ANDA-ing love

DATA SEBENAR: asalamualaikum..dr yang dikasihi, kena hantar sebelum bila ya???kerjasama anda amat dihargai!!

Saya dengan berat hati terpaksa menegur hal ini. Mohon berbanyak-banyak maaf terlebih dahulu jika ada yang terasa nanti apabila membaca ini.

Apabila kita berhubung dengan orang yang lebih tua, janganlah kita meng-ANDA-ANDA-kan orang ini. Sewajarnya bentuk yang paling sesuai ialah PUAN untuk WANITA dan TUAN untuk LELAKI. Jangan persoal status perkahwinan mereka atau status socioekonomi mereka. Begitu juga dengan penggunaan KAMU dan AWAK untuk orang yang lebih dewasa dari kita.

Mungkin ANDA boleh meng-ANDA-ANDA-kan orang yang lebih tua apabila ANDA telah menjadi perdana menteri atau menteri dalam kabinet. Itupun kena fikir dua tiga kali. Ini kerana ANDA, AWAK, KAMU dan YOU tidak sama sepenuhnya. Saya yakin dan percaya YAB PM kita tidak akan meng-ANDA-ANDA-kan, meng-AWAK-AWAK-kan, dan meng-KAMU-KAMU-kan guru beliau apabila berkomunikasi dengan guru beliau.

Selain dari itu, adakah DIA dan BELIAU sama dengan SHE dan HE, dan NYA sama dengan HER dan HIS? Bincangkan. Sertakan dengan contoh dari data sebenar dari internet.
Semua pelajar DIWAJIBKAN memberi jawapan kepada soalan ini dalam bahagian "comment' untuk pos ini selewat-lewatnya pada hari Khamis 4 September 2008 pukul 12.00 tgh waktu Malaysia. Letakkan nama sebenar anda di akhir jawapan anda.

Markah:

Betul: A
Salah: D
Tak Jawab: 0 (sifar)

Reaching CANADA

Rasenye Yi Hui have reached Canada safely... and to those who want to vizit her during Xmas can start saving from now on... x bnyk RM60 je...i mean RM6000.. bt if u guyz can cycle lagi jimat - all u nid is a bicycle, camping gear n dets abt it...

Belated HappyBirthday TJ

A very big belated Happy 21st Birthday to Teh Jawahir.


X ade ape nk bagi, ini je.. low cal chiz kek

TQ erynn habibah bee chin:) & hanim hannah;)

tq so much bee chin & hanim for helping me spread the stuff on this blog

really appreciate it...

Seminar Verbal dan Bukan Verbal 2 - 23 Oktober 2008 (Khamis)

Anda digalakkan menyertai seminar ini dengan menulis artikel yang memenuhi tema seminar. Anda boleh berbincang dengan semua pensyarah anda untuk mendapatkan idea dan untuk memastikan kertas anda menepati piawaian kertas kerja untuk seminar ini. Jika anda takut atau khuatir untuk membentang seorang diri, anda boleh membentang secara berkumpulan dan/atau bersama dengan pensyarah anda.

Seminar ini akan diadakan pada minggu terakhir pengajaran.

Layari blog ini untuk maklumat lanjut - http://svbvppikusm2008.blogspot.com/

Yuran penyertaan: RM100.

RM3500 BEIJING JUN 2009

Sesiapa yang berminat untuk menyertai lawatan sambil belajar ke Beijing pada Jun 2009, mula-mulalah menyimpan dan mengumpulkan dana sebanyak RM3500. Lawatan ini ialah selama 7 hari. Sila hubungi DGSS untuk maklumat lanjut.

Anda boleh melakukan pelbagai aktiviti (yang halal je ye) - selling cookies, sewing curtains, washing cars, singing at kenduri kahwin, tangkaping gambar, walkathon, marathon, eatingthnon, sleepingthon, taklarathon etc etc etc - untuk mengumpul dana secara berkumpulan atau secara individu.

http://tsreadinglog.blogspot.com/

Baca blog ini untuk melihat apa yang perlu ada dalam blog anda, selain daripada pengalaman peribadi anda dan selain daripada bahan yang saya minta ada di blog anda, spt latihan.

NO. RUJUKAN PELAJAR - wajib

Mulai hari ini 30 Ogos 2008, semua pelajar mesti meletakkan nombor rujukan pelajar di bucu kanan atas (RHS) halaman hadapan setiap latihan/tugasan/ujian yang diberikan. Gunakan FON ARIAL 24 jika menggunakan pemproses kata. Dan tulis besar-besar jika melakukan secara insaniah.

Latihan/tugasan/ujian yang tiada nombor rujukan pelajar akan diberikan automatis '0' (sifar) mulai hari dan saat ini.

Berikut ialah nombor rujukan pelajar. Saya juga telah menyertakan satu fail di yahoo egroup jika paparan di bawah tidak jelas.

No. Rujukan Pelajar	NAMA
1	AHMAD SYAKIR BIN ABDUL MAJID
2	CHAN SIN YEE
3	CHEN CHAI FUN
4	CHENG YONG PEY
5	CHONG CIEW JU
6	CHOONG FOONG YAM
7	CHRISTINA PRIYADARSHINEE
8	DAYANG NORMALINA BINTI JULAIHI
9	FARHANNAH SHAHFINAZ BINTI FEROZ
10	GAN KAI JUN
11	HANIM HAFIZA BINTI MOHD HANIF
12	HELIANA BINTI JASNI
13	HELLINIE BINTI SINA
14	HOONG XIAO HUI
15	HOW YEN YENG
16	KALAIVANI A/P MURUGIAH
17	LAW LEE KIAN
18	LEOW CHIN YUAN
19	LIEW CHENG YAN
20	LIM SIEW CHIN
21	LIM SIEW FA
22	LOO KEAN HOE
23	LOO SHI YAO
24	MADZIAH BINTI MAT BUNUT
25	MARY WONG MEI LIN
26	MELATI BINTI ABDUL MAJID
27	MOHD ADAM BIN AHMAD
28	MOHD AMIR AIZAT BIN SAINON
29	MOHD BIRSYAHMAN BIN BAKAR
30	MOHD JAYA BIN MOHD JOHAN
31	MOHD NOR AZREN BIN KAMARUDIN
32	MOHD TAN'IM BIN TAJUDDIN
33	NOOR ATIRAH ELIYA BINTI MOHD NOR
34	NOR FAZILAH BINTI ARIFFIN
35	NOR HASLINDA BINTI IBRAHIM
36	NORHASLINDA BINTI ABD RAZAK
37	NUR AIN BINTI ABU JAMIL
38	NUR AKMAR BT KAMALLUDIN
39	NUR YIHADA BALQIS BT MAHAMAD RASHIP
40	NURIZYAN AYUNI BINTI HARUN
41	NURUL SHUHADA BINTI KAMRALAN
42	PUNITA A/P KASI
43	SADATUL NAZIRAH BT ABD HAMID
44	SALWA BINTI ABDUL JALIL
45	SEOW SIEW LENG
46	SHARIFAH KHALIRAH BINTI SYED ABDUL RAHMAN
47	SIM YEN SUN
48	SRI ACHANTI BINTI TENDEN
49	SRI RAMONA BINTI AHMAD
50	TAN BEE CHIN
51	TAN KIT YING
52	TEE LI LING
53	TEH JAWAHIR BINTI MOHD AKIB
54	TEH MING CHOO
55	TEOH KIA LING
56	VIJEYE BHARATHI A/P JEGANATHAN

WAJIB SERAH FASA 1: Tukar BENTUK & Lukis RP untuk PERKATAAN & AYAT dan HUBUNG dgn blog rakan

1) Tukarkan lirik lagu '31 Ogos' ke dalam bentuk ayat-ayat sempurna.

2) Lukis rajah pohon untuk setiap perkataan dalam lagu '31 Ogos' dan ayat yang terdapat dalam hasil tukaran (1) anda menggunakan ironcreek.

3) Paparkan hasil tukaran dan imej rajah pohon untuk setiap perkataan dan ayat dengan disertai kurungan berlabelnya di blog anda.

4) Serahkan versi cetakan dalam bentuk .doc kepada saya pada 3 September 2008 sebelum kuliah dimulakan dan versi digital ke emel hbt2130809syntax@gmail.com dan hbt2130809syntax@yahoo.com selewat-lewatnya pada pukul 5.00 pagi 3 September 2008.

