Conditionally vague

Hello again Taru!

Thanks for telling us more about your lifelong learning! So, you’re studying Hospitality Management and Tourism at Rovaniemi University of Applied Sciences, as well a taking a teacher training course at Oulu University of Applied Sciences and, as part of your teacher training, learning about e-learning and web-based learning at the University of Jyväskylä? That must keep you pretty busy! Do your twins help out with your five-year old, or are they also busy with their own studies (and social lives)?

Like you, I also seem to be a permanent student, which can be fun but is also often tiring and sometimes a bit frustrating….

I did an internet search for the term diploma disease, which I remember reading about a few years ago when I did a course (!) on the economics of education: private and public returns on investment. I found this interesting webpage from the University of Toronto. I think you’ll find a lot to agree with here:

History of education: 1976 Ronald Dore publishes Diploma Disease in response to qualification escalation

In your discussion of the benefits and challenges of lifelong learning you use the following sentence (and I’m going to make two language points based on what you have written here):

What would happen if every person who is able to read and write would join to every possible learning community and become a profession what ever.

I’m going to start by re-writing your sentences as follows, can you see the difference?

What would happen if every person who is able to read and write joined every possible learning community and became a professional whatever?

I'm sure you can see that the main change I have made is to the structure of the first part of your sentence. You need a second conditional in the first part because you are talking about something which could happen in the future, but probably won’t. I have deleted the second would and changed the two verbs that follow (joined and became) into the past simple tense.

So, the second conditional is my first language point! There is already quite a lot of information on the BBC LE site about second conditionals, so I’m not going to repeat it here. Try these two links for useful tips and practice exercises:

BBC LE grammar challenge: second conditional

BBC LE Flatmates: second conditional

Onto my second language point now, which is about vague* language. I have briefly mentioned vague language before, in reference to a video that my daughter, Clara, made about our garden. When Clara couldn’t remember the name of a flower in the garden, she said, “It’s a kind of….”. You are using vague language very effectively at the end of the sentence about ‘learning communities’ when you say, “a professional whatever”. Here, I think you are using whatever not because you don’t know the names of any professions, but because you mean any or all professions. Whatever in this sense means anything. By saying a professional whatever, you are able to be general, by being vague. Similar phrases are:

I’ll do whatever

You could write about whatever

I don’t mind, whatever

There is a lot more useful information about vague language here:

BBC LE Flatmates: vague language

OK, so those are my two language points: the second conditional and vague language.

Thanks for the information about your 90-minute night/dawn, it sounds amazing. I look forward to hearing about your hobbies soon!

My next post is my last one and there will be a new teacher blogger next week. I’m planning to do one final video, probably of me saying goodbye and thank you….

Until then!

Rachel

*vague = not specific, unclear

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Comments on the comments:

Sita Ram Rai (from Nepal), Asma (from UAE), Young (from South Korea), Jeronimo from (Valencia, Spain) – thank you for your comments!

Vladimir (from Ukraine) – glad you liked the accents website. Go on, give YouTube a try!

Marianna (from Slovakia) – lots of strong coffee (and quite a lot of chocolate) keeps me going.

Hyoshil (from the UK) – I agree that accents are very interesting and that we should be proud of the one(s) we have…..after all, even the Queen has an accent….

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