cornelia parker, artist

From the Science Museum we looked at how art and nature interact:

discover how we have questioned our relationship with society, our bodies, the environment and found patterns in nature, as we continue to interpret and explore the world around us.

Another way of looking at the world could be how we see sheds - those little huts in the garden where we leave and forget lots of stuff:

or perhaps you prefer your sheds to explode...

which takes us to a reconstructed barn

A good place to see art in London is the Royal Academy summer exhibition. 

There is some great art happening, including from Yinka Shonibare, artist - whose work, as with many artists, is interesting to be seen next to others...

Including Cornelia Parker, also at Tate Britain in London - and New Zealand's City Gallery reopening with a bang with a major Cornelia Parker exhibition.

Cornelia Parker's 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ (1991). SUPPLIED / Courtesy Tate Collection

These are brilliant ideas from Cornelia Parker - giving us Art from Destruction as seen in this recent video.

Finally in a new documentary from the BBC, In My Own Words, Cornelia Parker looks back over her extraordinary life and career.

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Lexical Lab online and online resources

The Lexical Lab platform is innovative, stimulating and full of useful up-to-date English:

Jay Doubleyou: Lexical Lab: learn languages with an online teacher through everyday english and common words, chunks, idioms, phrasal verbs, phrases and expressions used in spoken language

Their social media is also informative - from the founders Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley

They also offer an excellent Blog

You can sign up to their very entertaining Newsletter, which this month looks at 'No-vember'

November has flown by, to be honest, and I've been busy teaching online. With Lexical Lab, we've now only got one more week of our twelve-week term to go before we knock off, but we will be back early in 2025 with more, so do keep an eye on our website and make sure you follow us on Instagram too...

I’ve been writing the last webinar of the year which is on Saturday 6th December. We'll be discussing the nature of difficulty and challenge in the classroom – and why easier doesn't always mean better. You can sign up here.

PS: Here's my vote for the greatest Xmas song of all-time! Enjoy.

To finish on a more serious note, Two weeks ago, Ternopil was the site of a massive Russian terror attack. Earlier today they did an Instagram Live with Tetyana Ivanenko, a teacher based in the city talking about the situation there now, her roots in eastern Ukraine, how the war is affecting her teaching and her students, and much more besides:

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LIVES WITH UKRAINIAN TEACHERS: Tetyana Ivanenko - YouTube

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making shakespeare accessible

Shakespeare should be seen - and not read - especially at the movies.

But there are some great ideas to look at in Shakespeare, including the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...

Meanwhile, if you want to dig even deeper, there are several questions around Shakespeare.

Or if you want a bit of fun, we can look at to be or not to be: the intonation is the question.

And if you want a fabulous 'modern' version, there is The Merchant of Venice A spoken-word synopsis by Kate Tempest - and there is Romeo + Juliet and West Side Story.

The Orange Tree Theatre in London is putting on versions of Shakespeare plays for younger people:

Designed for 11 to 16 year olds, this 70-minute abridgement of Romeo & Juliet tells the complete story using Shakespeare’s original text. Contemporary settings and clear, dynamic staging make the play accessible to all, and is perfect for families to discover one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. Shakespeare Up Close 2025: Romeo & Juliet - Orange Tree Theatre and Shakespeare Up Close 2025: Macbeth - Orange Tree Theatre

There are lots of great materials out there to make Shakespeare more accessible:

Shakespeare's Theatre | i.am.Will Shakespeare | BBC Teach - YouTube

Making Shakespeare accessible | Royal Shakespeare Company

How to make Shakespeare’s language more accessible to students

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6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?

How do we add new vocabulary in English dictionaries? 

The problem is that the UK does not have an official language - nor does it have an official dictionary.

So, it's really a matter of choice as to what is put into dictionaries - or, rather, a matter of choice of those out there who are using the English language.

Looking at the online dictionary.com, it asks and answers the question: How Does A Word Get Into The Dictionary?

This is one of the most common questions we get—and it’s a great one.

The answer involves one of the most misunderstood things about dictionaries, so let’s set the record straight: a word doesn’t become a “real word” when it’s added to the dictionary. It’s actually the other way around: we add words to the dictionary because they’re real—because they’re really used by real people in the real world.

In other words, our lexicographers add a word to the dictionary when they determine that:

• It’s a word that’s used by a lot of people.
• It’s used by those people in largely the same way.
• It’s likely to stick around.
• And it’s useful for a general audience.

