Critical Thinking 2025 Workshop 1 Why is language so powerful?
inspire@sjc.ox.ac.uk sjcinspire.com
What are critical thinking skills?
Jenna Illet
Workshop 1: What is language?
Katie Inwood
What is the linguistic significance of the Rosetta Stone?
Petros Spanou
The origin of language (Anthropology)
Tom Kemp
do you translate Icelandic runes? (Languages)
Marie Elven
The language of social media: polarisation and bias in the digital age (Politics) – Jack Gamblin
are semiotics necessary? (Linguistics) Julia
Creative Thinking (Critical Thinking)
Can DNA be read as a language? (Biology)
Tom Kemp
Should literary language be difficult? (English)
Lily Middleton-Mansell
Do animals have languages? (Biology)
Tom Kemp
How do babies learn to communicate (Psychology)
Jack Gamblin
(Oxplore)
(Oxford Spotlight) Lily Middleton-Mansell
Welcome
TO INSPIRE CRITICAL THINKING 2025
Pause for a moment, read these words out loud, and think about what is happening! Your eyes are focussed on a row of little squiggles.
These register as images on the retina at the back of your eye which converts them into electrical impulses sent by your optic nerves to a part of your brain. Here your mind interprets them as words whose meanings you learned in childhood that have been strung together by a set of rules into a sentence. The sentence informs you of something that I wanted you to know. Should you wish to, you can now convert into sound your own words chosen from those stored in your brain, emit them from your vocal chords through your mouth, and in this way inform me of what you think about the sentence. You are using language: you are performing what is by the far the single most important characteristic of humans.
Welcome to St John’s College’s 2025 Inspire Critical Thinking programme, which is all about language: what it is, where it came from, and the varied roles it plays in our diverse and complicated social lives.
Our information comes via language from many sources, newspapers and broadcasting, the internet, social media, and advertising. Some are truthful and balanced, some biased towards one point of view, and some deliberately aimed to mislead and misinform.
To understand the world and make it a better place for you to live in, you must learn to critically assess rather than unthinkingly accept what you hear and read. Nothing is more important to you as you face the problems and hazards the world will throw at you than how to understand and make the best use of language.
You will be offered four successive workshops, each presenting you with a variety of different aspects of language, ranging from the humanities, the arts, medicine, maths and science. They have been written by my St John’s College colleagues, some of them established world-renowned experts in their field, others up and coming young students.
Enjoy it!
Tom Kemp: Associate Editor
How to submit a superchallenge
There are some activities that offer a chance for you to win an Amazon voucher! Your entry should be emailed to inspire@sjc.ox.ac.uk, saved as a PDF document where possible. In your email, please let us know:
■ Your name
■ Your School
■ Your year group
■ Whether you are happy for us to share your work on social media.
Submit your super challenge piece by the end of the month for a chance to win. You may only enter one super challenge per workshop.
What are critical thinking Skills?
Think about the last time you read a new piece of information. Perhaps it was a news article, a page in a textbook, or a social media post. Regardless of the content, you may have approached the information in similar ways. You may have questioned the author’s intent, whether the information is reliable, or if you agree with the argument being expressed. Critical thinking skills can often be automatic and are important across all contexts. Using critical thinking skills can help you make sense of the world around you. But what do we actually mean when we talk about critical thinking skills?
Critical thinking is an umbrella term that includes many different types of skills. We have identified the most important of these skills, and developed a framework of five key Inspire Learning Skills. These have been broken down into simple criteria, so you know exactly what to do to work on any particular skill. Opportunities to develop these Inspire Learning Skills have been embedded across the four Critical Thinking workshops in a variety of ways, including polls, quizzes and super challenges. Any opportunity to develop one of the 5 skills will be indicated by a coloured icon, with a specific skill highlighted in the
corner of the article page. By engaging with these activities, you will have the opportunity to develop skills that will help you solve problems, understand information from a range of sources, make informed judgements based on evidence, and share your opinions confidently. There are also resources to help you independently explore the topic in more detail. These skills will be useful throughout your time at school, but also beyond, as you make decisions about your life, education and careers.
WORKSHOP 1
What is language
Welcome to this first workshop. As you read the articles, watch the videos, follow the further resources and puzzle over some challenges, we hope you will start to question what you know language to be.
It may seem obvious that language is something you, and the people around you, speak to each other. Language, though, is a complex system of communication that transcends mere words, encompassing symbols, sounds, and gestures. It serves as a vital tool for expressing thoughts, emotions, and ideas, allowing us to connect and share experiences. Little is known about how language developed, but it has played a crucial role in preserving knowledge and culture. The discovery of Rosetta Stone, in 1799, became the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language and thus a civilisation’s history.
?
Language is fundamental to our communication, social bonds, cultural development and cognitive processes. If it ceased to exist, would society collapse? Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” suggesting that our understanding of reality is shaped by our linguistic capabilities.
The arguments posed in this workshop invite you consider how language is far more than a method of communication. In the animal kingdom, communication exists in various forms, from the complex vocalisations of whales to the intricate dances of bees. While many species possess methods for conveying information, human language stands apart due to its complexity and ability to express abstract concepts.
Biologically, language may even have parallels in our DNA. Some researchers propose that the genetic capacity for language is encoded in our genes, influencing the brain’s development and functionality. Just as DNA carries the blueprint for life, language serves as a blueprint for human interaction, shaping societies and cultures across generations.
Whether through the spoken word or written text, language remains an essential aspect of our existence, reflecting the very essence of what it means to be human.
We also include the first of four videos aimed at developing your critical thinking skills – how to think creatively. Knowing and understanding a language is all well and good but knowing how to use this effectively can empower you for a variety of situations and tasks.
Katie Inwood Editor
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Demotic
Ancient Greek
What is the linguistic significance of the Rosetta Stone?
Author: Dr Petros Spanou, Historian of Modern Britain, Oxford University
The date is 15 July 1799. Egypt is now in the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army advanced into the country with the strategic intention of controlling the Eastern Mediterranean and thus challenge British naval supremacy and interests in the Near East and routes to India. While digging near the town of Rashit (Rosetta), the army made a discovery: a stone incorporated into an old wall bearing inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek, and demotic (a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the language used by the common people). The meaning of the text on the stone, was the same in those three languages. Scholars generally agree that the inscriptions were composed by Egyptian priests around the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who ruled Egypt between the early third and late second century of the Common Era.
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a bigger block of stone, as pictured above. It is made of black granite and it measures 114cm x 72cm, and is currently displayed in the British Museum. So how did it end up there? In 1801, the French surrendered Egypt to the British forces as part of the campaigns against Napoleon. Then, the stone was taken by the British before it was transported to London and
deposited in the museum.
Why is the Rosetta Stone significant? After the arrival of the stone in Britain, people began making attempts to ‘read’ the inscriptions and decipher it. Two men are credited with the decipherment of the stone: the English Thomas Young and the French JeanFrançois Champollion. Young and Champollion began studying the stone’s hieroglyphic text, realising that this text was a translation from Greek.
