Recent Books

In December 2004 I took up an academic post at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, and from that moment had to accumulate publications to embellish my CV. In fifteen years I wrote a couple of books whose sales were never likely to induce me to scamper off to a tax haven, plus thirty-four shorter works, either articles for academic journals or chapters in multi-authored volumes. Some of that stuff makes for rather painful reading even for me. My discipline is linguistics and it has always dismayed me to observe how linguists, of all people, seem to delight in bamboozling readers with almost impenetrable prose and unnecessary jargon. Of course, if your field is quantum mechanics it is impossible not to impress people with how clever you are, but if you deal with language use, a skill that nearly everybody uses every day for most of their lives, the temptation to mystify things may be difficult to resist. 

I played the game and churned out the publications but I was never happy about wilfully suppressing my preference for clarity and a more engaging style. In the end it didn’t do me a scrap of good in career terms, and when I realised that I was going no further in the university it was more a liberation than a disappointment. At last I could write what I wanted to write. I didn’t abandon my discipline but I unapologetically embraced popular linguistics for a wider readership plus a willingness to stray into other fields, notably media studies and political science. And also fiction. Rather late in life, I am beginning to feel like a writer.