All four of these points are important. Our lexicographers look for use not just by one person, but by a lot of people. Of course, many words have different shades of meaning for different people. But to be added to the dictionary, a word must have a shared meaning (that is, it must communicate a widely agreed-upon meaning from one person to the next). If everyone used a word in a completely different way, we wouldn’t be able to give it a definition, right?

But what about how dictionaries claiming that x is 'word of the year'?

It's probably about marketing: getting the name of the dictionary out there. And it works! 

The Daily Mail says the internet is divided as Dictionary.com unveils its 2025 word of the year - or as The Independent tells us, ‘6-7’ is named 2025 Word of the Year: Here’s what it means...

Alternatively, as reported in the E L Gazette, the Cambridge Dictionary names parasocial as the Word of the Year.

This social media and Gen Z/Alpha derived vocabulary was critiqued in last year's choice, as reported in the Guardian: ‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year:

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Take your pick!

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how good is grokipedia?

HOW GOOD IS WIKIPEDIA?

This is from a blog post from two years ago: Jay Doubleyou: Search results for wikipedia

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED [2020]

“Wikipedia Is Good for You!?” by James Purdy | Thematic Reading Anthology

Opinion | Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet - The Washington Post [2016]

Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher | Economist

Is Wikipedia a good source? When to use the online encyclopedia – and when to avoid it [2023]

Is Wikipedia a good source? When to use the online encyclopedia – and when to avoid it

In some countries, students are told not to use it - but perhaps they need to learn how to use it instead:

Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source [2021]

5 Reasons to Actually Encourage Middle and High School Students to Use Wikipedia | Edutopia [2021]

What about today?

As this entry on the website says at Wikipedia: Don't cite Wikipedia on Wikipedia - Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia. As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.

This piece from this year from the website The Online Reputation and Wikipedia Blog asks Is Wikipedia Reliable in 2025:

Wikipedia is a great starting point for online research. It has a very good reputation and consistently ranks at the top of Google search results and has information on almost every topic. But is Wikipedia a reliable source? The answer as to whether it is trustworthy is both yes and no.

Sometimes, Wikipedia can be an accurate source of information. It is updated regularly and contains a wealth of knowledge from various sources (these are two of the main reasons it ranks so high in search). Articles that have many editors who are clearly experts and that include solid citations and references are usually quite reliable. Articles with less oversight tend to be less reliable.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia. This means anyone can edit its pages, which leads to wild inconsistencies across its pages. With 45,175,790 registered Wikipedia users, there is always the potential for bias or inaccuracies.

Therefore, when reading information on Wikipedia, it’s important to take the time to verify the accuracy of the information by looking for other sources that corroborate the facts.

So, Wikipedia is a good starting-off point.

But what about its 'politics'?

It's a long-standing point as to what might be the Ideological bias on Wikipedia - Wikipedia

One of the founders says it is biased: Wikipedia co-founder says online encyclopedia has been completely corrupted by woke ideology | Daily Mail Online

The other says not: Wikipedia is not woke, insists founder Jimmy Wales

On the right they say: How Wikipedia became Wokepedia - spiked

And on the left they say: Wikipedia’s Deep Ties to Big Tech | Institute for New Economic Thinking

Here's an excellent piece from the Manhattan Institute which says it's OK but could do better with regard to any political bias: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?

And a piece from today's Le Monde very much looks at the current situation: Wikipedia, under fire from conservatives and shaken by AI:

Nearing its 25th anniversary, the online encyclopedia faces multiple challenges: accusations of 'woke' bias, threats to contributors, AI-generated content and declining readership. Despite these issues, Wikipedia remains resilient. But for how long?

Wikipedia is "controlled by far-left activists." "Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority." "I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia." These are just a few of the increasingly virulent messages posted online by Elon Musk, the world's richest man.

On October 27, Musk took things a step further by launching his own encyclopedia, Grokipedia, which he claimed would represent "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." More than 885,000 articles, all generated by artificial intelligence (AI), make up what he called a site "10X better" than Wikipedia....

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES - AND ARE THEY ANY GOOD?

There are indeed other places to go, as detailed in this blog piece from 2021: Jay Doubleyou: alternative wikipedias

Although the best are probably here: 5 Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model | Cracked.com

Now we have Grokipedia. which according to it:  

Grokipedia is an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge.

And according to Grokipedia - Wikipedia:

Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia developed by xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025, as version 0.1. Entries in Grokipedia are created and edited by the Grok large language model (LLM). Many articles are derived from Wikipedia, with some copied nearly verbatim at launch.

A problem seems to be its sources.

The Guardian [liberal/left] has said: In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Richard Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. “AI just hoovers up everything.”