In doing so, they were able to match the hieroglyphics to the ancient Greek text, and therefore to decipher the mysterious hieroglyphics.
As a result of this momentous discovery, Young and Champollion opened up the study of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts which up until that point they were a mystery to scholars and the public in general. This was perhaps the most important achievement in modern translation practice, with tremendous linguistic significance. The secrets of the Egyptian civilisation were thereby unlocked, and because of the Rosetta Stone our understanding of this civilisation and its secrets has been increased markedly.
Watch this video which explains the story of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the way it helped us understand and decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic characters.
If you want to find out more: ● Website: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone and a reconstruction of how it would have originally looked. Illustration by Claire Thorne.
Are we similar to apes?
The origin of language
Author: Tom Kemp, Former Tutor in Zoology and Emeritus Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford
Aboutsix million years ago, an ape-like species living in Africa divided into two separate groups. One of these evolved relatively little over time and today are the chimpanzees. The other group, in contrast, evolved several important new characteristics such as a brain about three times as big, walking upright on two legs, hands capable of delicate manipulation, and smaller teeth. By 300,000 years ago, it had become Homo sapiens, our own species.
We know quite a lot about the bodily evolutionary changes from fossils. But we know virtually nothing for certain about the evolution of the most significant of all human characteristics, which is our language.
There are two prior requirements for language to evolve. A spoken word corresponds to a particular kind of object or action, and therefore an idea, or a concept of what each word stands for must be capable of being learned and retained in the mind of both the speaker and the listener. When you say “dog”, to me, both of us understand what that particular sound refers to. The second requirement is that there must be some advantage
to an exchange of complex, detailed information about ourselves, our family, and the world around us.
How did language begin?
As our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees offer a likely starting point for the evolution of human language. Experiments show that chimps can be trained to recognise and respond appropriately to many spoken human words. Their brains are able to acquire and hold concepts in order to distinguish between words such as “banana”, “apple”, “hide” or “find”. However they cannot learn to speak, not least because the vocal tract lacks the finely controllable changes of shape that allows humans their wide range of easily distinguishable sounds. The noises chimps do make consist only of grunts, hoots and screams, which they use to
express such things as anger, social position, maintenance of contact within the group, and cooperation during hunting. But they have a wide repertoire of gestures of hands, face and posture and can even be taught to use specific gestures that correspond to human words they have learned, a simple equivalent to speech. More than that, a few individuals have been trained to associate different coloured tokens with particular words, and to combine a few of these in what amounts to simple sentences.
Experiments show that chimps can be trained to recognise and respond appropriately to many spoken human words.
What were the next steps?
If we assume that human language arose by a sequence of gradual changes from this chimp-like capacity, we can imagine what the steps might have been, even though we cannot know for sure. The larynx housing the vocal chords and the muscles controlling the tongue, lips and soft palate, were gradually elaborated so the vocal tract could produce an ever-increasing range of different, easily distinguishable unit sounds or phenomes, our vowels and consonants. Particular combinations of phenomes came to represent particular concepts, and so words were born. Perhaps the first words consisted only of a combination of a consonant followed by a vowel, such as ”me” or “wa-ter”. These are the easiest words to say, because they only require a simple closed-to- open mouth movement (try it) and are the first words a human infant produces – “ma-ma” or “dog-gie. From this point on, more and more ways of combining phenomes resulted in a virtually unlimited vocabulary. We have no way of knowing what the first words actually stood for, not even whether each one referred to a single object or action like “lion”, “you”, “attack”, or whether, as some linguists think, a single word could stand for a whole situation – “lion attacking you”. But what is sure is that the next step was the origin of syntax, the set of rules for stringing individual words together. More precise, unambiguous information is conveyed by using the correct order of the words and by adding accessory words like prepositions (“here” and “there”) and articles (“the” and ”a”) – “The lion behind you is about to attack”. Thus the sentence was born.
It seems virtually certain although unproveable that communal hunting using weapons as illustrated in this cave painting were coordinated by language.
Why speak?
The significance of the evolution of language from the shouts and gestures of a chimpanzee-like ancestor to fully human verbal language can only be understood alongside other aspects of human evolution, especially the brain and the social organisation. Enlargement of the brain is associated with increased learning, cognitive ability and memory. All these are necessary for language, because the concepts, the vocabulary, and the rules of syntax have to be learned anew by each generation. The large brain is also associated with the extensive cooperation amongst the members of a human community in such activities as hunting, food collection, mutual protection, child rearing, and communal decision making. It was entirely thanks to the evolution of our uniquely rich language that these social activities could develop
to the extraordinary lengths they did, culminating a few hundred thousand years later in the written version that underpins the whole of civilisation as we now know it.
SUPER CHALLENGE
Read this article carefully and you will see that the author had to make a number of assumptions that cannot actually be proved for certain. But what is an assumption?
What is an assumption?
An assumption is something that is accepted as true or taken for granted without proof or verification. Our thinking relies upon assumptions and we need assumptions to make communication possible (and more efficient). It acts as a foundational belief or premise that influences thinking and decisionmaking. Assumptions can be explicit, meaning they are clearly stated, or implicit, meaning they are unspoken and often go unnoticed.
Examples of Assumptions
1. In Everyday Life: Assuming a friend will always be available to hang out because they’ve done so in the past.
2. In Problem-Solving: Believing that a specific solution will work based on past experiences, without considering current circumstances.
3. In Communication: Assuming that others understand your references or background knowledge without checking if they do. If you were having a conversation with your friend, it would be tiresome to have to explain every word and sentence you mean if there wasn’t a shared understanding!
Recognising assumptions is important, especially in critical thinking, as they can shape perspectives and conclusions. Questioning assumptions can lead to deeper understanding and better decision-making.
If you’d like to find out more:
● Website: Theories of language origin
LINK >
● Video: How did Language begin?
LINK > LINK >
Dr Kemp assumes that chimpanzee communication is similar to an early stage in human language evolution. A second is assumption is that from such a stage, human language evolved gradually by a number of small steps. What would happen if we assumed something different about how language originated? How would this lead to a different conclusion? Write no more than 300 words describing what other assumptions could be made and explaining why these could be true.
● Video: The Origins and Evolution of Languagem
To help you explain, here is a list of some of the theories about the origin of language that have been put forward in the past (including the evolutionary theory proposed here!).
Like this article? A course in Archaeology and Anthropology might be for you!
Say what?
Jules
How do you translate Icelandic runes?
Author: Marie Elven, Lecturer in French Language at St John’s College, Oxford
Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) tells the story of how Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel enter the depths of the Earth via the crater of a volcano called Sneffels, on the western coast of Iceland. But the journey, which eventually takes the heroes through the Earth to the other end of Europe, starts with the discovery of an ancient manuscript between the leaves of an old book bought from an antiques dealer. To his nephew’s suggestion that a translation of the book would be more useful, the Professor protests: “A translation! What good would a translation be? This is the original work, in the Icelandic language, that beautiful idiom both simple and rich which makes possible the richest, the most varied grammatical and word combinations!”
