard. Upstairs there is a superb little circuits cave with surprisingly long circuit problems on walls and roofs to get fit on.
The ground floor area at Calluna
It’s great that the Fort has a great place to train again since the demise of the once excellent leisure centre wall. Full details on how to visit the wall will be on the Calluna site shortly, and the beta for some of the problems are on it’s very own you tube channel here.
The Mezzanine caveI have written up the problems into soft, intermediate and hard circuits which are displayed on sheets at the wall so you can easily locate the problems of your chosen level and have a good session. Enjoy, and see you down there, if it ever starts raining in Lochaber again?!
Filling column inches
No, not another spam email about "manhood enhancement", but a quick piece about fillers. You know, like...err fillers yeah? Ha ha, can you see what I did there? Sorry...Anyway, The Daily Telegraph (which is normally really good on language stories) has this terrible non-story about how English language speakers use loads of fillers and how this reflects a lack of care for our language. According to Phillip Hodson, speech expert and Fellow for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (who may have been selectively quoted, it has to be said):
It seems to me that the Anglo Saxon countries - Britain and America - are the worst for using these filler words to pad out our conversations. I think it is because unlike other countries like France we do not protect our language. There is little teaching of best practice. Some say that fillers are a sign of intellect, used to consider what to say next. However, research shows that if your speech is full of padding, you’re harder to understand, which makes listeners tend to tune out.
Erm, not exactly true though is it? Fillers are just normal parts of our spoken language; we use them as a form of punctuation for the most part, and it's not really true that we associate fillers with padding and a lack of clarity. In fact, this piece of research suggests that fillers, hedges and indirect constructions actually make us more convincing in some situations, more human and likeable even.
Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language
Sexist grammar?
A piece of psychological research covered on the BPS Research Digest takes a look at gender in grammar. In some languages (French and German for example) nouns possess gender: not gender in the sense of socially constructed sexual identities, but gender as a grammatical concept, in which certain nouns are classed as masculine (le chapeau = the hat) or feminine (la plage = the beach). But gender in a more conventional sense also applies to French nouns, so you get le chien for a male dog and la chienne for a female dog, spectateur for a male spectator and spectatrice for a female spectator. OK so far?But when you get a mixed group and need to use a plural pronoun, the tradition in both French and German has been to use the male pronoun ils to refer to the group, regardless of the gender of the participants. But as ils is a masculine pronoun, does it actually convey a gender neutral meaning?
The equivalent in English is the false generic pronoun he, which many people have historically used to refer to both men and women, as in the rather odd statement "Like other mammals, mankind breastfeeds his young". But as we have looked at in ENA1 Language & Representation, there's a problem with these generic pronouns (and nouns like mankind) because they don't really bring to mind gender neutral identities and often exclude women.
So anyway, back to the research. The result appears to have been that when French or German listeners hear a male plural pronoun they tend to assume that it refers to males and take longer to process the words if they're followed by clearly feminine nouns. More detail here. But how is this relevant to ENA1? Well, it's a bit of a long shot, but it could be argued that this sort of research helps support the linguistic relativist or linguistic determinist perspectives, that language can control or shape our perceptions. It could also support the Dale Spender Man Made Language position that sexist attitudes have become encoded in the language we speak, reflecting the dominant positions of males in the history of society and language control.
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
Time to Train
When you aren’t so fit, you have to be more proactive about finding good rests. Recovering on Pota D’ Elephant 7c+, Siurana.The coming months are going to be really exciting. For the last couple of years, I’ve somewhat put climbing on the back burner, just climbing routes that would go fairly quickly (NB. My definition of ‘quickly’ may differ from others). The last time I tried a really hard route was Rhapsody in 2004-6. After I completed that, I knew that I was after another project that would take as much and more commitment, but that it would take some time to find.
I don’t think it’s possible to go out and search hard for a route like this, you just need to go out and look and climb until the right inspiration hits you and the right route is there. For something so close to your limit, the chances of the climb being a little too hard (or easy) are pretty high. Of course you can respond by increasing your level, but this takes time.
I’ve hopefully found the right project, and so I’m hoping for a good dry summer so I can work hard at it. I tried it before and realised I’d need to be climbing 9a to even be able to try it properly. Now the climbing is more realistic for me, so I should at least be able pull on the holds and move a little and start to make progress.
I’ve been saving for two years so I could reduce my work level and train properly if I was ready to have a crack at a project like this. Now that time is getting close. For the rest of April I’m trying to finish as much of my work as I can. In between writing, I have to go and work on gear design at Mountain Equipment and visit Oxford, Inverness and my local climbing walls for some coaching days. After this, my task is to lose quadricep from the winter’s heavy sac carrying and to get into a good training routine leading into summer.
The last time I trained properly was in the ten months before I did Rhapsody. I have really missed the daily routine of getting up and training every single day, for most of the day. I can’t wait to start again.
What is genital flip flop?
