The first reference to an “earworm” (which can also be expressed as two words) in a publication in English appears to have been in a novel by Desmond Bagley published in 1978. The concept, though, of a tune or song that repeats endlessly in your mind, is much older and has had many other names. […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
The Non-Politics of Circumcision
Only once did I attend a circumcision. It was in the 1960s, in those dear far-off days when young men like myself simply set off hitch-hiking to see how far we could get before it was time to turn round. Those days seem as long ago as the 1860s when I think about them now. […]
The Transition from Male to Female
My fifteen-year-old granddaughter remarked to me recently that, having given the matter some thought, she would remain female. One of her friends had identified as male and it occurred to me that this was the first generation to have a widespread belief that the choice existed, not least because they have been encouraged in that […]
Academic Holidays
In the summer of 1968 I was holed up with my cousin in my parents’ house on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. We were both in our early twenties, low on funds and single. I might have said that we were “house-sitting”, but I never heard that expression until several years later. We spent the time fell-walking […]
Heaven and Hell in Academia
In June 2018 Malcolm Anderson, a lecturer at Cardiff University, committed suicide. The name stuck in my mind because it was also the name of one of my colleagues when I started work as a lecturer at the University of Warwick in 1969. It was a sad event, but one accepts that depression can strike […]
The Vice-President who Doesn’t Like Universities
The case for mass higher education: University education empowers people and gives them the skills to perform a wide variety of jobs in a changing economy. A high proportion of graduates makes an economy more flexible and ultimately more prosperous. Universities offer dissent and eccentricity and enrich society. The case against mass higher education: Prolonging […]
Who’s Been Appropriating MY Culture?
I was pleased and relieved during England’s home rugby matches in 2024 to hear the anthem “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” belted out by the crowd. They have been singing it apparently since 1987, but recently there has been talk of “banning” it. The controversy has involved a prime minister (Boris Johnson) opposing the ban, numerous […]
Parisian Encounters of the Third Kind
“English games dressed in Greek clothes by a Frenchman.” Discuss this comment on the Modern Olympic Games. Thus the lofty voice of whoever it is that says those things that students have to discuss – in this case, me as part of the historical background to a course on the politics of sport. The trick, […]
The Man Who Went on 500 Holidays
That would be me and, of course, it raises the question of what constitutes a holiday. The Office for National Statistics uses the criteria of four or more nights away from one’s main domicile taken primarily for recreational purposes. I can get to about five hundred provided I am allowed everything including courses, conferences, sports […]
The Case for Real Exams
What the university system needs now, entering the second quarter of the twenty first century, is very much the same as the Tang dynasty needed – and introduced – in imperial China in what we would call the Dark Ages. I mean the jinshi, the system of public examinations that were used to recruit the […]