Luckily the Professor is a polyglot and he translates every Icelandic rune (or letter) into its equivalent in our alphabet. This is the result he gets:
• The consonant to vowel ratio (79 to 53) makes it highly likely that it was not after all written in Icelandic but a “Southern” language, because “Northern” languages contain even more consonants. Since medieval scientists commonly communicated in Latin, this must be Latin.
Further observation reveals that these letter sequences, with punctuation, capitals and brackets can’t be part of a natural language in its normal form, and therefore the message was written in code: a key must be found.
The Professor’s instinct leads him to ask Axel to rearrange the letters, first taking the first letter of each sequence, then the second letter, etc. By following this idea, his long-suffering nephew obtains the following result:
At this point, several clues seem to present themselves, as words from various languages emerge from the magma:
• From English, ‘ice’ and ‘sir’
• From Latin, ‘rota’ (wheel), ‘mutabile’ (changeable), ‘ira’ (anger), ‘nec’ (neither) ‘luco’ (sacred wood) and ‘atra’ (black)
• Possibly from Hebrew, ‘tabiled’
• From French, ‘mer’ (sea), ‘arc’ (arc/ arch), ‘mère’ (mother)
What can the connexion between these words be? It’s tempting to see a link between ‘ice’ and ‘mer’ in a document written in Iceland. The young man’s speculation becomes feverish, and he gets so worked up by his efforts that he feels the need to fan himself, using the piece of paper he has been working on. As it flits backwards and forwards in front of
his face, as if via an optical illusion the meaning appears clearly to this fluent Latin speaker: the text was written backwards! This is how it should read:
In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, Audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges… Kod feci.
… which, if you ignore the poor spelling, means:
Audacious traveller, if you go to Sneffels and descend the crater of Yokuls, touched by the shadow of Scartaris just before the July calends, you will reach the centre of the Earth. This I have done.
You can guess what happens next.
This particular word quest may lack plausibility, just as the rest of their adventures, across underground seas and giant mushroom forests inhabited by long-extinct creatures and culminating in an eruption which saves the travellers from certain death by ejecting them out of the volcano at great speed on a jet of lava, perched as they are on a flimsy wooden raft… But that’s not to say that some aspects of the Professor’s approach can’t be applied to decipher other coded texts.
SUPER CHALLENGE
Using what you have learned about Jules Verne’s version of the Icelandic runes, what does the following text mean? Beware: There are a few letters that do not fit exactly – see if you can decipher them!
Like this article? A course in European and Middle Eastern Languages might be for you!
Can we communicate without social media? Vote now!
The language of social media: polarisation and bias in the digital age
Author: Jack Gamblin, Medicine student at St John’s College, Oxford
Over the last couple of decades, social media has revolutionised the way in which we communicate, connect, and consume information. While it has expanded our access to people and ideas across the globe, it has also contributed to increasing polarisation and bias in public discourse. This article explores how various social media platforms, through their algorithms and design, shape our language, opinions, and worldviews. So, why does social media create division amongst everyday users?
The Echo Chamber Effect
Social media algorithms are designed to show users content they are likely to engage with, based on their past behaviour and preferences. This creates what is known as an “echo chamber” or “filter bubble”. Users are increasingly exposed to information that aligns with their existing beliefs, while contradictory viewpoints are
filtered out. This algorithmic curation reinforces and amplifies existing biases, leading to more extreme and polarised opinions over time.
An example of an echo chamber is anti-vaxx propaganda on X (formerly Twitter) or other social media apps. If a user happened to engage with an anti-vaxx page on an app, then it would be likely that the app would expose this user to more related anti-vaxx information, thus creating a vicious cycle of perpetual misinformation.
Watch this interesting video to learn more about the echo chamber effect in social media.
Searches and likes
1 2 3
Vaxx news
Vaxx science
Vaxx data
Vaxx latest
Vaxx testing
Anti-vaxx
Anti-vaxx news
opinion
Vaxx science
Vaxx conspirousy
Vaxx lies
Vaxx news Government vaxx lies Vaxx ‘the truth’ Anti-vaxx opinion
Vaxx conspirousy
Vaxx sheeple
Vaxx implant
Polarised Language and Discourse Research has shown that the language used on social media platforms tends to be more polarised compared to other forms of communication. Users often employ more extreme rhetoric and emotionally charged language when discussing political or controversial topics. This polarised language not only reflects existing divisions, but also contributes to widening them. State-affiliated trolls and politically motivated users have been found to use significantly more polarised language than average users. This deliberate use of divisive rhetoric can further inflame tensions and deepen societal rifts.
Users often employ more extreme rhetoric and emotionally charged language when discussing political or controversial topics.
One example is the Brexit debate in 2016 and after. Twitter users found themselves embroiled in fierce debates with other users over the vote on Brexit. The language used in many tweets reflected an increasing polarisation amongst users, with pro-Brexit voters dismissing the opposite camp as ‘Remoaners’, and Remainers (the pro-EU contingent) patronizing Brexiteers as ill-informed
and uneducated individuals who let themselves be duped by unscrupulous politicians. To make matters worse, bot-accounts fuelled hateful content and rhetoric directed at users, thereby creating further polarisation, and deepening the rift in post-referendum British society.
The Spread of Misinformation
Social media’s rapid information dissemination capabilities, combined with algorithmic amplification, have created an environment ripe for the spread of misinformation. False or misleading content that aligns with users’ existing beliefs is more likely to be shared and go viral, further solidifying biased viewpoints. Social media acts as a platform that allows projection of these false claims unchecked to millions of people, causing more distrust, resentment, and division.
Nowadays, Twitter/X has added disclaimers (in the form of community notes) to alert users that the content (e.g., video, image, article, statement or assertion made by a user) they are encountering is fake or misleading. YouTube has added direct links to Wikipedia articles which provide context and information about various topics, so users are not misinformed by various videos and their claims.
In 2020, former US President Donald Trump tweeted that: ‘There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.’ Twitter then added a disclaimer/warning that the comment was unsubstantiated, and encouraged users to click on a link to ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’.
Conclusion
Despite these challenges, social media has also expanded our ability to connect with diverse groups of people across the world and access a wide range of information. Yet at the same time, it is important to note that the language of social media reflects and shapes our increasingly polarised society. While social media platforms have expanded our ability to connect and communicate, they have also contributed to the deepening of societal divisions through algorithmic bias, echo chambers, and the amplification of extreme viewpoints. As we navigate this complex digital landscape, it is crucial to remain aware of these dynamics, and actively work towards fostering more balanced, nuanced, and inclusive online discourse. The key lies in developing strategies to mitigate the negative effects, while preserving the benefits of digital connectivity.
SUPER CHALLENGE
Write down a few potential solutions to mitigating the negative effects of social media on users. Here’s an example to get you thinking about potential solutions: can the improvement of media literacy education help users critically evaluate the online content they encounter and consume? If yes, how can this be achieved? Try to think about these questions and propose other solutions.