5) Untuk yang belum menghubungkan blognya dengan blog kelas dan blog rakan sekuliah, pastikan anda hubungkan sekarang.

Tarikh akhir : 3 September 2008 pukul 5.00 pagi;) waktu MALAYSIA (untuk bentuk digital) dan 8.00 pagi (untuk bentuk cetakan)

Markah:

1 kesalahan - A
2 kesalahan - B
3 kesalahan - C
4 kesalahan - D
5 atau lebih kesalahan - F
Selepas 3 Sept 2008 5.00 pagi waktu Malaysia - 0 (sifar) untuk digital
Selepas 3 Sept 2008 8.00 pagi waktu Malaysia - 0 (sifar) untuk cetakan

Sebarang soalan tentang ARAHAN (sahaja), letakkan di bahagian 'comment' untuk pos ini. Maklum balas saya juga ada di bahagian 'comment'.

SUDIRMAN's 31 Ogos

sumber: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCiZweEsmoc

31 Ogos

Tanggal 31
Bulan lapan lima puluh tujuh
Merdeka ! Merdeka !
Tetaplah merdeka
Ia pasti menjadi sejarah

Tanggal 31
Bulan lapan lima puluh tujuh
Hari yang mulia
Hari bahagia
Sambut dengan jiwa yang merdeka

Mari kita seluruh warga negara
Ramai-ramai menyambut hari merdeka
Merdeka !
Tiga satu bulan lapan lima puluh tujuh
Hari mulia negaraku merdeka

sumber: http://www.liriklagu.com/liriklagu_s/Sudirman_31Ogos.html

SELAMAT MENYAMBUT RAMADHAN AL-MUBARAK

Kepada semua pelajar, selamat menyambut Ramadhan al-Mubarak. Semoga segala ibadah yang dilakukan diterima dan diberkati ALLAH.

Saya juga ingin memohon maaf di atas segala kesilapan dan kekurangan yang terdapat semasa saya mengajar anda dan semasa saya berkomunikasi dengan anda.

Kepada Erynn Habibah Bee Chin:), jemputlah ke masjid USM untuk berbuka puasa ye. Kitekan nak kurangkan 5kg bulan ini;). So make sure u fast wt me ye, no supper, brunch, or hi tea. Just sahur and buka.

Kepada pelajar bukan Islam, sudi-sudilah ke masjid USM untuk menjamu selera dengan menikmati hidangan enak ketika berbuka bersama rakan-rakan Islam. Most important - it's FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE:-)

SELAMAT MENYAMBUT HARI KEMERDEKAAN

Saya ingin mengucapkan Selamat Menyambut Hari Ulangtahun Kemerdekaan yang Ke-51 kepada anda dan ahli keluarga anda


Semoga kita semua kekal aman damai dengan penuh kebahagiaan dan kejayaan.

DAN sebanyak mana sekalipun anda marah dan tidak bersetuju dengan sesiapa dalam Kerajaan Persekutuan atau Kerajaan Negeri, janganlah tunjukkannya melalui ketidakhormatan terhadap lambang negara, seperti BENDERA MALAYSIA dan LAGU NEGARAKU.

LEARN FROM THE AMERICANS WHO LOVED THEIR COUNTRY AND THE SYMBOLS THAT ARE ASSOCIATED WITH HER, no matter how much they disagree and upset with the policies of their state and federal governments. So far I only saw her flag being burnt by the non-Americans. AND I have never seen her national anthem being butchered by an American. CORRECT ME IF AM WRONG HERE.


so, kidz BE PROUD TO BE MALAYSIANS!!!! and stand tall when the flag is raised and the national anthem is sung.

MAY MALAYSIANS LIVE IN HARMONY AND PEACE FOREVER! GOD BLESS. amin.

WAKTU PERTEMUAN DRY - ULANGKAJI dan SOALAN

If you have any questions on materials on syntax, you'd better make sure that you see me to askme and discuss with me before Minggu Ulangkaji. I will not entertain anyone after that. ANDA YANG MENGULANGKAJI, BUKAN SAYA DAN DR. GOH!!!!

In the month of RAMADHAN, I will set my Waktu Pertemuan on Wednesday 3am-5pm and Thursday 11am-2pm.

If you cannot meet me at these hours, plz contact me via yahoo mess at odyusoff@yahoo.com - either thru offline or online message. AND wait for my consent on the proposed date. Both parties have to agree on the date and time.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to come prepared.

KULIAH BHG SINTAKSIS - RABU shj

Semua kuliah bahagian sintaksis akan diteruskan pada hari RABU 8-9 pagi di DKB.

Jika ada tarikh yang memperlihatkan hari yang berlainan dari hari RABU, maka tarikh yang memperlihatkan hari RABU akan digunakan.

Oleh itu, saya mohon maaf jika pada kuliah lepas, tarikh 5 September 2008 digunakan. Seharusnya tarikh 3 September 2008 diperlihatkan. (ini RABUkan???)

Almaklumla dah smakin mude, mate pn dh mule x mnentu fokusnye... solila ye;)

WAKTU TUTORIAL DR. GOH

Untuk makluman semua, waktu tutorial HBT213 bahagian DGSS adalah seperti
berikut:

Selasa 9am-11am
Rabu 10am-12pm
Khamis 9am-11aM

Tempat: Makmal Bahasa II

PENGUMUMUAN PENTING untuk RABU 27 OGOS 2008

Disebabkan permintaan ramai (well, more like one person and her invisible backups), kelas esok akan diadakan di Lapangan Terbang Antarabangsa Pulau Pinang. Semua dikehendaki hadir di lapangan terbang tersebut selewat-lewatnya pada pukul 8.00 pagi. Anda dikehendaki membawa kamera dan suratkhabar lama.
Untuk yang tiada kenderaan, anda digalakkan mula berjalan kaki dari USM pada pukul 5.00 pagi untuk sampai ke lapangan terbang tersebut pada pukul 8.00 pagi. Tetapi pastikan anda memakai pakaian serba putih yang melantunkan cahaya dan membawa lampu suluh, payung, baju hujan, dan pom pom.
Sila hubungi ketua sorakan kita, Bee Chin, untuk mendapatkan maklumat lanjut tentang hal ini. I am sure all of you have her hp.

PPLZ read this

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elltankw/names.pdf

Gettin Shakespearean la pulak... again on names...

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Meaning

What matters is what something is, not what it is called.

Origin

From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 1594:

JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/305250.html

To those who have yet to change their names:)

Choosing the right English name for you
Written by Alex Cureton-Griffiths

{mosimage}Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, William Jefferson Blythe, Rolihlahla Mandela, Eldrick Woods. No idea who these people are? I can't blame you -- history knows them as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Tiger Woods. Your name can mean the difference between success and failure, so don't choose it lightly.

Now, if you're Chinese, it's relatively easy to adopt or change your English name. The question is, which name should you be using?

Do you need an English name?

First of all you should decide if you even need an English name. Some Chinese names are no trouble for foreigners to pronounce and remember, so in this case you could just use your existing name. On the other hand, some sounds and spellings in Mandarin can really confuse non-Chinese. If your (Chinese pinyin) name contains r,z, zh, or c then foreigners may have difficulty pronouncing it.

No matter what, it's better to have a Chinese name that foreigners can't understand than to have a terrible English name that makes you look bad.

Be conservative

Even if you think outside the box in other aspects of your life, your name should generally be conservative if you want people to take you seriously. This is especially true for more traditional fields like finance, government or law, but is also the case for almost any profession out there.

Generally, choosing a name from Royalty (Charles, Elizabeth, Henry, Victoria), religion (John, Paul, Mary) or history (Alexander, Martin, Ben) is a good bet. Even in these categories though, don't choose anything uncommon or controversial (Adolf, Jesus, Ezekial or Rasputin for example)

Don't be cool

Naming yourself after your favorite pop star or other celebrity is a bad idea. Many celebrities have weird names themselves (Paris, Shia or Britney for example) and that makes it stand out like a sore thumb. Secondly, to some people, naming yourself after a celebrity can make you seem shallow and not very serious. Finally, anything your celebrity namesake does can reflect badly on you. Calling yourself Britney wouldn't have been so bad when she was at number one, but things didn't look so good when she shaved her hair and lost her children.