The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.“We live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight. The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks. Those are real knowledge processes.”

Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have. It doesn’t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust. It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on. It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made.”

The Financial Times says Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is a major own goal | Financial Times:

Musk, who has called Wikipedia, on which Grokipedia is modelled, “Wokepedia” and has described the site as “an extension of legacy media propaganda”, demonstrates a facile understanding of human knowledge. After all, even our best approximations of what is true are constantly shifting, as new facts and developments emerge, and as the values that shape our understanding change...

Go and have a poke around in it and you will see what I mean. You will find Tommy Robinson described as a “citizen journalist” in glowing terms in the very first sentence of his entry. You will see Elon Musk’s 20lb weight loss highlighted in his entry as if that were important information, and you will find out that can be attributed to intermittent fasting (rather than to Mounjaro). You will read Kremlin talking points in the first paragraph of the entry on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, like the idea that the former is “denazifying” the latter. You might also be somewhat mystified — given its purported role in propagating legacy media propaganda — to find that, often, “content is adapted from Wikipedia”.

Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal. Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have “liberal” biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it’s so hard to know what’s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.

Even Grok, the xAI chatbot the new site is named after, told me that “while Grokipedia improves on specific Wikipedia flaws — like verbose, overly critical entries on conservative topics — its AI gatekeeping creates a centralised ‘Musk’s truth’ filter, lacking Wikipedia’s distributed checks”, and that “it trades one set of biases for another, often with less accountability.”

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reading broadens the mind

They say that 'travel broadens the mind': 

It’s hard to not have any prejudices, especially when we are bombarded by bad news on a 24/7 schedule. However, we implore you to act against these; by visiting these countries, having an open mind for their culture and cuisine and asking questions. Being genuinely curious and respectful will guarantee to open doors for you and lead to experiences you would never have had before... Why Does Travel Broaden the Mind?

Studies suggest that taking a gap year or studying abroad can positively influence your brain to make you more outgoing and open to new ideas... Travel broadens the mind, but can it alter the brain? | Students | The Guardian

And perhaps 'reading broadens the mind' in the same way:

Reading is a gateway to new worlds, cultures, and perspectives. Through books, we can travel across time and space, experiencing different eras, countries, and societies. Whether we delve into historical accounts, immerse ourselves in fiction, or explore the realms of science, reading broadens our minds and expands our horizons. It allows us to step into the shoes of diverse characters, fostering empathy and a deeper understanding of the human condition. By encountering different viewpoints and narratives, we become more tolerant, open-minded, and compassionate individuals... The Profound Benefits of Reading: Expanding Horizons, Sharpening Minds, and Enriching Lives | by Lanu Wilson | Medium

Yes, it's good for us! What Reading Does To Your Brain - YouTube

As Matthew D'Ancona, writing in the New World/European, says, reading is the new resistance:

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

But how is this done? Or (more specifically) what practices encourage the kind of radical empathy that Harper Lee’s lawyer prescribes? Allow me to suggest that reading – reading often, closely and critically – is a significant part of the answer.

As Harold Bloom puts it in How to Read and Why (2000), the company of books “returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends… One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change.” ...

Books are the rebel contraband of the idiot age.

As Malcolm X recalled in his autobiography: “I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

For the young Nye Bevan, books also represented a form of liberation. As Michael Foot writes in his biography of the founder of the National Health Service, the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute Library was an intellectual temple for the teenaged Bevan: “his reading became prodigious… He seized on everything and would often stay awake reading until the dawn. He wrote poems of his own and declaimed many more.”

This is why it is so infuriating when the campaign for reading is dismissed as a middle-class preoccupation or an elitist cause. The opposite is the case: it is precisely those who do not grow up in a household rich in intellectual capital who most deserve access to the full range of culture and knowledge. Why should books be the preserve of the affluent, a luxury rather than a basic entitlement at the core of modern citizenship?

See also some more recent blog posts on the value of reading:

Jay Doubleyou: what makes a good detective story - it's not the plot

Jay Doubleyou: today is world book day in the uk and ireland!

Jay Doubleyou: the key language learning benefits of graded readers

Jay Doubleyou: how to teach/learn reading

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listening to the languages of papua new guinea and questioning the notion of a 'universal grammar'

It's clear that language is a human thing.

But how has language come about? What do languages have in common?