OR
Write a short essay (300-500 words) about how social media influences individuals’ thoughts and communication. How can social media be changed for the better? Use the additional resources to help you.
If you’d like to find out more:
● Video: The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?
● Article: Evolving linguistic divergence on polarising social media
● Article: Troll and divide: the language of online polarisation
Author: Julia Bray, Emeritus Research Fellow in Arabic at St John’s College, Oxfordrd
Semiotics, from an ancient Greek word meaning “a sign”, is the study of signs and sign systems. Signs stand for things and ideas—spoken as well as written words are signs (because they’re not actual things; they only stand for them), but we commonly think of signs as visual or pictorial, for example, signboards: “TOILETS”, “WAY OUT”; emojis: �� ��; road signs: ⚠��; flags and coats of arms trademarks and logos, and so on.
Signs give out messages, but they aren’t natural or self-explanatory, and they aren’t universal—they’re conventions, and may not mean the same in different cultures (a stark example is the swastika, an ancient Indian religious symbol that became popular as a good-luck sign in the west, which the Nazis misappropriated as a political emblem). In order to communicate, signs must form a system and be accepted by a target group of users. Examples of small systems with small user groups are baseball scoring, heraldry, the Glasgow subway map��.
Examples of large systems with large groups of users are the Paris bus map��, musical notation, chemical symbols, alphabets and other writing systems. You can find out more about these notation systems here.
Scroll through the “Warning signs” section. Would you know what the signs meant without the verbal explanations that are provided? Which of the signs are culturally specific to the UK and why?
Physical gestures (such as shaking hands or kissing in greeting) are culture-bound signs, and so are the systems of etiquette they belong to. An important part of learning a modern language, or the speech of a different generation or social group, is learning what are good or bad manners, such as the body language and forms of words used to express respect, friendliness and so on. It’s easy to misread such signs or send wrong signals through not thinking about the wider system they belong to, or forgetting that they may mean something different in other systems.
What would happen if we did not have universal signs? How would this affect our ability to communicate?
Let us know in our forum.
All this relates to anthropology — the study of human cultures and behaviours and the signs and sign patterns which enable us to decode what they mean — but semiotics plays a key role in other disciplines
too. In science and history, we can’t understand how people once made sense of the cosmos, tried to control the physical world and understood human destiny, without knowing about the systems of signs that they believed corresponded to patterns in the human body and soul and enabled them to read the world around them. As examples, the long-lived medical “doctrine of signatures” was based on the idea that plants that resembled (carried the “signature” of) parts of the human body could be used to cure those parts, and the theological theory of typology held that, in the sacred history contained in the text of the Christian bible, persons and events in the Old Testament were “types” or prefigurations and confirmations of those in the New, and that the biblical text could also foreshadow, and validate, events in latter-day human history, such as the seventeenthcentury Puritan exodus from England to New England.
Today, the decipherment of the sign systems that structure the visual arts of different cultures, from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to Banksy’s pop-up street art, is known as iconography (as are the sign systems themselves). Within semiotics, iconography has wide applications. As advertisers have always known, and as the French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) pointed out well before the digital age, the mass media surround us with “hidden persuaders” who use both visual images and verbal slogans to press emotional buttons to persuade us to buy goods or to buy into ideologies.
On a more cheerful note, whole worlds of meaning of which we’re often only partly aware, if at all, are waiting to be discovered in the sign systems of the world’s literatures,
religions and historical sciences and philosophies. And on a practical, career-orientated note, from graphic design and advertising to fashion, food, journalism, politics and public administration, a basic understanding of semiotics—how to send messages and how to make sure that people can read them—is essential if we want to communicate effectively with each other.
SUPER CHALLENGE
Create a poster about a sign/icon that has either a universal meaning or a culturally specific meaning. Your poster should explain why that sign/icon is important..
If you’d like to find out more:
● Article: The Semiotic Significance of Everyday Life
● Book: Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler LINK > LINK >
Critical thinking skills: creative thinking
Author: Alfie Dry, Human Sciences Graduate, St John’s College, Oxford
In each Critical Thinking workshop, we introduce you to a key skill to help you develop your ability to think critically. This month focuses on creative thinking.
Creative thinking is the ability to approach problems or situations in innovative and original ways. It involves thinking outside the box, generating new ideas, and making connections between seemingly unrelated concepts.
Key aspects of creative thinking include:
1. Flexibility: Adapting ideas and approaches as new information arises.
2. Originality: Coming up with ideas that are novel and different from what has been done before.
3. Elaboration: Expanding on ideas, adding details and refining concepts to enhance their potential.
4. Divergent Thinking: Generating multiple solutions or responses to a problem rather than seeking a single, correct answer.
Developing your ability to think creatively takes time. Being a successful creative thinker involves quite a bit of reflection, first about your own ideas – where did these come from? What is your inspiration? What methods have/haven’t you tried before and why? Then, reflect on the outcome of your methods and don’t be afraid to adapt and consider alternatives. It’s trial and error!
Watch the video below to see Ima Lyer apply creative thinking to her Agony Aunt section in the newspaper and then have a go at our super challenge to practise this skill.
SUPER CHALLENGE
Come up with a message you wish to pass to friends. Create three creative ways to pass this message to them. Think about different ways we communicate and use language; text (poems, prose, emails), non-verbal (dance, images), inference (codes, secret messages). Try each message out on a different person. Which was easiest to communicate with?
Ima Lyer Here to help
The most important biological discovery of 20th century
Can DNA be read as a language?
Author: Tom Kemp, Former Tutor in Zoology and Emeritus Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford
Watson and Crick’s now familiar double helix structure of DNA and how it replicates by the two strands separating and each base attracting the complementary base: G to C and A to T
What was the most important biological discovery of 20th century? James Watson and Francis Crick were two molecular biologists working in a lab in Cambridge. They published a short paper in 1953 with the rather uninspiring title Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid, ending with the words: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated suggests a copying mechanism for the genetic material.” These modest words sparked off the solution to nature’s greatest mystery: how a fertilised egg cell acquired from its parents the information to grow into a fully formed adult.
It was soon discovered that the four bases are associated in three’s called codons, and each of the 64 possible codons represents one of the 20 amino acids. For example, the codon TCA stands for the amino acid serine. The message conveyed is the sequence of amino acids that must be strung together in the cell to form one of the many thousands of different proteins that are the essential molecules of life.
“Alphabets,
Words, Sentences and Books”
Over the following years, molecular biologist gradually unravelled the way in which this information needed by the egg cell to grow and develop is used by a genetic system that in several ways reminded them of human language. And so, what is called by linguists, a “metaphor” was born. A metaphor, from the Greek word to “carry across”, is the well-known literary device used to help us understand one thing by comparing it with something different that is more familiar but has some similar features, such as “the urban jungle”. Metaphors are particularly useful in science to help explain complex phenomena and to suggest new insights. The nucleotides of the DNA are like four letters and the codons like 64 three letter words, each one standing for a particular amino acid. The sequence of codons specifying the complete chain of amino acids of a protein is like a sentence with the words in the correct order. Furthermore, certain codons along the DNA chain indicate where the sequence of codons representing a protein starts and stops, like the capital letter and the full stop of a sentence.
