Laughing at Cancer Online: a corpus-based investigation of irreverent humour as coping

In the context of illnesses like cancer, humour and joking, especially gallows humour “that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way” (Watson 2011: 38), can still be socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer and their carers amongst themselves, can sometimes find much needed comfort and relief in breaking social taboos and making light of their often life-threatening situations. Such naturally occurring interactions, however, can be difficult to capture in the physical world. This paper therefore explores the role of irreverent humour used by patients and carers in the digital world, on a UK-based online forum dedicated to cancer. Specifically, the focus is on a thread called “For those with a warped sense of humour WARNING- no punches pulled here”, consisting of half a million words, over 2500 posts, contributed by 68 individuals. A statistical comparison of this thread with other threads on the same forum using Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) reveals that the key humorous utterances make fun of cancer and its consequences, such as embarrassing bodily functions and paraphernalia required as part of treatment: If baggy had farted lots then HB would have shot across the pool... jet propulsion! Focusing on such examples identified through combined corpus and qualitative methods, I discuss potential functions of this kind of humour in the cancer context, such as community building, support and empowerment in a situation where people otherwise feel powerless. I also reflect on the affordances of digital environments, both as facilitating such risqué interactions and in enabling researchers to capture them

The role of second-person narration in Sylvia Plath’s Smith Journal

This paper looks at instances of second-person narration in ‘The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath’. Second-person narration is defined as “…a narrative mode in which the narrator tells a story to a (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/or hypothetical) narratee – delineated by you – who is also the (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/or hypothetical) principle actant in that story” (DelConte, 2003:207-8). Entries written in the second-person are examined in order to determine the role that a narrative shift (from first- to second-person narration) can have in terms of its potential implications as a linguistic representation of mental states. The contributions of different approaches (narratology, linguistics, psychology) to the study of second-person narration are considered and their findings are re-applied to a non-fictional text. The focus is on only one of Sylvia Plath’s Journals, the ‘Smith Journal’, as this is where the narrative shifts occur. Second-person narration can have a variety of functions stemming from the inherent properties of the second-person pronoun and some of these properties combine, or even clash to produce a whole array of effects such as distancing, sense of an inner split, self-alienation, or similar. This paper proposes that any effects are not only brought about by a narrative shift, but are also dependent on temporal orientation. The effects identified in the text are then linked with research in psychology as well as Sylvia Plath’s known biography in order to comment on how various linguistic patterns can allude to states of mind

Laughing at Cancer: Humour, empowerment, solidarity and coping online

In the context of cancer, humour and joking can still be seen as socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer can find relief in making light of their often life-threatening situations. How and why they do this has received little systematic attention to date. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring 530,055 words of online patient-patient interactions on a thread explicitly dedicated to humour within a UK-based cancer forum. A corpus informed analysis reveals that characteristic forms of humour make fun of cancer and its consequences (e.g. embarrassing bodily functions and paraphernalia required as part of treatment), sometimes via co-constructed fantasy scenarios running several posts. Facilitated by the affordances of the online environment, the main functions of these humorous utterances and exchanges include enabling contributors to talk about frightening, sensitive, embarrassing and/or taboo experiences; potentially reducing the psychological impact of their experiences; potentially facilitating a sense of individual and collective empowerment in a context where people can feel powerless; and building a sense of a cohesive, supportive community, reducing potential feelings of isolation. In these ways, humour helps contributors cope with their illness

Verordnungen über die Bestattungen in den mittelalterlichen und neuzeitlichen Quellen aus dem Szeklerland

Written sources indicate that burials inside churches and within the churchyard enjoyed a special status throughout the Szekler region. For both Catholics and Protestants, burials in the church, mainly around the communion table, had a particular status linked to the belief that the chances for resurrection on the day of the Last Judgement were higher for those who were closer to the saints, to the sanctuary. Nobles, donors and benefactors of the church as well as clergymen would normally be buried there. However, the church allowed every social category to have a grave in the church against a certain amount of money. Burials in the church and in the churchyard were regulated by several ecclesiastic decrees that were disregarded most of the times. The austerity measures in the church protocols give us some information about those situations. In the Middle Ages the church was packed with graves, which, at the beginning of the early modern period, led to decisions to confine burials to the church crypt alone. However, the ecclesiastical regulations did not have the expected results of moving the cemetery outside the inhabited space. At the end of the 18th century, at the initiative of the secular authorities, began an evacuation process on sanitary considerations that ended only at the end of the 19th century and during which cemeteries were moved from inside the church to the churchyard

The Cancer Card: metaphor and humour in online interactions about the experience of cancer

