Tim William Machan. (2009). Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tim William Machan’s book Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English illuminates the status of English in the context of a conflictual history. It has been on my desk for some time while I have engaged in inner and outer debate about it, mostly about why I find it so rich and students find it less so. To support my teaching of the history of the English language, I wanted a carefully researched book that displayed English and its evolution as a site of difficulty as well as opportunity. I wanted a book that could show that English is a language whose history is laden with issues of colonialism, hegemony, power imbalances, and prescriptivism—the latter complicit in all the preceding. I wanted a book that would detail the need to nuance notions of grammar and its unproblematic goodness. I wanted a book to ground, historically and socio-linguistically, Deborah Cameron’s (1995) arguments in Verbal Hygiene. Machan provides all those things. This review celebrates Machan’s undoubted achievement in producing such a book, while noting that I still search for a book more persuasive to students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".