Finally, the full genome coding for all 20,000 plus proteins in the cell can be thought of as a sort of workshop manual for building and maintaining the organism.
Metaphors are particularly useful in science to help explain complex phenomena and to suggest new insights.
Video: How to ‘read’ DNA
“Reading the Book” No cell requires the continual production of all 20,000 different proteins. What is needed depends on many factors such as what particular kind of cell it is and whether it is growing, dividing, facing stress or just metabolising. To continue the language metaphor, it is as if only one or two pages of the workshop manual need be open for the job to hand, the
rest remaining closed but available. Several mechanisms are used to switch genes on and off depending on the current need. Methylation is the addition of a CH3 molecules to DNA, and is a common way of switching a gene off. An acetyl molecule can be added to histone proteins around which DNA is tightly coiled, causing exposure of a DNA segment to transcription, so switching it on. Other switches include repressor molecules that bind to DNA to prevent transcription.
Often genes which are unnecessary for a particular kind of cell are not just switched off but silenced completely for the lifetime of the cell, as if irrelevant sections of the manual have been torn out.
Evolution
Genomes change over many generations by the permanent silencing of some genes and the acquisition of new genes by mutation. This is the basis of evolution and is driven by natural selection of more advantageous genes and resulted in the several million different species of organisms on Earth. Those that diverged relatively recently are more
similar to one another than those that diverged long ago, but all evolved from a single, common ancestor. Language also evolves over time, by the gradual loss or modification of some words, and the acquisition of new ones. Today there are about 7,000 different languages. Those that diverged very recently are little more than local dialects, while those that diverged much further back are so different that they are completely incomprehensible to one another’s speakers. But so far as we know all of them trace back to a single ancestral language.
Like all metaphors, there are differences between the two compared systems. Care must always be taken not to push the comparison too far because that can lead to misunderstandings. In the case of the language metaphor for the way genes work, there is the huge difference between the mechanics of communication, aurally or visually in the case of human language, but movement of molecules in the case of cells. There is no helpful sense in which communication by molecules can be compared to the conceptual awareness of the human brain of the meaning of the words. Another difference is that while a DNA sequence specifies a particular amino acid sequence, the reverse is not true because a sequence of amino acids cannot specify a DNA sequence of nucleotides, so there can be nothing corresponding to a two-way conversation.
What other concepts can be explained using a language metaphor? Share your thoughts in our forum.
Should literary language be difficult?
Author: Lily Middleton Mansell, English Graduate St John’s College, Oxford
This article is a little more challenging. Give it a go!
It’s not unusual to struggle to read a literary text or essay. They can be full of unfamiliar words and abstract concepts, or have complicated sentence structures and arguments. Often, once you work out what the text is actually trying to say, it feels like it could have been put in much simpler terms. Why does literary language have to be so difficult?
Critic Judith Butler, who is often criticised for her hard-to-follow writing style, defends difficult language in her 2003 essay ‘Values of Difficulty’. Butler starts her essay by expressing their anxiety about how to write:
I am wondering how to write this essay. Will I be intelligible or not? And if I am intelligible, does that mean that I have succeeded? And if I am not quite intelligible, or if I am unintelligible, then will that be a failure of communication? Or will it be making a different point? This is a rhetorical predicament I am in, writing here, and it is one not only I am in, but which many of us are in as we try to explain why certain kinds of scholarship in the humanities assume the voice that they sometimes do.
In contrast with Butler’s style, author and journalist George Orwell argues strongly against overly complex or opaque writing. In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell declares that English has become ‘ugly and inaccurate’: a ‘mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing [...] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.’
Orwell argues that writers rely on complex language and clichéd imagery in order to hide the fact that their writing isn’t saying very much at all. These sins of bad writing include ‘dying metaphors’ (‘wornout metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves’); ‘pretentious diction’ (the belief that complex words are better than simple ones); and ‘meaningless words’ (terms that add nothing to the meaning of what you are writing). Such bad uses of language often make a piece more difficult to read, but they in fact add nothing to its argument.
The difficulty of such writing can work as a trick to make it seem more clever than it actually is.
Do you think people sound more intelligent if they use fancy words rather than keeping it simple? Can you think of an example where being simple is more effective in communicating your point?
Have your say in our forum.
To speak in ways that are already accepted as intelligible is precisely to speak in ways that do not make people think critically, ways that accept the status quo and do not make use of the resource of language to rethink the world radically.
Orwell ends his essay by offering six rules for good writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The key principles underlying these rules are simplicity, clarity and flexibility. Concise writing is easier to read and gets your arguments across more effectively because they are not obscured by unnecessary words and confusing jargon. However, that doesn’t mean that writing shouldn’t be complex: as long as it adds to what you’re trying to say, you should be willing to ‘break any of these rules’.
Analysing poetry can help us understand how simple language can still contain complex meaning. Nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson, who is known for her short poems and unusual grammatical structures (particularly the frequent use of dashes), is a useful example of this. Read this poem by Dickinson:
Analysing poetry can help us understand how simple language can still contain complex meaning.
George Orwell
While it is more archaic than modern English, Dickinson’s language is reasonably simple and easy to read. It does not have the complex structures and flowery imagery that defines much of the verse of the period and it certainly seems to follow Orwell’s rules of good writing. However, the meaning of the poem as a whole may be more difficult to understand. Dickinson’s overall argument is summarised in the first two lines: ‘Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.’ Success means most to those who do not have it. So what purpose does the rest of the poem serve? Dickinson uses the illustration of the battle to highlight the complexity underlying her simple statement. The ‘defeated’ man
Success is counted sweetest ToBythosewhone’ersucceed. Requirescomprehendanectar sorestneed.
understands ‘the definition’ of ‘victory’ more clearly than those who won. But this is only when he is ‘dying’, hearing the ‘distant strains of triumph’ through a ‘forbidden ear’. Success is therefore paradoxically understood through the experience of its opposite, through complete failure. Dickinson’s bracketing of the word ‘dying’ within two hyphens makes it stand out, suggesting that it is a defining term in the poem. She suggests that certain forms of knowledge require the context of death, or loss, to be truly understood, because otherwise you are too used to them to see them clearly. In short, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. In this sense, such forms of knowledge or experience are impossible to truly understand in life: you either have them and therefore don’t fully appreciate them, or you’ve lost them and it’s too late. Dickinson’s illustration to her simple argument therefore contains a more complex understanding of success as something that is always ‘dying’ as it is won.
Poetry such as Dickinson’s demonstrates that difficulty, or rather complexity, is not always about language. It is possible to contain a complex idea in very simple terms. Difficulty is also not necessarily a negative thing. As Butler has argued, sometimes difficult writing pushes you to think differently about the assumptions inherent in everyday language. Sometimes complex ideas work better in simple terms. Understanding does not always have to be followed by articulation. It was difficult for me to explain in my own words what was complex about Dickinson’s poem, but you probably got an impression of what she meant just by reading it and enjoying the imagery - there’s a reason that Dickinson wrote it as a poem rather than an essay. If you read a seemingly difficult text without worrying about trying to explain or analyse it, it becomes a lot easier to simply enjoy it.