Employing a dynamic system approach, this chapter investigates the use of one particular metaphor—the ‘cancer card’—on an online forum dedicated to cancer. Far from being a common Card Game metaphor with a stable source-target mapping, the metaphor is collaboratively developed (i.e. used, re-used, adapted) to express the idea that patients can use their illness to their advantage in a variety of situations, while also reflecting a broader tendency to employ humor as a strategy for coping with adversity. An analysis of all 106 instances of ‘(cancer) card(s)’ on one of the threads of the forum shows that, though related to English expressions like ‘play the […] card’ and to conventional conceptual metaphors like LIFE IS A GAME, its use is specific to the interactions among the members of this online community. Our analysis of the ‘cancer card’ as a group-specific metaphoreme (Cameron & Deignan 2006) emphasizes that multiple interacting factors must be considered to account for such rich and complex phenomena as the use of metaphors in online interactions

Săpături arheologice la biserica reformată din Tăuții Măgheruși (jud. Maramureș)

A Máramaros megyei Miszmogyorós (rom. Tăuții Măgherăuș) Nagybányától nyugatra, 11 km távolságra helyezkedik el. Református temploma a város központi részén található, a régi Tótfalu/Misztótfalu részen. A templomot a Nagybánya-Szatmár DN 1C nemzeti út veszi körül. A 2009 tavaszán a templom alapozása mellett végzett drénezési munkálatok kapcsán került sor megelőző régészeti feltárásra. A kutatás célja a templom építéstörténetének és a hozzá tartozó temető kapcsolatának megállapítása, annak időrendjének tisztázása volt. A régészeti kutatás során két szelvényt jelöltek ki: az SI/2009 felületet a templom déli falával merőlegesen nyitották, a templomhajó és a szentély találkozásánál, míg az S II/2009-est a szentély északi külső falával párhuzamosan nyitották a 16. században elfalazott sekrestyeajtó előtt. A kutatás során megállapították, hogy az S I/2009 szelvényben a templomhajó és a szentély alapozása és felmenő fala között létezik egy falelválás, ami arra utal, hogy ezek különböző fázisokban épültek. Mindezt a megállapítást alátámasztja az alapozás mélysége, a falszövet összetétele és a habarcs állaga. A falak környeztéből nem került elő leletanyag, amely alapján keltezni lehetne ezeket az építési periódusokat. Az \ud ásatás a templom körüli temető 27 temetkezését tárta fel. Figyelembe véve azt, hogy a temető csak részben kutatott, így a feltárt temetőrészlet alapján jelen elemzés csak részeredményeket tartalmaz és tájékoztató jellegű. Kiemelném azt a tényt is, hogy egy katolikus eredetű templomról és közösségről van szó, amely áttért a református vallásra, így a feltárt temetkezések elkülönítése és keltezése viszonylag nehéz feladatot jelent. Más temetőfeltárásokhoz hasonlóan, ahol sikerült elkülöníteni a katolikus és protestáns temetkezésket (lásd. Szentábrahám, Telekfalva, Teke), a miszmogyorósi református templom esetében ez nem volt lehetséges. A szegényes leletanyag alapján a temető használatának periódusát a 16-18. századra határozhatjuk meg

Interview with Peter Rutkoff

Professor Peter Rutoff at Kenyon College talks about raising his children Jewish, his own history with the religion and the culture, and the anti-semitism he has experienced.https://digital.kenyon.edu/lt_interviews/1036/thumbnail.jp

Complexity theory and conversational humour: Tracing the birth and decline of a running joke in an online cancer support community

This paper argues that a fuller understanding of conversational humour, in all its multifunctional, multifaceted, and heterogeneous nature, could be achieved by conducting at least some conversational humour research from the perspective of complexity theory (an umbrella term covering ‘complex adaptive systems theory’, ‘dynamic systems theory’, ‘chaos theory’, etc.). Complexity theory encourages questions that are not usually asked about conversational humour and provides ways of answering them. It ‘aims to account for how the interacting parts of a complex system give rise to the system's collective behaviour and how such a system simultaneously interacts with its environment’ making 'change central to theory and method’ (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008: 1). The ‘objects of concern’ are no longer entities or things (e.g. the joke, a pun, etc.), but processes, changes and continuities: how do particular jokes, puns or humorous lexemes come into being in a given discourse community, how do their uses and meanings develop? The paper demonstrates the potential of a complexity approach to conversational humour by applying it to one particular manifestation of conversational humour: 235 instances of a running joke centred around the lemma rolo*, in approximately 680,000 words of online peer-support data (2544 forum posts, 47 blogs and blog comments), produced by 97 contributors over a period of 13 months in 2011–2012