Here are some ideas:

the language of thought hypothesis

learning theory: the poverty of the stimulus

paulo freire and the tabula rasa

steven pinker - and language

The most dominant theory comes from Chomsky:

theories of language learning and teaching: behaviourism vs nativism

chomsky and language acquisition

what makes us human: noam chomsky and human languages

behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

As Wikipedia summarises:

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.[1] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established.

Other linguists have opposed that notion, arguing that languages are so diverse that the postulated universality is rare.[2] The theory of universal grammar remains a subject of debate among linguists.[3]

And the theory is indeed being debated.

This month, the British Academy Neil and Saras Smith Medal has just been awarded to Professor Nicholas Evans for his long and distinguished career working on endangered languages, both documenting hitherto undescribed languages and exploring the consequences of such data for general linguistic theory.

This is the linguist they can’t shut up: 

Nicholas Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him. They had exited a rifle wielded by a hungover pilot called Fletcher...

And this is his book, courtesy of the New European/World:

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Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us (The Language Library) : Evans, Nicholas: Amazon.co.uk: Books

This is quite revolutionary when it comes to understanding human language, because, through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages:

Evans’ work has made a significant impact beyond academia – interpreting for Native Title cases and cultural heritage documentation, developing writing systems for previously unwritten languages, and helping revitalise endangered languages.

Evans is currently teaching in Garrthalala, Northeastern Arnhem Land at a new ‘bush uni’ initiative aimed at bridging the path to university studies for Yolŋu Matha-speaking students. He will return to Canberra next month to continue exploring how languages shape – and are shaped – by the ways humans think, feel, and imagine.

It’s a reminder that every language reveals a unique act of human imagination, and a testament to a lifetime spent listening deeply to the many voices of our world.

Interestingly, Chomsky was the first to receive the British Academy prize - as reported by the Observer this weekend on Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages:

The first winner of that medal, in 2014, was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky famously emphasised the commonalities across languages, the universal template or grammar that a baby is born with, that allows it to pick up any natural language with minimal prompting.

Evans thinks the Chomskyans are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and that what defines language is its staggering diversity – the vast span of “engineering solutions” that evolution has found to the problem of human communication.

A language must allow a person to express any idea to another person, but it also has to be learnable by babies. These two constraints drive language evolution, but what nobody yet knows is where the limits of the possible lie. How big is the language design space? Or, to put it another way, how complex or expressive of the minutiae of human experience can a language become, before it becomes unlearnable?

The reason nobody knows this is because it is thought that only about 10% of the estimated 7,000 living languages are well documented. Since 90% of those languages are also endangered, with many of the unwritten ones being at the greatest risk of extinction, Evans has long argued for the need to record them.

The linguists who take on that painstaking task are constantly reminded of the ocean of diversity on whose shore they stand. “Almost every new language that comes under the microscope reveals unanticipated new features,” Evans and fellow linguist Stephen Levinson, then director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, wrote in a landmark 2009 paper questioning the mainstream Chomskyan view.

There is another reason why Evans considers documentation so vital. Language infuses everything we do, so studying it is, he says, “mainlining into the human experience” – past and present.

This is the research by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson from 2009: With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

The Evans-Levinson work is quite fundamental to what makes us human:

Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

Others have followed this up, looking at the myth of language universals and the myth of universal grammar:

It has been widely argued that an innate Universal Grammar (UG) must be postulated to explain two key observations: first, that languages share putatively “universal” patterns, which appear arbitrary from a functional, communicative point of view; and second, that children acquire language so readily from an apparently impoverished linguistic input (the “poverty of the stimulus” argument). The second point has been the subject of considerable recent interest, with many theorists arguing that linguistic input is richer than has previously been suspected (e.g., Pullum & Scholz 2002; Reali & Christiansen 2005) or that modern learning methods are richer than is often presumed (e.g., Chater & Vita´nyi 2007; Harman & Kulkarni 2007). The first argument, based on language universals, has gone relatively unchallenged in the cognitive science literature– but no longer. Evans & Levinson (E&L) provide powerful evidence that language universals are myth rather than reality, and hence, that this line of defense of UG is swept aside. It remains to be explained, though, how languages came to display such stunning diversity, and this is where research on language evolution may offer some insight.

Finally, another [Vyvyan] Evans has written a more accessible book challenging The Language Myth - but it was really not liked by the academic establishment:

In 2016, Language, the flagship academic journal of the Linguistic Society of America published a series of "Alternative (Re)views"[12] by six leading linguists, all addressing The Language Myth. Evans was originally invited to contribute a response to those articles. However, his submission was rejected by the journal's review editor.[13] Evans wrote an open-letter to the linguistics community claiming that he was being censored.[14]

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