So don’t be intimidated by difficult writing. It can be extremely rewarding to take the time to work out what a complex piece is saying but, especially when it comes to fiction and poetry, you can also just enjoy certain writing styles without trying to interpret exactly what they mean. The point of literature is often to capture that which cannot be put into clear explanation or argument. However, don’t be afraid to call out bad writing that hides itself in difficulty. Both in your own writing and that of others, keep in mind Orwell’s rules and learn to differentiate between bad and complex writing: if you’re finding something difficult to read, it might just mean that the author needs to improve their use of language!
If you’d like to find out more:
● Video: The History of the English Language
● Resource: Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’
● Video: Rapper Nas and Harvard academic Elisa New comparing Nas’ and Whitman’s writing (Walt Whitman is often compared to Emily Dickenson).
● Video: What makes a great essay?
Emily Dickinson
Do pets really understand our language? Vote now!
Do animals have language
Author: Tom Kemp, Former Tutor in Zoology and Emeritus Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford
Birds, mammals and many other kinds of species, from croaking frogs to stridulating crickets, can communicate with one another by sound. But do trained parrots really speak or just mimic humans? Are the clicks and whistles of dolphins or the chattering of monkeys languages? If the family dog was able to use a computer keyboard linked to a voice synthesiser, could it use the keys to hold a conversation with us? Do any animals possess language? The answer is not straightforward because it depends on what we mean by “language”. If it is thought of as the system of the thousands of words we humans can speak and the infinite number of different sentences we can create from them, then certainly no other animal possesses language. If however an animal can communicate vocally using some of the characteristics of human speech, then we might say that it does have a simple kind of language.
Alex the amazing parrot
Let us start with the closest any animal species comes to human-like speaking. Alex was a famous African grey parrot. Over about thirty years Alex was taught by his trainer to speak more than a hundred words and phrases, which he mostly used in
Shown a blue and a red triangle he could be asked what the difference was and he would say “Colour”; given a blue triangle and a blue disc and asked the same question he would say “shape”.
the correct context. Impressive as this is, it could be put down to repeatedly hearing a word at the same time as seeing an object. The word “Blue”, for example, becomes associated with being presented with a blue object, and “Hello” with a person walking into the room. This is called conditioning and does not imply awareness of what the word actually means. However, by a series of carefully designed training and testing methods, Alex proved to have a good deal more going on in his brain than mere conditioning. Shown a blue and a red triangle he could be asked what the difference was and he would say “Colour”; given a blue triangle and a blue disc and asked the same question he would say “shape”. One of his most unexpected abilities was to ask a question and apparently understand the answer. Seeing himself in a mirror one day, he said “What colour?” and on being told “Grey” could later name other objects as grey. Up to
six, Alex could tell you how many of a particular object he was presented with. Tests like this show something akin to a human-like understanding of the meaning of the words.
Keeping in touch and working together: dolphins, elephants and others
Unlike Alex, no mammal can speak in human words. Dolphins communicate by series of rapid clicks and whistles. A whistle lasts a few seconds, during which the pitch changes up and down. Each dolphin has one unique signature whistle which corresponds to its own name, evidence that it recognises itself as distinct from the other individuals that it recognises, which is a very human like ability. The other whistles
Alex the parrot
are extremely varied, and unlike our words they are not simple separate sounds that could stand for single specific objects or actions. So far, the information conveyed by the whistles is not known; not only can we not translate them, we do not even understand the principles of dolphin “language”.
Given dolphin behaviour, their vocal communication clearly underpins a complex social structure. Juveniles learn a lot from their parents, and adult individuals have friends they tend to associate with and enemies they tend to avoid. Hunting often involves groups of individuals cooperating in catching fish within a shoal. Much of a dolphin’s time is given over to what we can only call playing together.
There are innumerable other examples of animal vocalisation associated with social behaviour. Elephants, like dolphins, have sounds corresponding to their own names, and use their variety of growls, squeaks, snorting and trumpeting to express emotions like affectionate greetings, male aggression, courtship and probably much else we do not know about. Some of the sounds are too low pitched for the human ear to
detect and can carry for many miles to help keep the group in contact with one another.
The howl of the wolf serves the purposes of advertising the pack’s territory, maintaining contact between individuals over many miles, and bringing them together to hunt or defend their territory against invaders.
Meerkats indulge in quiet reassuring chatter while foraging, give warning calls for specific predators like birds of prey or jackals, and have a variety of social calls.
So do animals have language?
All these vocal communications have some elements of language, but lack others. None have the sheer diversity of our language, and one fundamental feature of human language that no animal has yet proved to possess is called displacement. This is our capacity to refer to events other than the here and now. Much of our conversations concern things that have happened in the past, predictions of what might happen in the future, and what is happening away from the immediate surroundings.
Do animals have language?
None have the sheer diversity of our language, and one fundamental feature of human language that no animal has yet proved to possess is called displacement.
If you’d like to find out more:
● Video: The Smartest Parrot in the World (Alex the African Grey)
● Article: Communication and Echolocation in Dolphins
SUPER CHALLENGE
Definition is an extremely important part of language. It helps us to understand exactly what each of us is talking about, and therefore allows us to have a more rational argument. You will have noticed that the answer to the title of this article “Do animals have language?” depends on which definition of “language” is used. Try setting out two arguments, one using a definition of language as the human verbal communication system, and the other a definition of language as any system if conveying information by vocalisation, and then decide which of these arguments you think is the better one.
OR
Record a video of your pet demonstrating that they can understand language and converse with you.
How do babies learn to communicate?
Author: Jack Gamblin, Experimental Psychology student at St John’s College, Oxford
Everwonder how babies go from crying to chatting? It’s an amazing journey that occurs in just a few short years, where babies transform from helpless newborns into chatty toddlers who can express their thoughts and feelings.
Newborns
When babies are born, they can’t talk or understand words, but they’re already communicating at this stage!
They do so through:
• Crying: It’s the universal baby language. Different cries mean different things - like hunger, pain, or tiredness. It allows a newborn to get attention when it needs a basic need or care.
• Body Language: Babies use facial expressions and body movements to show how they feel. This is still observed into adult communication too.
• Touch: Grasping, snuggling, or pushing away are all ways babies communicate through touch. For example, it can give an indication of likes and dislikes for the baby in each context rather than being able to say, “Yes please.” or “No thank you.”
First Few Months
As babies grow, their communication skills become more sophisticated. Cooing and gurgling begins at around 2-3 months. Babies start making soft, vowel-like sounds, the beginning of spoken communication! They begin to turn towards familiar voices and show excitement when hearing them meaning they show signs of responsiveness to other people talking. This development is aided by babies watching faces during conversations which aids their learning.