Don't name yourself after objects

When I was a kid, our family had two pet cows. I named them Honour and Bravery and I never stopped getting teased about it. While it's unlikely anyone will pick on you, naming yourself after an object, like Candy, Kitty or Sky, is generally a bad idea -- it just seems really strange.

Don't be too original

This one goes out to all the Pollos, Bloodbears and Darlings. If your name's completely unique, it's probably for a good reason -- mostly because no one ever wanted to call their child that. Listen to those wise parents. This also goes for "interesting" spellings of names, like Tarcy, Sherree or Krystina.

Be sure you use the right gender

Jackie is usually a woman's name. If you're unsure of the gender of your name, search Google Images and see what pictures come up. If they're the same gender as you, then it might be worth considering. If they're the opposite gender, perhaps not. If it's all pictures of dogs, definitely not.

Make sure your name is easy to spell and pronounce

First of all, make sure you can pronounce and spell your own name. If you don't know what it should sound like, then you probably shouldn't be considering it in the first place. Then make sure your colleagues can pronounce it from just reading it. Finally, if people keep making mistakes, it's usually easier to change your name than to keep correcting them.

How can I tell if I have a bad name?

Ask foreign friends and colleagues for their honest opinion. They've lived with foreign culture all their lives, so they may be able to give you insight as to why a name may or may not be suitable. A name is a very cultural thing, so someone who has lived in the culture for a long time will be able to give you a good answer.

More fun with Google Images

• If it's all pictures of the same person, be very careful. They may be a celebrity. If they're a current celebrity, reconsider your name. If not, research them some more and then decide.
• If it's all pictures of objects (cats, dogs, candy), reconsider your name.
• If it's all pictures of someone the opposite gender, reconsider your name.
• If you forget how to type your name into the search box, definitely change your name

More inspiration

For more ideas, check out books of baby names and Nymbler, a baby name search tool.

source: http://shanghainn.com/networking-with-foreigners/expats/choosing-the-right-english-name-for-you.html

To all the Helens and Erynns: )English names catch on among Chinese

English names catch on among Chinese

Young bridging a gap with West

By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent | October 1, 2006

BEIJING -- Di, Chao, Xu, and Wentao now answer to Eddy, Super, Promise, and Wendy.

For the ever-pragmatic Chinese, adopting English names has always represented a way for them to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap. Now, as China widens its reach abroad and as the number of expatriates living in China swells, picking an English name has become a rite of passage for most young, urban Chinese.

When students enroll in Chinese colleges, they routinely are required to pick English names as a way to prepare themselves for life in their increasingly Westernized world. Students race to snap up the ``best" names on a list the schools circulate.

``Popular names like Michael and Alex go quite fast, and Eddie was already gone before I could choose it," said Eddy Wu, 19, a student at Beijing Forestry University, explaining that he wanted the name because it sounded like his Chinese name, Di. ``So I said `OK, let me take Eddy with this other spelling.' "

People usually adopt only English first names and retain their Chinese family name. The practice is informal and has no legal significance. Sometimes, the results can be quirky, with Chinese names that potentially mystify foreigners often being replaced with English aliases that amuse them.

Super Zhang, 25, a paralegal in Beijing, said he chose his English name because it is a literal translation of his Chinese one, Chao.

``I like to see myself as a great and extraordinary person," Super said. ``People wonder about my name all the time and are always asking me to explain it. But I still enjoy having it."

Most Chinese take their name -- its meaning, its sound, and its associations with historic figures -- very seriously.

Promise Hong, a 30-year-old writer in Beijing, said her English name was a rough translation of her Chinese one, Xu, and that she saw a philosophical connotation in it.

``Promise has more profound meanings especially with the biblical background of the promised land," she said. ``I began to use it when I was a freshman [in college] 12 years ago, and some people I've met have expressed their kind appreciation and curiosity about my choice."

In 19th-century China, choosing an English name was the privilege of only a handful of elites. Possessing one was a status symbol indicating that a person had been to college and rubbed shoulders with the ``laowai," the Mandarin slang word for foreigner.

The process of picking the name often involved weeks of discussions between the person and his or her English tutors and foreign friends. Chinese sages would then vet the short list of names for their tonal qualities and astrological powers.

That English names are now ubiquitous in urban China is a sign of the country's progress, Eddy said.

``My parents tell me how once any foreigner on the street would be stared at, they were so unusual," he said. ``Now, China is developing very fast and Chinese are becoming very modern."

While most Chinese with English names reserve their use for times when they are in the company of foreigners, Eddy said more people, especially young women, prefer using their English names. This is particularly true for Chinese immigrants in the United States and other English-speaking countries, who use their Western names to help them fit into their new world.

Wentao Zhang, 40, began calling herself Wendy while living in New Jersey for 15 years.

``It just makes things easier," she said. ``People [in the United States] used to find it really hard to say my name, so I began saying `Just call me Wendy' and it worked really well."

This phonetic approach, picking a new name that sounds like your original one, sidesteps the pitfalls of trying to find English translations of Chinese names.

Of course, not every Chinese person has an English name. In the sleepy hamlets that dot the countryside, farmers and workers look surprised at the thought of taking an English name. And sometimes, name-changes alone are not enough to bridge the cultural gap.

Apple Li, 21, a travel agent in Beijing, said she chose her English name because her Chinese name is Ping and the Mandarin word for apple is ``pingguo." But one problem remains: Her business card reads Li Ping, since the Chinese write their family name first and given name second.

Many foreigners accustomed to the Western format assume that Li means apple in Mandarin, she said. Adding to the confusion is that Li, when written using a certain character, means pear.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

source: http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/10/01/english_names_catch_on_among_chinese/

inspiration for RP;)

Somalia’s runners provide inspiration

By Charles Robinson, Yahoo! Sports Aug 24, 12:53 pm EDT

BEIJING – Samia Yusuf Omar headed back to Somalia Sunday, returning to the small two-room house in Mogadishu shared by seven family members. Her mother lives there, selling fruits and vegetables. Her father is buried there, the victim of a wayward artillery shell that hit their home and also killed Samia’s aunt and uncle.

This is the Olympic story we never heard.

It’s about a girl whose Beijing moment lasted a mere 32 seconds – the slowest 200-meter dash time out of the 46 women who competed in the event. Thirty-two seconds that almost nobody saw but that she carries home with her, swelled with joy and wonderment. Back to a decades-long civil war that has flattened much of her city. Back to an Olympic program with few Olympians and no facilities. Back to meals of flat bread, wheat porridge and tap water.

“I have my pride,” she said through a translator before leaving China. “This is the highest thing any athlete can hope for. It has been a very happy experience for me. I am proud to bring the Somali flag to fly with all of these countries, and to stand with the best athletes in the world.”

There are many life stories that collide in each Olympics – many intriguing tales of glory and tragedy. Beijing delivered the electricity of Usain Bolt and the determination of Michael Phelps. It left hearts heavy with the disappointment of Liu Xiang and the heartache of Hugh McCutcheon.

But it also gave us Samia Yusuf Omar – one small girl from one chaotic country – and a story that might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for a roaring half-empty stadium.

***

It was Aug. 19, and the tiny girl had crossed over seven lanes to find her starting block in her 200-meter heat. She walked past Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown – the eventual gold medalist in the event. Samia had read about Campbell-Brown in track and field magazines and once watched her in wonderment on television. As a cameraman panned down the starting blocks, it settled on lane No. 2, on a 17-year old girl with the frame of a Kenyan distance runner. Samia’s biography in the Olympic media system contained almost no information, other than her 5-foot-4, 119-pound frame. There was no mention of her personal best times and nothing on previous track meets. Somalia, it was later explained, has a hard time organizing the records of its athletes.

She looked so odd and out of place among her competitors, with her white headband and a baggy, untucked T-shirt. The legs on her wiry frame were thin and spindly, and her arms poked out of her sleeves like the twigs of a sapling. She tugged at the bottom of her shirt and shot an occasional nervous glance at the other runners in her heat. Each had muscles bulging from beneath their skin-tight track suits. Many outweighed Samia by nearly 40 pounds.

After introductions, she knelt into her starting block.

