Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Language

I know I haven’t posted here in… about a month-ish.  I got a little burnt out on Doctor Who, and my biggest television obsession, Sherlock, has recently had a lot going on (as in, the new series started on Sunday and I’ve already watched Scandal about five times). 

I did finish my paper and hand in a final draft, but I wasn’t happy with it.  I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to clean it up… or would you all rather I just post it as-is?  It’s not awful (I did get a 90% on it from my professor) but I’m sort of stuck a little bit as to how to fix it and say something insightful.  Bah. 

Anyway…

To my followers:

To my paper:

Do I really need an entire paragraph about Doctor Who, explaining the premise of the show in my paper?

Either way, it’s staying in right now, because this is the rough draft.  I’ll cut it later if I find it to be unnecessary. 

But really, I’m not sure if I need it or if it’s going to look like filler.  If you don’t understand the premise of the show, at least the basic concepts that it’s about an alien who travels in time and space in a ship designed for that purpose with a human companion, how will the rest of the paper make sense?

ETA: And I should really mention that when I SAY paragraph, I MEAN nearly half a page.  (Just double-spaced what I have… it’s really big.  I’ve got like three introductory paragraphs: one about my study, one about Doctor Who and one about conceptual metaphor.)

So!  There are actually quite a lot of metaphors in Doctor Who.  I was just looking in the wrong place!  I finally realized that an entire section of my paper is going to have to be about lives and conceptual metaphors about lives/time and how they’re… conceptualized.  One of the underlying metaphors I’ve noticed is “A Person’s Life is a Book/Story.” Also, with a little stretch, “Time is a Book/Story.” (NOTE: I haven’t decided which to use, here… book or story?  If you have a preference, let me know, and tell me why!  It might spark something as to why one works better than the other for my purposes.)

For instance: (I’m putting this under a cut because it ended up much longer than I anticipated.)

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This project is going to be a little trickier than I thought it would be… but it’s going to be SO fun!  I didn’t pick Doctor Who as the basis for my project so I could throw some stuff together about wibbly wobbly and call it linguistics; I’m so excited to start digging into this show and its writing! 

(More like because I’m a super nerd, but it’s all the same to me.)

So!  Here’s the list I’ve got so far, hoping it’ll be enough to get started with:

• S03E11 - Blink
• S05E09 - Cold Blood
• S02E05 - The Girl in the Fireplace
• S01E08 - Father’s Day
• S04E12/13 - The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
• S06E13 - The Wedding of River Song
• S04E08/09 - Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
• 2010 Christmas Special - A Christmas Carol

I wanted to watch the specials between the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, but they aren’t all on Netflix.  So.  Guess I won’t. 

There were a few good lines in Blink that I’m gonna get from the transcripts and put in a word document, so I can keep track of where I’m getting quotes.

Once again, if you have any suggestions/ideas/encouragment/projects of your own/questions, etc. LET ME KNOW!  My Ask is always open.  I don’t even mind if you want to be anon.  You’ve all helped me so much!  I love all of you, so thank you, and have some applause! 

I just watched Turn Left, hoping it would have some of the timey-wimey language I’m looking for, but I didn’t hear anything!

My theory/hypothesis about the show (and time-travel fiction in general, but I can expand the study to include other things at a later date) is that, even though time and space are viewed non-conventionally, the underlying conceptual metaphors that English uses to talk about time and space will still be recognizable. 

There are quite a few conceptual metaphors about time and space, especially spacial metaphors FOR time, like “Time is a line.”  Within that conceptual metaphor, we get “Forward is the Future” and “Backwards is the Past” and there are a lot of tense/aspect markers for those things, like past perfect vs. simple past.  But, even though Doctor Who skews a lot of those concepts, the underlying metaphors are STILL THERE, which is super neat!  It shows just how engrained in English these metaphors are. 

But it’s going to be hard to prove my theories if I can’t find quotes.  I think this weekend is going to be mostly a Doctor Who marathon (with some thrift store shopping for Ugly Sweaters thrown in, because my newspaper staff’s Christmas party is Ugly Sweater themed!).  I’ll be taking notes.

Wow!  Sorry for that wall of text!  I know a few of my followers were also interested in doing Doctor Who-related studies.  Any of those pan out?  Run into any trouble?  If you have questions, ask me!  If I don’t know, I’ll try and find you someone who might!

I went from about 22 followers to over 200 in less than a few hours!  I seriously can’t thank you all enough!  You guys rock! 

There are a ton of questions in my Ask, and I’ll get to them as soon as I can!  It might not be tonight, but as soon as I can.  Promise. ^_^  Just… thanks!  This really makes me even more excited for my Linguistics project!