Months 4-6: The World of Babbling
Babbling is when babies start putting consonant and vowel sounds together, like “ba-ba-ba”. It’s a crucial step in language development. Around this time, babies also start responding to their name and understanding simple words.
Months 7-12: Getting Ready for First Words
In the second half of the first year, babies become more interactive. They use gestures to communicate wants and interests like pointing at objects. They understand more words and speak their first recognisable word around their first birthday. A baby’s
brain grows incredibly fast in the first year, doubling in size! Different parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of communication:
• The temporal lobe (on the side of the brain) is involved in understanding speech and language.
• The frontal lobe (at the front of the brain) is involved in producing speech.
• The parietal lobe (at the top back of the brain) helps with understanding the meaning of words.
As babies experience the world around them, connections form between neurons (brain cells) in these areas. The more experiences a baby has with language and communication, the stronger these connections become.
One important event happening in a baby’s brain is the growth of myelin. Myelin is a fatty substance that wraps around nerve fibres in the brain. It’s kind of like the insulation around an electrical wire, meaning it makes electrical currents faster! Myelin is super important for efficient communication between different parts of the brain. As more myelin develops, signals in the brain can travel even more efficiently. This allows for better coordination between different brain areas, which is crucial
for complex skills like language. Recent research has found some interesting links between myelin and language development. Babies who hear more words spoken by adults tend to have more myelin in languagerelated areas of the brain by the time they’re 2-3 years old. However, in very young babies (around 6 months), hearing more words is associated with less myelin. Scientists think this might be because the brain is focusing on growing new cells at this age, rather than connecting existing ones. This research shows just how important it is to talk to babies, even when they can’t talk back yet. All that talking is literally shaping their brain!
The Power of Parentese
That high-pitched, exaggerated way people often talk to babies? It’s called Parentese, and it’s helpful for language development! You might think that using “baby talk” would make it harder for babies to learn proper language, but the opposite is true! Research has shown that parentese has several benefits for babies including:
• Getting the babies’ attention- The exaggerated pitch and intonation of parentese is great at catching and holding a baby’s attention.
• Helping babies distinguish soundsThe clearer pronunciation and slower speed of parentese makes it easier for babies to hear the individual sounds in words.
• Understanding turn-taking: The exaggerated pauses in parentese give babies a chance to respond, even if it’s just with a coo or babble. This teaches them about the back-and-forth nature of conversation.
• The emotion conveyed in speech:
The exaggerated intonation of parentese helps babies understand the emotional content of what’s being said.
• Increasing vocabulary: Studies have shown that babies who hear more parentese tend to have larger vocabularies later on.
Therefore, Parentese should be encouraged in early life to help aid babies to become proficient communicators with a great depth of vocabulary in later life.
Responsive Communication
It’s not just about talking to babies, but also responding to their attempts to communicate. This encourages more communication, teaches turntaking, and helps babies connect words with meanings. Play is crucial for communication development. Games like peek-a-boo teach turntaking, naming games help connect words with objects, and pretend play encourages using language in different contexts. Music and rhymes are also great for language development.
Learning to communicate is a complex process that involves many skills developing together. From crying and gesturing to babbling and speaking, babies are constantly learning and improving their communication abilities. The
brain plays a crucial role in this process, and things like Parentese, responsive communication, and play all contribute to a baby’s language development. Whether learning one language or two, babies are amazing little communicators from the very start!
Check your understanding of this article with our comprehension quiz
If you’d like to find out more:
● Article: Talking to babies may contribute to brain development
● Article: Talking to babies may help shape brain structure, research finds
● Article: How caregiver speech shapes infant brain
● Activity: If you have a baby relative, try the baby babble experiment
ANALYSING INFORMATION
Punning across languages
Author: Marie Elven, Lecturer in French Language, St John’s College, Oxford
The spread of English across the world has been impressive. Does it have a claim to be a ‘Universal Language’? On the one hand it is used widely as a means of communication between countries with very different languages, but on the other there are as many ‘Englishes’ as there are countries in which it is used, whether as a first or second language. You could argue that English has invaded other countries and cultures but is it also possible to say that it has been used by speakers of other languages for its perceived raw energy and modernity, with no regard for the history and culture it stems from? In other words, has it been ‘cannibalised’? This is a look at what is happening in France.
Everyone knows that French people have a passionate relationship with their language. They are at once protective, pedantic, and authoritarian, but they also seem to be willing to manipulate and pull French in all sorts of different wild shapes following a variety of recipes (verlan, javanais, etc). This linguistic experimentation includes the use of patterns and words coming directly from English, possibly in an effort to rejuvenate their language. The Académie Française, an institution tasked with preserving the French language, has been vocal about the ‘invasion’ of English words and structures that French has undergone, and many are nostalgic for an era when linguistic barriers were less porous – if such an era ever existed.
Some English words are given a completely new sense, and made to interact with French ones to create a meaning that only works if the reader understands French.
However, French is not entirely a passive victim of its neighbour. Mostly in the world of commerce, there are many examples of English words and structures openly used to create wordplay between the two languages, with results which are very often incomprehensible by an English speaker. The ‘lawlessness’ of the process is no doubt part of the fun. Some English words are given a completely new sense, and made to interact with French ones to create a meaning that only works if the reader understands French. Here are a few examples:
Tourism
Unsurprisingly, the tourism industry uses English to communicate with foreign travellers and investors. The following messages can be seen in Lyon and Nice airports:
ONLY LYON
This clever anagram makes no sense to a non-English speaker, although it is visually pleasing and the ‘lion’’ wordplay works in both languages.
TELLEMENT NICE
This line works differently in English and French: a non-English speaker can’t access the pun nice/Nice, but the city of Nice has enough personality to justify its name being used as an adjective, in the same way as you could say: it’s so London! This makes it work in French too.
Retailers and businesses
In a purely French context, where there is no intention to reach English speakers, English also appears:
• Société Générale, a bank, advertises its services to young people (Gen 18-24) in the following way: Soyons cash,…. Let’s be cash? That would be to miss the French meaning of ‘parler cash’: to speak honestly, bluntly. It means something like: We’ll be straight with you.
• Chains of DIY stores have sprouted around the country with names like WELDOM or BRICODOM, where the ending ‘DOM’, although clearly associated with home improvement, is not obviously identifiable on a linguistic level: is it the common English word-ending found in ‘freedom’ or ‘kingdom’, words known by most French speakers? Or is it somehow related to ‘domus’, the Latin word for ‘house? The second interpretation is supported by the rooflike hat sitting on top of the initial W, but ‘wel’ is clearly a reference to ‘Well’. Or maybe it’s both at once? Does it have a hybrid etymology?
• …and the Monoprix supermarket chain guides its customers to its tills with large signs saying ‘C’est easy [ici] que ça se passe’, at least partly accessible to a non-English speaker, and not particularly clear to an English one.
The clear winner when it comes to linguistic creativity is, however, the hairdressing industry. Below are some increasingly fanciful examples. Many of these puns (‘calembours’’ in French) rely on a Gallic approach to English pronunciation, which makes them difficult to grasp for English speakers. What is it, and can you recognise the French words hiding in these trade names?