***

The country of Somalia sent two athletes to the Beijing Games – Samia and distance runner Abdi Said Ibrahim, who competed in the men’s 5,000-meter event. Like Samia, Abdi finished last in his event, overmatched by competitors who were groomed for their Olympic moment. Somalia has only loose-knit programs supporting its Olympians, few coaches, and few facilities. With a civil war tearing the city apart since the Somali government’s collapse in 1991, Mogadishu Stadium has become one of the bloodiest pieces of real estate in the city – housing U.N. forces in the early 1990s and now a military compound for insurgents.

That has left the country’s track athletes to train in Coni Stadium, an artillery-pocked structure built in 1958 which has no track, endless divots, and has been overtaken by weeds and plants.

“Sports are not a priority for Somalia,” said Duran Farah, vice president of the Somali Olympic Committee. “There is no money for facilities or training. The war, the security, the difficulties with food and everything – there are just many other internal difficulties to deal with.”

That leaves athletes such as Samia and 18-year old Abdi without the normal comforts and structure enjoyed by almost every other athlete in the Olympic Games. They don’t receive consistent coaching, don’t compete in meets on a regular basis and struggle to find safety in something as simple as going out for a daily run.

When Samia cannot make it to the stadium, she runs in the streets, where she runs into roadblocks of burning tires and refuse set out by insurgents. She is often bullied and threatened by militia or locals who believe that Muslim women should not take part in sports. In hopes of lessening the abuse, she runs in the oppressive heat wearing long sleeves, sweat pants and a head scarf. Even then, she is told her place should be in the home – not participating in sports.

“For some men, nothing is good enough,” Farah said.

Even Abdi faces constant difficulties, passing through military checkpoints where he is shaken down for money. And when he has competed in sanctioned track events, gun-toting insurgents have threatened his life for what they viewed as compliance with the interim government.

“Once, the insurgents were very unhappy,” he said. “When we went back home, my friends and I were rounded up and we were told if we did it again, we would get killed. Some of my friends stopped being in sports. I had many phone calls threatening me, that if I didn’t stop running, I would get killed. Lately, I do not have these problems. I think probably they realized we just wanted to be athletes and were not involved with the government.”

But the interim government has not been able to offer support, instead spending its cash and energy arming Ethiopian allies for the fight against insurgents. Other than organizing a meet to compete for Olympic selection – in which the Somali Olympic federation chose whom it believed to be its two best performers – there has been little lavished on athletes. While other countries pour millions into the training and perfecting of their Olympic stars, Somalia offers little guidance and no doctors, not even a stipend for food.

“The food is not something that is measured and given to us every day,” Samia said. “We eat whatever we can get.”

On the best days, that means getting protein from a small portion of fish, camel or goat meat, and carbohydrates from bananas or citrus fruits growing in local trees. On the worst days – and there are long stretches of those – it means surviving on water and Angera, a flat bread made from a mixture of wheat and barley.

“There is no grocery store,” Abdi said. “We can’t go shopping for whatever we want.”

He laughs at this thought, with a smile that is missing a front tooth.

***

When the gun went off in Samia’s 200-meter heat, seven women blasted from their starting blocks, registering as little as 16 one-hundredths of a second of reaction time. Samia’s start was slow enough that the computer didn’t read it, leaving her reaction time blank on the heat’s statistical printout.

Within seconds, seven competitors were thundering around the curve in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, struggling to separate themselves from one another. Samia was just entering the curve when her opponents were nearing the finish line. A local television feed had lost her entirely by the time Veronica Campbell-Brown crossed the finish line in a trotting 23.04 seconds.

As the athletes came to a halt and knelt, stretching and sucking deep breaths, a camera moved to ground level. In the background of the picture, a white dot wearing a headband could be seen coming down the stretch.

***

Until this month, Samia had been to two countries outside of her own – Djibouti and Ethiopia. Asked how she will describe Beijing, her eyes get big and she snickers from under a blue and white Olympic baseball cap.

“The stadiums, I never thought something like this existed in the world,” she said. “The buildings in the city, it was all very surprising. It will probably take days to finish all the stories we have to tell.”

Asked about Beijing’s otherworldly Water Cube, she lets out a sigh: “Ahhhhhhh.”

Before she can answer, Abdi cuts her off.

“I didn’t know what it was when I saw it,” he said. “Is it plastic? Is it magic?”

Few buildings are beyond two or three stories tall in Mogadishu, and those still standing are mostly in tatters. Only pictures will be able to describe some of Beijing’s structures, from the ancient architecture of the Forbidden City to the modernity of the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest.

“The Olympic fire in the stadium, everywhere I am, it is always up there,” Samia said. “It’s like the moon. I look up wherever I go, it is there.”

These are the stories they will relish when they return to Somalia, which they believe has, for one brief moment, united the country’s warring tribes. Farah said he had received calls from countrymen all over the world, asking how their two athletes were doing and what they had experienced in China. On the morning of Samia’s race, it was just after 5 a.m., and locals from her neighborhood were scrambling to find a television with a broadcast.

“People stayed awake to see it,” Farah said. “The good thing, sports is the one thing which unites all of Somalia.”

That is one of the common threads they share with every athlete at the Games. Just being an Olympian and carrying the country’s flag brings an immense sense of pride to families and neighborhoods which typically know only despair.

A pride that Samia will share with her mother, three brothers and three sisters. A pride that Abdi will carry home to his father, two brothers and two sisters. Like Samia’s father two years ago, Abdi’s mother was killed in the civil war, by a mortar shell that hit the family’s home in 1993.

“We are very proud,” Samia said. “Because of us, the Somali flag is raised among all the other nations’ flags. You can’t imagine how proud we were when we were marching in the Opening Ceremonies with the flag.

“Despite the difficulties and everything we’ve had with our country, we feel great pride in our accomplishment.”

***

As Samia came down the stretch in her 200-meter heat, she realized that the Somalian Olympic federation had chosen to place her in the wrong event. The 200 wasn’t nearly the best event for a middle distance runner. But the federation believed the dash would serve as a “good experience” for her. Now she was coming down the stretch alone, pumping her arms and tilting her head to the side with a look of despair.

Suddenly, the half-empty stadium realized there was still a runner on the track, still pushing to get across the finish line almost eight seconds behind the seven women who had already completed the race. In the last 50 meters, much of the stadium rose to its feet, flooding the track below with cheers of encouragement. A few competitors who had left Samia behind turned and watched it unfold.

As Samia crossed the line in 32.16 seconds, the crowd roared in applause. Bahamian runner Sheniqua Ferguson, the next smallest woman on the track at 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, looked at the girl crossing the finish and thought to herself, “Wow, she’s tiny.”

“She must love running,” Ferguson said later.

***

Several days later, Samia waved off her Olympic moment as being inspirational. While she was still filled with joy over her chance to compete, and though she knew she had done all she could, part of her seemed embarrassed that the crowd had risen to its feet to help push her across the finish line.

“I was happy the people were cheering and encouraging me,” she said. “But I would have liked to be cheered because I won, not because I needed encouragement. It is something I will work on. I will try my best not to be the last person next time. It was very nice for people to give me that encouragement, but I would prefer the winning cheer.

She shrugged and smiled.

“I knew it was an uphill task.”

And there it was. While the Olympics are often promoted for the fastest and strongest and most agile champions, there is something to be said for the ones who finish out of the limelight. The ones who finish last and leave with their pride.

At their best, the Olympics still signify competition and purity, a love for sport. What represents that better than two athletes who carry their country’s flag into the Games despite their country’s inability to carry them before that moment? What better way to find the best of the Olympic spirit than by looking at those who endure so much that would break it?

“We know that we are different from the other athletes,” Samia said. “But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like all the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country.”

She smiles when she says this, sitting a stone’s throw from a Somalian flag that she and her countryman Abdi brought to these Games. They came and went from Beijing largely unnoticed, but may have been the most dignified example these Olympics could offer.

Charles Robinson is a national NFL writer for Yahoo! Sports. Send Charles a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

source:http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/track_field/news?slug=cr-somalirunners082408&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Y d stuf on Doc's blog

So you can dance, Malaysia - Season 3.

no...la

Saya hanya hendak memperlihatkan kandungan blog yang ditulis oleh mereka yang berada dalam bidang perubatan, cara blog ini ditulis, dan tujuan blog ini ditulis.

