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Sunday 22 April 2012

Next module

Went to University for the start of the new module. Wore my striped asymmetric jacket and felt good. This one was on corpus linguistics - studying large bodies of text using computers - so I was OK with it. They used as an example looking for how people greet each other - 'hi', 'hello' or 'good morning'. The results showed that people over 60 rarely use 'hi' and everyone agreed that 'old people' were more formal. I kept my mouth shut (for once!) but wanted to explain that 60 is not old, that many of my friends are over 60 and that most of us say 'hi'. It turned out that the data was 30 years old, so they were talking about a previous generation of 'over 60s'. Whereas we are all children of the flower-power 60s, man. It makes you wonder whether a lot of age-related research is out-of date.

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