Million’hairs
Coif’hair
Hôtesse de l’Hair
Hair France
Nouvel Hair
Beau de l’Hair
Alt’Hair’Ego
Les têtes en l’Hair
The more difficult to understand these puns are by an Anglophone, the more you could say that English has been ‘cannibalised’, or ‘vampirised’. But would it not be more accurate to say that English ‘pollinates’ other languages and that from this cross-pollination arise new, creative, tongue-in-cheek versions of French? Perhaps English is not as universal as sometimes thought, and perhaps no language can be, because of every community seems to want to make language local. But at least one could say that it serves as a giant pollinator.
Can you guess what kind of service these businesses provide, and how their trade names work?
Ouigo
Optim’home
Welcom
One, two, tri
Cityz
No Pain No Gain
Could you create some other trade names based on French-English (or other languages) ‘calembours’? Remember that a French approach to pronouncing English words can be helpful.
- In your opinion, is English as productive in ‘calembours’ across languages?
If you’d like to find out more:
● Video: David Crystal - Is control of English shifting away from British and American native speakers?
● Article: Where does language come from? Where does my language come from?
● Article: How English evolved into a global language
Would it be better if we all spoke the same language?
Oxplore is an engaging digital resource from the University of Oxford and the ‘Home of Big Questions’. Their resources aim to challenge you with debates and ideas that go beyond what is covered in the classroom and invite you to consider alternative opinions.
S P OTLIGHT O N OXFORD
Money talks at the Ashmolean
Author: Lily Middleton-Mansell, English Graduate St John’s College, Oxford
Visiting the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is a great way to discover art from all around the world. Its artefacts range from pieces made in the last decade to treasures from half a million years ago. In August, the Ashmolean opened an exhibition called Money Talks: Art, Society and Power. Combining works by American Pop Art icon Andy Warhol and contemporary Indian sculptor Tallur L.N. with Ancient Chinese currency and 18th century British political cartoons, this exhibition tracks the relationship between art and money from the physical production of notes and coins through to their subversion in political artworks and digital currencies. The first caption in the exhibition highlights the close alignment between art and money with a quote by Andy Warhol: ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’ Money Talks asks a deceptively simple question: is art money, and can money be art? Underlying this is a more complicated matter: how can an understanding of the great power money holds - as something that often speaks much louder than words - be upheld and undermined by different artworks? Does art hold a similar power?
The power of an art exhibition lies in its curation. By placing lots of artworks from different countries and periods side by side, a curator can communicate connections, debates and significance without using a single word. An exhibition encourages its audiences to read artworks against one another, thinking critically about their contrasts and similarities. How might one artwork support or undermine the message suggested by another? For an exhibition with political undertones like Money Talks, these comparisons are especially
important. A curator can set up a political debate by simply placing artists with very different points of view next to each other - they are put into a dialogue.
There are too many different artworks in the Money Talks exhibition to give them the attention they deserve. Here we will look at just three artworks from the exhibitions and consider what, when placed together, kinds of ideas they suggest about art and money.
The first face that comes to mind when you think of physical currency is likely that of Queen Elizabeth, who has adorned British coins and notes for over sixty years. The Ashmolean exhibition names Queen Elizabeth as a ‘global icon’, displaying a range of currencies from different countries to highlight how she has decorated ‘banknotes across the world’. This section of the exhibition was created to emphasise the position of Elizabeth’s picture as ‘probably the most reproduced portrait’ - an often-overlooked instance of massproduced art. Sometimes an image is so common that you no longer see it. But take a look at the countries highlighted on the exhibition’s world map of Queen Elizabeth’s currencies. What do all these countries have in common? Why do you think Queen Elizabeth’s face might be on the banknotes of currencies outside of the United Kingdom?
The underlying theme that the Ashmolean does not acknowledge in this display is colonialism. Queen Elizabeth is on the currencies of all
these countries because they are former or current British colonies (now known as British overseas territories), or part of the British commonwealth. It is often important to look beyond an exhibition’s signage. This display celebrates Queen Elizabeth’s presence on banknotes across the world, but it does not evaluate the reason for this presence - a history of unjust colonial practices. While most of the countries on this map are now independent, something as commonplace as a banknote can highlight the lasting political impact British colonialism has on countries all over the world.
Money Talks does explore the colonial associations of different currencies in other displays. This dress made by the British sculptor Susan Stockwell highlights the feminist and colonial politics underlying material objects. The exhibition explains: ‘Stockwell fashions modern-day money into objects that conjure globe-crossing legacies of trade and imperialism, like maps, sailboats and historical
garments. The artist has said that “Money Dress”, which stands as if it is being worn, is “based on the idea of female territory and power being enabled by economic independence”.’ This display highlights how, as well as being used to purchase art, or be understood as a piece of artwork in themselves, banknotes can be a material to create artwork. By using the currencies to make a political sculpture, Stockwell undermines their power - instead of perpetuating their political (specifically colonial) implications, as explored with Queen Elizabeth’s portraits, when made into an empty dress these banknotes transform into new message of feminist critique.
Bank of Jamaica Ten Shillings banknote - featuring portrait of Queen Elizabeth II based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding
Money Dress, 2010 - Susan Stockwell
Senegal-born artist Mansour Ciss Kanakassy invented an imaginary currency called the ‘Afro’, which would circulate in a utopian United States of Africa. In this case Kanassy is responding to French colonial currency - the ‘Afro’ represents a challenge to the CFA Franc, which was originally imposed by France on its West and Central African colonies. Instead of celebrating white colonial figures or perpetuating racial stereotypes (the original franc featured artworks that objectified African people), these banknotes celebrate African culture and freedom. By creating his own banknotes, Kanakassy demonstrates how artwork can imagine a better alternative to the societies that we live in. Since 2016, Kanakassy’s hypothetical ‘Afro’ has been available as a cryptocurrency coin: the development of online currencies have allowed Kanakassy’s utopian banknote to become a small part of
reality. However, it is worth asking if the Afro holds the same power as other currencies. What makes money powerful? What different forms of power can different kinds of money hold? Could certain cryptocurrencies be understood as artworks?
Just from these three displays, you can see how the Money Talks exhibition puts a variety of cultures and objects together in order to encourage questions and dialogue. From Queen Elizabeth’s domain over international currencies, to the use of banknotes as sculpture material, to the creation of a new form of currency as a political statement against colonialism, Money Talks tracks the different interactions and manifestations of money, and its power, across art. Next time you come across a coin or a banknote, take a closer look at it. What images and writing does it feature? How is it structured? Why do you think it is designed that way? And, most importantly, could you consider it an artwork in itself?
Coming up…
WORKSHOP 2: HOW CAN LANGUAGE INFLUENCE BEHAVIOUR?
Debate questions include:
Why is language important in the court room?
How has language affected the 2024 US Presidential Election?
Can your facial expressions say more than words?
And Ima Lyer explores how to communicate effectively in our critical thinking focus.