Jadi agaknya, apakah kandungan yang perlu dalam blog yang ditulis oleh mereka yang berada dalam bidang morfologi, sintaksis, dan terjemahan? Dan bagaimanakah blog ini sewajarnya ditulis? Selain dari dua persoalan ini, agaknya apakah tujuan blog ditulis oleh mereka yang berada dalam bidang morfologi, sintaksis, dan terjemahan?

Medical blogs for doctors and patients alike

Here's a roundup of some of the best-known medblogs. Go to the sites, however, and these doctors might introduce you to even more.

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2008

The world of medical blogs is crowded, colorful and as diverse as the nation's population of doctors and nurses. Following are a few of the best-known. But virtually all med bloggers provide their own "blog rolls," which link to the fellow bloggers they like to read. And most will reveal a bit about themselves under FAQs or in their "About" section.



* From Medskool. This blog by a medical school student maintains links to the MedBlogs Grand Rounds that come out each Tuesday morning. In addition to following and linking to news of interest to medical students and professionals, this site has a comprehensive "blog roll" and links to a wide range of medical Internet sites.

* Emergiblog. Billed as "The Life and & Times of an ER Nurse," this blog includes observations on the practice of medicine from the point of view of Kim, a San Francisco-area nurse and 28-year veteran of the medical profession. It's also the occasional home of Change-of-Shift, a weekly compilation of nurses' blog postings.

* GruntDoc. Former Marine infantryman and physician Allen Roberts, an ER doc in Fort Worth, holds forth on medicine and life, oversees MedBlogs Grand Rounds regularly and is one of the grand old men of the medical blogosphere. "It's cheap entertainment for me," he says of blogging. Of the blogosphere, he says, "it's a strange little fishbowl."

* Blogborygmi. Dr. Nicholas Genes, an ER doc from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and father of the MedBlogs Grand Rounds idea, partners with a pathologist at University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and a medical student from Harlem to maintain this widely read blog, whose name is a variation of the word Borborygmi, medical argot for stomach-gurgling sounds.

* Edwinleap.com. A thoughtful ER doc living in South Carolina describes himself as "husband, father, physician, writer," and writes about medicine, family and culture.

* DB’s Medical Rants. This blog maintained by Dr. Robert M. Centor, an internist at the University of Alabama School of Medicine comments on the practice of medicine and the healthcare system. Despite its name, it sticks to professional topics.

* Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason. Dr. Val Jones' take on "health, medicine and the pursuit of happiness." This blog includes comments and interviews conducted by Jones on the state of the nation's healthcare system, medical research in the news studies and on the medical profession.

* Kevin, M.D.. A Nashua, N.H., internist writes short, snappy takes on news and studies of general medical interest, providing great links.

* MedGadget. Just what it sounds like -- a cavalcade of specialized devices pitched to physicians, richly illustrated and sometimes taken on a test drive.

* Medpolitics. One of the newest of the medblogs, Medpolitics -- a site for "doctors only," aims to give physicians a forum for discussing the politics of American healthcare. Physicians-bloggers hail it as evidence that the med blogosphere will play an important role in shaping the coming debate over healthcare reform.

* California Medicine Man. The blog of Dr. John S. Ford, assistant UCLA professor and an internist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

* Notes of an Anesthesioboist An anesthesiologist and music lover in Boston writes eloquently about the care of patients going under the knife.

* Fingers and Tubes in Every Orifice. A doctor who calls himself "Charity Doc" came up in a housing project and practices medicine in a busy emergency department in "Crack City." With witty and often heartbreaking candor, he chronicles the woes of an underserved patient population that is often its own worst enemy.

* Ob/Gyn Kenobi. This often hilarious blog from the obstetrician-mom of an infant she calls "Bean" is highly engaging. If you're pregnant and sensitive, stay away!

* Mothers in medicine. A new blog in which physician-mothers share "our war stories" and write about "the unique challenge and joys of tending to two distinct patient populations." They're on call, they say, "every.single.day."

* Codeblog. A highly entertaining blog that primarily serves as a gathering place for nurses wishing to share their stories.

* Musings of a Distractible Mind. Dr. Rob is a primary care physician in the Southeastern U.S. who writes about "what it is like to be a physician, dogs driving cars, what troubles are in our system, toddlers with flame-throwers" and much more.

* Head nurse. A 4-year-old blog on the work and play of a head nurse.

* Urostream. Dr. Keagirl is the nom de plume of this very funny urologist, who posts on matters ranging from Pilates to penile fractures.

* Clinical Cases and Images. A teaching blog with a comprehensive collection of cases in all areas of medical specialty.

* Medical Jokes, Cartoons, Videos. Bills itself as a compilation of "Doctor jokes, medical jokes. Anatomically correct medical humor. Not another Medical Weblog."

* Placebo Journal Blog. Calling itself "Medical Humor With a Purpose," this blog is an extension of the print-edition Placebo Journal, and is written by Auburn, Maine, family practitioner Dr. Douglas Farrago. There's funny stuff here.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

source: http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/health/
la-hew-docblogside4-2008aug04,0,5919063.story

Doctors talk shop on medical blogs

Web posts offer insight into the profession, but also raise patient privacy issues.

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2008

» Discuss Article (7 Comments)

For physicians of a certain age, the weekly teaching session known as grand rounds is a ritual steeped in formality and tradition. Presided over by the profession's graybeards, grand rounds are attended with white coats on and clinical details in hand.

Here, young physicians learn to accept their elders' old-school admonishments with reverence and humility.

Grand rounds on the Internet, however, is another thing altogether. A weekly compilation of the Internet's best medical blog postings, it is part classroom, part locker room, part group therapy session and part office party -- a free-wheeling collection of rants, shop talk, case studies and learned commentary (along with the occasional recipe, movie review or vacation slide show).

This rotating Internet roundup, hosted each week by a different medical blogger, is the center ring of a colorful and growing circus of blogs written by medical professionals and posted for all to see. It is making the practice of medicine more transparent to patients and, at the same time, raising ethical questions about safeguarding patient privacy.

"Medical blogs have the opportunity to be such a benefit to patients," says Dr. Tara Lagu, author of an article on the subject published online last week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. "By revealing the struggles we have, they can really open patients' eyes to how to interact with doctors, they can connect patients and nurses who can be isolated from each other and they can be an important source of information for doctors as well as patients."

But as physicians increasingly use blogs to talk shop and vent their frustrations online, patient privacy has become an issue, says Lagu, who is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and an internal medicine specialist. "It's time for us to take some responsibility and really think of how we can maintain the integrity of this process."

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, gives patients strong privacy protections, but the 1996 law predates the medblog phenomenon, leaving gray areas for bloggers who write about their patients.

In a 2006 study, Lagu and her coauthors found 271 blogs written by physicians or nurses. Roughly 42% of those blogs included descriptions of interactions with individual patients, and almost 17% "included sufficient information for patients to identify their doctors or themselves." Three of the blogs showed recognizable photographic images of patients.

And in a sign that blogs may increasingly become a means of indirect marketing by pharmaceutical and device makers, 11.4% had postings promoting healthcare products. Few, however, said anything about an author's conflict of interest.

Medical blogs are the place to eavesdrop on what doctors and nurses are talking about in break rooms and at conferences and to read what medical professionals think about the latest clinical studies or healthcare proposals making headlines. For a growing number of the nation's more than 700,000 physicians and 2.9 million nurses, they are a gathering place like no other.

Here, members of the community jettison the facade of clinical authority; abandon forbearance with obstinate or demanding patients; and flout the convention of paying homage to the profession's most senior practitioners.

"Like everything else on the Internet, it's just kind of the Wild West," says Dr. Allen Roberts, an emergency room doctor from Fort Worth who is better known in the blogosphere as the author of the GruntDoc blog. "It's very leveling . . . you can write in print what you would never say to a surgeon's face about him being an overweening jerk."

Though many medblogs are filled with clinical observations and links to studies, some posts are deeply personal and often downright ribald.

In a recent Friday night posting on the blog Ob/Gyn Kenobi, an obstetrician who identifies herself as Dr. Whoo admonished pregnant patients -- under the heading "Seriously, people . . ." -- not to place an emergency call to the doctor if they had just had sex and had a creamy discharge (but no pain or bleeding) afterward.