You may well ask. Is it when you drink one too many pints of Stella and can't perform up to the usual standard? Or could it be some kind of Max Mosley-esque nazi spanking ritual involving beachwear? Actually it's a form of semantic change in which a word associated with "naughty body parts" (ie the genitals) changes meaning in different English-speaking cultures so that no one's really sure what the word means anymore. A good example is the word fanny which means one thing in American English and quite another in British English. I mean who, in the UK, would say "I tripped and fell on my fanny"? Exactly...My usual obsession with rude things apart, why cover this on the blog? Well, it's all about euphemisms isn't it? We often avoid saying rude (or otherwise taboo words) by using euphemisms: sugar, oh my days, oh gord, little girls' room, a number two, Mr. Winkie will see you now, partying hard, jesus h price...and many more.
This week's edition of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth programme on Radio 4 has a really interesting interview with Australian linguist Kate Burridge on the ways in which euphemisms develop and change over time. You can listen again to the whole programme here or hear just the Kate Burridge clip from here.
For those of you revising ENA6 and thinking about scripting radio shows, it's a good example again of how these things work, plus the content is suited to either ENA6 topics on Language Change or Language & Representation.
It's a good listen too for some silly euphemisms, and a prize of the usual Haribo goes to the first person to add the real meanings of these 3 euphemisms discussed on the show:
- "A patient who failed to fulfil his living potential"
- "Chronologically gifted"
- "To go to bed"
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates
ENA6 - Investigating Language Change
On the ENA6 A2 paper you're expected to answer a 5 mark question on your methodology for investigating a language issue. To help you revise and prepare for this, I'm going to set a question a week up, on a different topic each week, until the exam itself, asking you to explain how you'd investigate each topic.The format I'd like you to follow in your answer is outlined here, so you need to give a 5 point answer which outlines your:
- AIM/ANGLE
- METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
- FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
- CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
- WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND
So, to kick start it, this week's question is: How would you go about investigating people's attitudes to language change?
Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates
A brum deal
Speaking in a Birmingham accent gives a worse impression than saying nothing at all.
So say researchers at Bath Spa University who have been investigating stereotypes associated with accents. The BBC news website reveals more here.
The Daily Telegraph has a longer feature on the same story, adding that "People associate the Birmingham accent with criminal activity and that criminal activity is associated in people's mind with low intellect". But the accent that comes out on top is that of Yorkshire whose speakers are perceived to be wise and intelligent.
The Telegraph also has a feature here where you can contribute your views about accents and read what others have said.
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties
ENA6 - Language Debates
Rudeness, racism and religion
Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth programme on Radio 4 is a good source of news and debates about language, and the new series kicks off with a look at bad language: blasphemy, racial abuse, naughty words and all that stuff.You can listen again by clicking on the relevant box, and I would suggest that you have a good listen to it as you're likely to face a radio script either in your mock ENA6 paper or the real thing in June.
Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates
Potty mouths
"I know what the worst swear word is," said one of my boys the other night as I put him and his brother to bed."Oh yeah," I replied, expecting it to be something like bumhead or weeface, the recent phrases of choice to describe me when they don't get their way.
"It's f*cking," he replied with a smile.
"Yes, it's f*cking and you always say it," added his brother just to make sure.
Now, if this sounds exactly like the incident described in this link to the ways in which imitation works in children's language development, then that's probably because it happens to a lot of us. But as the article goes on to say, imitation is only part of the story. Kids will pick up swear words but it's the social interaction with parents and peer group that determines how swearing is used and whether or not children understand the impact of what they're saying.
As the article puts it, quoting psychologist Paul Bloom:
Another part of growing up is knowing how to speak with adults and in formal situations. "So we'd like our children to grow up knowing when it's appropriate to use these words," Bloom says.
As most parents come to recognize, teaching good judgement is not a one-time event; it's a process.
Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition
A nation ov illiterats and twitz
Texting is blamed for many of society's ills - repetitive strain injury to the thumb, lamppost accidents, car crashes - but its impact on the nation's literacy skills is always a hot topic.The Daily Mail and The Guardian have picked up on a press release from an online parenting site, Bounty, who claim that parents are so crazed by text speak that they can't even spell their kids' names properly and are resorting to txt spk. So we're getting names like Flicity, Ana, Samiul, Conna, Lora and Cam'ron.
So, are these the result of grim educational standards brought about by text language, attempts to make otherwise dull kids' names sound so very special, or just the result of deranged parents being a bit dumb? The Guardian likes to think it's smarter than The Daily Mail - and of course, it is - so its writer Tim Dowling suggests that Cam'ron is actually named after a rapper, while Samiul is a fairly common Pakistani name. The Daily Mail, obsessed as it is with all things terrible in this society - teenagers who chew gum, crazy environmentalists who want to save the planet, nasty immigrants - sees the dark side: we're all doomed and its txspk wot dun it.
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)