"It is semen, you rocket scientist, and we really, really did not need to know that," she fumed on the blog. "Think before you page," forcing doctors to take time away from family and home "to hear about the effluent from your nether regions after your feelgood Friday night."

A growing number of people -- by no means all of them medical professionals -- seem to enjoy reading the unfiltered candor of a profession long hidden behind the white coat and forbidding air of authority.

"It really gives a glimpse behind the medical curtain that otherwise the general public wouldn't see," says Dr. Kevin Pho, an internal medicine specialist in Nashua, N.H., and author of the widely respected blog Kevin, M.D. "Some of the opinions are very raw and in some cases don't reflect on the profession in a very positive way. But they do reflect reality; we often say what people don't like to hear."

When Roberts -- GruntDoc -- sat down at his computer in 2002 and began posting a running commentary on his professional life, he knew of four, maybe five, other physicians doing the same, he says.

Today, the world of medical blogs is a place so crowded that Roberts says he doesn't know most of their authors. According to Lagu's analysis, roughly 65% are penned anonymously, while the rest of the authors identify themselves by name. Some use their blogs to blow off steam and share their experiences in a profession that most agree has become more trying in recent years; others use it as a link to studies they find interesting; about half, Lagu says, make forays into the political realm of healthcare policy; and a few, including one sponsored by the highly respected Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, are primarily teaching tools.

But Lagu says physicians who blog may not be doing all they can to protect the identity of patients described in postings. She cited several cases in which patients had been disparaged by disgruntled physicians. Her study also found 45 blogs -- 16.6% of the 271 she combed through -- that included posts describing interactions in enough detail that patients, or family and friends, could recognize themselves.

Several bloggers interviewed said they are wary of identifying patients and take pains to avoid it. Roberts says he frequently changes the gender, age or other descriptions of patients. Dr. Robert Donnell, a hospital-based physician in Arkansas who writes under his own name at Notes From Dr. RW, says he avoids reference to any clinical cases in which he's been personally involved.

Virtually every medical blogger acknowledges in his or her posts the case of Flea, a physician blogger who anonymously posted on his practice, including damning details of a malpractice suit against him. In the course of the case, the plaintiff's attorney -- recognizing the doctor by the details in his posts -- confirmed he was the author and used his own words against him.

Lagu says that bloggers' intentions are mostly good, but it's not clear all are doing enough to protect patients' privacy and to avoid undermining patients' trust in physicians.

Experts fear, for example, that commercial interests could damage the integrity of the medical blogosphere unless the profession agrees on when and where a blogger's conflicts of interest should be divulged. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, says public relations firms are known to have some bloggers on retainer to ensure favorable mentions of their clients. And Lagu cited an online survey of healthcare bloggers, in which 29% of respondents said they had been approached by public relations professionals to endorse certain products. The survey, prepared by the commercial group Envision Solutions LLC, also found that 52% had written at least one post endorsing such products.

Medical blogging is such a new feature, Lagu adds, that it has scarcely been noticed by the profession's graybeards -- medical community leaders who would ordinarily initiate debate on appropriate behavior of their peers.Amid that leadership vacuum, she holds, the medical blogosphere has become much larger and more cacophonous, and patients' medical secrets are clearly being spilled in the process.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

For links to the blogs that are mentioned, read this article online at latimes.com/health.

source: http://www.latimes.com/features/
printedition/health/la-he-docblogs4-2008aug04,0,3833489.story

if you need to read Lagu et al.'s article: go to http://www.pharmalot.com/wp-content/uploads/
2008/07/medical-blogs.pdf

reprinted in People Fit4Life Sunday 24 August 2008 Star Sunday SF10.

Yippeeeeee....

Tomorrow will be a public holiday for the state “to ensure a full turnout of voters for the critical Permatang Pauh by-election”, Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng said.

source: http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/

Kidz, u can go 2 klas, bt i won b de:) i wil b in QB - mesin wt d zohan wil 4getn sarah marshal n u guyz, n srchn 4 d mummy, n l8r go 2 jusco n gt la lingerie:)

Hugs n Kisses for your Loved Ones

Anakanda2 sekalian:

Before you come back to school this weekend, don't forget to give your mom, dad, and other loved ones a very BIG hug and kisses.

You never know when the hug and kisses will be your last ones with them. So take time to cherish them in whatever way you can.

Trust me on this. I am writing this from a first hand experience.

Hug and kisses do not cost you a sen. And if you have not tried this before you should start now. And when I said hug and kisses, I mean real hug and kisses. Not just the 'hi mom and dad hug and kisses'.

This had nothing to do with what we did in class during our hugging day.

My dad would have left me for eight years, come tomorrow. Since then, I miss hugging him. I miss kissing him. And I miss going to the mamak stall with him at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to get roti canai and teh tarik.

The only solace I have now is that my mom is still with me. At least, I can continue to hug her, to hold her, and to kiss her. And to just watch her sleep in the middle of the nite.

And don't just limit to your mom and dad. Anyone you loved. Just make sure yang sah kehalalannya dah la.

WAT D HEK IZ A TEORI????

source:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/farley/gflt/
gradfemsite/whatistheory.html
[Tq Dr. Hasmidar]

Jonathan Culler
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1997.
chapter one: what is theory?

Chapter 1
What is theory?

In literary and cultural studies these days there is a lot of talk about theory - not theory of literature, mind you; just plain 'theory'. To anyone outside the field, this usage must seem very odd. 'Theory of what?' you want to ask. It's surprisingly hard to say. It is not the theory of anything in particular, nor a comprehensive theory of things in general. Sometimes theory seems less an account of anything than an activity - something you do or don't do. You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what theory is.

'Theory', we are told, has radically changed the nature of literary studies, but people who say this do not mean literary theory, the systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methods for analysing it. When people complain that there is too much theory in literary studies these days, they don't mean too much systematic reflection on the nature of literature or debate about the distinctive qualities of literary language, for example. Far from it, they have something else in view.

What they have in mind may be precisely that there is too much discussion of non-literary matters, too much debate about general questions whose relation to literature is scarcely evident, too much reading of difficult psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical texts. Theory is a bunch of (mostly foreign) names; it means Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Gayatri Spivak, for instance.

page 1

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The term theory
So what is theory? Part of the problem lies in the term theory itself, which gestures in two directions. On the one hand, we speak of 'the theory of relativity', for example, an established set of propositions. On the other hand, there is the most ordinary use of the word theory.

'Why did Laura and Michael split up?'

'Well, my theory is that. . .'

What does theory mean here? First, theory signals 'speculation'. But a theory is not the same as a guess. 'My guess is that. . .'would suggest that there is a right answer, which I don't happen to know: 'My guess is that Laura just got tired of Michael's carping, but we'll find out for sure when their friend Mary gets hers.' A theory, by contrast, is speculation that might not be affected by what Mary says, an explanation whose truth or falsity might be hard to demonstrate.

'My theory is that . . .' also claims to offer an explanation that is not obvious. We don't expect the speaker to continue, 'My theory is that it's because Michael was having an affair with Samantha.' That wouldn't count as a theory. It hardly requires theoretical acumen to conclude that if Michael and Samantha were having an affair, that might have had some bearing on Laura's attitude toward Michael. Interestingly, if the speaker were to say, 'My theory is that Michael was having an affair with Samantha,' suddenly the existence of this affair becomes a matter of conjecture, no longer certain, and thus a possible theory. But generally, to count as a theory, not only must an explanation not be obvious; it should involve a certain complexity: 'My theory is that Laura was always secretly in love with her father and that Michael could never succeed in becoming the right person.' A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it can't be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind among a number of factors; and it is-RQI easily confirmed or disproved. If we bear these factors in mind, it becomes easier to understand what goes by the name of 'theory'.

page 2

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Theory as genre
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study (though such matters are part of theory and will be treated here, primarily in Chapters 2, 5, and 6). It's a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define. The philosopher Richard Rorty speaks of a new, mixed genre that began in the nineteenth century: 'Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre.' The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.

This simple explanation is an unsatisfactory definition but it does seem to capture what has happened since the 1960s: writings from outside the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or cultural matters. Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun, from the most technical problems of academic philosophy to the changing ways in which people have talked about and thought about the body. The genre of 'theory' includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology. The works in question are tied to arguments in these fields, but they become 'theory' because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people who are not studying those disciplines. Works that become 'theory' offer accounts others can use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience.

page 3

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Theory's effects
If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people's views, makes them think differently about their objects of study and their activities of studying them, what sort of effects are these?

The main effects of theory is the disputing of 'common sense': common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience. For example, theory questions

• the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker 'had in mind'.
• or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state of affairs which it expresses,
• or the notion that reality is what is 'present' at a give moment.

Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as 'common sense' is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don't even see it as a theory. As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most basic premisses or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read? What is the 'I' or subject who writes, reads, or acts? How do texts relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?

What is an example of some 'theory'? Instead of talking about theory in general, let us plunge right into some difficult writing by two of the most celebrated theorists to see what we can make of it. I propose two related but contrasting cases, which involve critiques of common-sense ideas about 'sex', 'writing', and 'experience'.

page 4

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Foucault on sex
In his book The History of Sexuality, the French intellectual historian Michel Foucault considers what he calls 'the repressive hypothesis': the common idea that sex is something that earlier periods, particularly the nineteenth century, have repressed and that moderns have fought to liberate. Far from being something natural that was repressed, Foucault suggests, 'sex' is a complex idea produced by a range of social practices, investigations, talk, and writing - 'discourses' or 'discursive practices' for short - that come together in the nineteenth century. All the sorts of talk - by doctors, clergy, novelists, psychologists, moralists, social workers, politicians - that we link with the idea of represssion of sexuality were in fact ways of bringing into being the thing we call 'sex'. Foucault writes, 'The notion of "sex" made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.' Foucault is not denying that there are physical acts of sexual intercourse, or that humans have a biological sex and sexual organs. He is claiming that the nineteenth century found new ways of grouping together under a single category ('sex') a range of things that are potentially quite different: certain acts, which we call sexual, biological distinctions, parts of bodies, psychological reactions, and, above all, social meanings, People's ways of talking about and dealing with these conducts, sensations, and biological functions created something different, an artificial unity, called 'sex', which came to be treated as fundamental to the identity of the individual. Then, by a crucial reversal, this thing called 'sex' was seen as the cause of the variety of phenomena that had been grouped together to create the idea. This process gave sexuality a new importance and a new rold, making sexuality the secret of the individual's nature. Speaking of the importance of the 'sexual urge' and our 'sexual nature', Foucault notes that we have reached the point

page 5

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where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness.... our identity from what was perceived as a nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to ft, the reverential fear with which we surround ft, the care we take to know ft. Hence the fact that over the centuries ft has become more important to us than our soul.

One illustration of the way sex was made the secret of the individual's being, a key source of the individual's identity, is the creation in the nineteenth century of 'the homosexual' as a type, almost a 'species'. Earlier periods had stigmatized acts of sexual intercourse between individuals of the same sex (such as sodomy), but now it became a question not of acts but of identity, not of whether someone had performed forbidden actions but of whether he 'was' a homosexual, Sodomy was an act, Foucault writes, but 'the homosexual was now a species'. Previously there were homosexual acts in which people might engage; now it was a question, ratiher, of a sexual core or essence thought to determine the very being of the individual: Is he a homosexual?

In Foucault's account, 'sex' is constructed by the discourses linked with various social practices and institutions: the way in which doctors, clergy, public officials, social workers, and even novelists treat phenomena they, identify as sexual. But these discourses represent sex as something prior to the discourses themselves. Moderns have largely accepted this picture and accused these discourses and, regress the sex they are in fact constructing. Reversing this process Foucault's analysis treats sex as an effect rather than a cause, the product of discourses which attempt to analyse, describe, and regulate the activities of human beings.

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Foucault's analysis is an example of an argument from the field of history that has become 'theory' because it has inspired and been taken up by people in other fields. It is not a theory of sexuality in the sense of a set of axioms purported to be universal. It claims to b an analysis of a particular historical development, but it clearly has broader implications. It encourages you to be suspicious of what is identified as natural, as a given. Might it not, on the contrary have been produced by the discourses of experts, by the practices linked with discourses of knowledge that claim to describe it? In Foucault's account, it is the attempt to know the truth about human beings that has produced 'sex' as the secret of human nature.

Theory's moves
A characteristic of thinking that becomes theory is that it offers striking 'moves' that people can use, in thinking about other topics. One such move is Foucault's suggestion that the supposed opposition between a natural sexuality and the social forces ('power') that repress it might be, rather, a relationship of complicity: social forces bring into being the thing ('sex') they apparently work to control. A further move - a bonus, if you will - is to ask what is achieved by the concealment of this complicity between power and the sex it is said to repress. What is achieved when this interdependency is seen as an opposition rather than interdependency? The answer Foucault gives is that this masks the pervasiveness of power: you think that you are resisting power by championing sex, when in fact you are working entirely in the terms that power has set. To put this another way, in so far as this thing called 'sex' appears to lie outside power - as something social forces try in vain to control - power looks limited, not very powerful at all (it can't tame sex). In fact, though, power is pervasive; it is everywhere.

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Power, for Foucault, is not something someone wields but 'power/knowledge': power in the form of knowledge or knowledge as power. What we think we know about the world - the conceptual framework in which we are brought to think about the world - exercises great power. Power/knowledge has produced, for example, the situation where you are defined by your sex. It has produced the situation that defines a woman as someone whose fulfilment as a person is supposed to lie in a sexual relationship with a man. The idea that sex lies outside and in opposition to power conceals the reach of power/knowledge.

There are several important things to note about this example of the Theory here in Foucault is analytical - the analysis of a concept - but also inherently speculative in the sense that there is no evidence you could cite to show that this is the correct hypothesis about sexuality (There is a lot of evidence that makes his account plausible buy no decisive test.) Foucault calls this kind of enquiry a 'genealogical' critque: an exposure of how supposedly basic categories, such as 'sex' are produced by discursive practices. Such a critique does not try to tell us what sex 'really' is but seeks to show how the notion has been created. Note also that Foucault here does not speak of literati at all, though this theory has proved to be of great interest to people studying literature. For one thing, literature is about sex; literature is of the places where this idea of sex is constructed, where we find promoted the idea that people's deepest identities are tied to the kind of desire they feel for another human being. Foucault's account has been important for people studying the novel as well as for those working in gay and lesbian studies and in gender studies in general. Foucault has especially influential as the inventor of new historical objects: things such as 'sex', 'punishment', and 'madness', which we had not previously thought of as historical constructions and thus encourage us to look at the discursive practices of a period, including literature, may have shaped things we take for granted.

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Derrida on writing
For a second example of 'theory' - as influential as Foucault's revision of the history of sexuality but with features that illustrate some differences within 'theory'- we might look at an analysis by the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida of a discussion of writing and experience in the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is a writer of the French eighteenth century often credited with helping to bring into being the modern notion of the individual self.

But first, a bit of background. Traditionally, Western philosophy has distinguished 'reality' from 'appearance', things themselves from representations of them, and thought from signs that express it. Signs or representations, in this view, are but a way to get at reality, truth, or ideas, and they should be as transparent as possible; they should not get in the way, should not affect or infect the thought or truth they represent. In this framework, speech has seemed the immediate manifestation or presence of thought, while writing, which operates in the absence of the speaker, has been treated as an artificial and derivative representation of speech, a potentially misleading sign of a sign.

Rousseau follows this tradition, which has passed into common sense, when he writes, 'Languages are made to be spoken; writing serves only as a supplement to speech.' Here Derrida intervenes, asking 'what is a supplement? 'Webster's defines supplement as 'something that completes or makes an addition'. Does writing 'complete' speech by supplying something essential that was missing, or does it add something that speech could perfectly well do without? Rousseau repeatedly characterizes writing as a mere addition, an inessential extra, even 'a disease of speech': writing consists of signs that introduce the possibility of misunderstanding since they are read in the absence of the speaker, who is not there to explain or correct. But though Rousseau calls writing an inessential extra, his works in fact treat it as what completes or makes up for something lacking in speech: writing is repeatedly brought in to compensate for the flaws in speech, such as the possibility of misunderstanding. For instance, Rousseau writes in his Confessions, which inaugurates the notion of the self as an 'inner' reality unknown to society, that he has chosen to write his Confessions and to hide himself from society because in society he would show himself 'not just at a disadvantage but as completely different from what I am.... If I were present people would never have known what I was worth.' For Rousseau, then, his 'true' inner self is different from the self that appears in conversations with others, and he needs writing to supplement the misleading signs of his speech. Writing turns out to be essential because speech has qualities previously attributed to writing: like writing, it consists Of signs that are not transparent, do not automatically convey the meaning intended by the speaker, but are open to interpretation.

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Writing is a supplement to speech but speech is-already a supplement:- children, Rousseau writes, quickly learn to use speech 'to supplement their own weakness ... for it does not need much experience to realize how pleasant it is to act through the hands of others and to move the world simply by moving the tongue'. In a move characteristic of theory, Derrida treats this particular case as an instance of a common structure or a logic: a 'logic of supplementarity' that he discovers in Rousseau's works. This logic is a structure where the thing supplemented (speech) turns out to need supplementation because it proves to have the same qualities originally thought to characterize only the supplement (writing). I shall try to explain.

Rousseau needs writing because speech gets misinterpreted. More generally, he needs signs because things themselves don't satisfy. In the Confessions Rousseau describes his love as an adolescent for Madame de Warens, in whose house he lived and whom he called 'Maman'.

I would never finish if I were to describe in detail all the follies that the recollection of my dear Maman made me commit when I was no longer in her presence. How often I kissed my bed, recalling that she had slept in it, my curtains and all the furniture in the room, since they belonged to her and her beautiful hand had touched them, even the floor, on which I prostrated myself, thinking that she had walked upon it.

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These different objects function in her absence as supplements or substitutes for her presence. But it turns out that even in her presence the same structure, the same need for supplements, persists. Rousseau continues, Sometimes even in her presence I committed extravagances that only the most violent love seemed capable of inspiring. One day at table, just as she had put a piece of food into her mouth, I exclaimed that I saw a hair on it. She put the morsel back on her plate; I eagerly seized and swallowed it.

Her absence, when he has to make do with substitutes or signs that recall her to him, is first contrasted with her presence. But it turns out that her presence is not a moment of fulfilment, of immediate access to the thing itself, without supplements or signs; in her presence too the structure, the need for supplements is the same. Hence the grotesque incident of swallowing the food she had put into her mouth. And the chain of substitutions can be continued. Even if Rousseau were to 'possess her', as we say, he would still feel that she escaped him and could only be anticipated and recalled. And 'Maman' herself is a substitute for the mother Rousseau never knew - a mother who would not have sufficed but who would, like all mothers, have failed to satisfy and have required supplements.

'Through this series of supplements', Derrida writes, 'there emerges a law: that of an endless linked series, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing that they defer: the impression of the thing itself, of immediate presence, or originary perception. Immediacy is derived. Everything begin with the intermediary.' 'The more these texts want to tell us of the importance of the presence of the thing itself, the more they show the necessity of intermediaries. These signs or supplements are in fact responsible for the sense that there is something there (like Maman) to grasp. What we learn from these texts is that the idea of the original is created by the copies, and that the original is always deferred - never to be grasped. The conclusion is that our common-sense notion of reality as something present, and of the original as something that was once present, proves untenable: experience is always mediated by signs and the 'original' is produced as an effect of signs, of supplements.

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For Derrida, Rousseau's texts, like many others, propose that instead of thinking of life as something to which signs and texts are added to represent it, we should conceive of life itself as suffused with signs, made what it is by processes of signification. Writings may claim that reality is prior to signification, but in fact they show that, in a famous phrase of Derrida's, 'II n'y a pas de hors-texte' - 'There is no outside-of-text': when you think you are getting outside signs and text,, to 'reality itself', what you find is more text, more signs, chains or supplements. Derrida writes,

What we have tried to show in following the connecting thread of the 'dangerous supplement' is that in what we call the real life of these 'flesh and blood' creatures.... there has never been anything but writing, there have never been anything but supplements and substitutional significations which could only arise in a chain of differential relations.... And so on indefinitely, for we have read in the text that the absolute present, Nature, what is named by words like 'real mother,' etc. have always already escaped, have never existed; that what inaugurates meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.

This does not mean that there is no difference between the presence of 'Maman' or her absence or between a 'real' event and a fictional one. It's that her presence turns out to be a particular kind of absence, still requiring mediations and supplements.

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What the examples show
Foucault and Derdda are often grouped together as 'post-structuralists', but these two examples of 'theory' present striking differences. Derrida's offers a reading or interpretation of texts, identifying a logic at work in a text. Foucault's claim is not based on texts - in fact he cites amazingly few actual documents or discourses - but offers a general framework for thinking about texts and discourses in general. Derrida's interpretation shows the extent to which literary works themselves, such as Rousseau's Confessions, are theoretical: they offer explicit speculative arguments about writing, desire, and substitution or supplementation, and they guide thinking about these topics in ways that they leave implicit. Foucault on the other hand, proposes to show us not how insightful or wise texts are but how far the discourses of doctors, scientists, novelists, and others create the things they claim only to analyses Derrida shows how theoretical the literary works are, Foucault how creatively, productive the discourses of knowledge are.

There also seems to be a difference in what they are claiming and what questions arise. Derrida is claiming to tell us what Rousseau's texts say or show, so the question that arises is whether what Rousseau's texts say is Irue, Foucault claims to analyse a particular historical moment, so the question that arises is whether his large generalizations hold for other times and places. Raising follow-up questions like these is, in turn, our way of stepping into 'theory' and practising it.

Both examples of theory illustrate that theory involves speculative practice: accounts of desire, language, and so on, that challenged received ideas (that there is something natural, called 'sex'; that signs represent prior realities). So doing, they incite you to rethink the categories with which you may be reflecting on literature. These examples display the main thrust of recent theory, which has been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the demonstration that what has been thought or declared natural is in fact a historical, cultural product. What happens can be grasped through a different example: when Aretha Franklin sings 'You make me feel like a natural woman', she seems happy to be confirmed in a 'natural' sexual identity, prior to culture, by a man's treatment of her. But her formulation, 'you make me feel like a natural woman', suggests that the supposedly natural or given identity is a cultural role, an effect that has been produced within culture: she isn't a 'natural woman' but has to be made to feel like one. The natural woman is a cultural product.

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Theory makes other arguments analogous to this one, whether maintaining that apparently natural social arrangements and institutions, and also the habits of thought of a society, are the product of underlying economic relations and ongoing power struggles, or that the phenomena of conscious life may be produced by unconscious forces, or that what we call the self or subject is produced in and through the systems of language and culture, or that what we call 'presence', 'origin', or the 'original' is created by copies, an effect of repetition.

So what is theory? Four main points have emerged.

1. Theory is interdisciplinary - discourse with effects outside an original discipline.
2. Theory is analytical and speculative - an attempt to work out what is involved in what we call sex or language or writing or meaning or the subject.
3. Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural.
4. Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices.

As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master, not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to 'know theory'. It is an unbounded corpus of writings which is always being augmented as the young and the restless, in critiques of the guiding conceptions of their elders, promote the contributions to theory of new thinkers and rediscover the work of older, neglected ones. Theory is thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings: (agri, Chomskyan greme iz jez plain skeri) 'What? you haven't read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject?' Or 'how can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault's account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization of women's bodies and Gayatri Spivak's demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of the metropolitan subject?' At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence condemning you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task will bring not respite but further difficult assignments, ('Spivak? Yes, but have you read Benita Parry's critique of Spivak and her response?') page 14

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The unmasterability of theory is a major cause of resistance to it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure whether you 'have to read 'Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Helene Cixous, C.L.R. James, Melanie Klein, or Julia Kristeva, or whether you can 'safely' forget them. (It will, of course, depend on who 'you' are and who you want to be.) A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position where there are always important things you don't know. But this is the condition of life itself.

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Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to organize and understand the phenomena that concern you. But theory makes mastery impossible, not only because there is always more to know, but, more specifically and more painfully, because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read.

This very short introduction will not make you a master of theory, and not just because it is very short, but it outlines significant lines of thought and areas of debate, especially those pertaining to literature. It presents examples of theoretical investigation in the hope that readers will find theory valuable and engaging and take occasion to sample the pleasures of thought.