"My secretary will fax you the details"

In a recent social media post, ELT writer Katherine Bilsborough was bemoaning the appallingly sexist images that came up when she was searching for secretary on a stock image site. I won't share the images, but I'm sure you can imagine the kind of thing. The post prompted a lot of equally appalled reactions about the actual images, but there were also a couple of comments about whether we even use the word secretary anymore anyway. Which, of course, got me thinking and sent me off to check ...

My immediate reaction and that of several people I spoke to was that secretary, to describe someone who does an admin job, has been replaced as a job title nowadays by 'assistant' of some kind - admin assistant, personal assistant, executive assistant. A bit of googling very quickly turned up several articles to back up my hunch. But what do the stats say?

There is some evidence that usage of the word secretary has fallen off slightly since about the 1980s.

Source: Google Ngram viewer

Source: Collins Dictionary online

It's difficult to pin down stats though because it's hard to disentangle from its other senses referring to a. political positions (Secretary of State, Home Secretary, press secretary, etc.) and b. formal positions in the hierarchy of certain organizations (Secretary General of the UN, General Secretary of a trade union, club/company secretary, etc.). I looked across several corpora though and took a random sample of corpus lines to scan through. In each case, for recent corpus data, there were a tiny number of cites that referred to the admin assistant sense (less than 5 per 100 cites). Comparing that to the old BNC (from the 1980s and 90s), I came up with around 18 in 100. Not rigorous research but still a fairly clear decline.

So, we're all agreed that secretary is probably as dated as typist or air stewardess. Which begs the question, why was an ELT materials writer looking to illustrate it? Answer: because it's on a (newly updated!) Cambridge exams vocabulary list ... Cue a flurry of further checking ... and I was slightly shocked to find:

• it appears on all the major publishers' word lists - A2 on EVP and (the brand new!) Oxford 3000 and B1 on the Pearson GSE
• it appears in all the major UK learner's dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, Collins COBUILD, Macmillan and Longman) without any kind of label or usage note to flag that it's old-fashioned - unlike stewardess which is labelled as 'old-fashioned' in all but one of them. I won't name and shame the dictionary with the example sentence of the title.

I found this particularly disappointing because I know just how aware lexicographers are of trying to keep on top of this kind of thing. I know how much work goes on to try and weed out dated entries and examples from dictionaries. And with most ELT lexicographers being female, we're especially sensitive to anything that smacks of sexism. It seems that this one has just slipped through the gaps.

So, I'm calling on all those dictionary publishers to at least take a look and reconsider your entries and also to relook at your word lists. I know this kind of change can't necessarily always happen overnight, but can you at least promise to check it for your next editions?

Walking away from my desk

Friends with conventional jobs often say that they wouldn't have the discipline to work from home. I think they imagine me lounging around in my pyjamas and watching daytime TV. To be honest, after almost 20 years of freelancing, I probably suffer more from the opposite problem. Especially when I'm busy with several projects at the same time and deadlines are coming thick and fast, the greater danger is in spending too long at my desk.

As an RSI sufferer, I've always been conscious of taking regular breaks and yes, going downstairs to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and maybe hang the washing out while I wait for the kettle to boil is a good way to take those much-needed regular physical breaks from a focused, tense posture at my desk. It's not enough on its own though. Last winter, I found myself 'home alone' with my partner working abroad for a few months and with grey, uninspiring weather outside, it was all too easy to spend all day at my desk and some days to not leave the house at all. Going out for regular daytime walks was already a part of my routine, but one that tended to slip when the weather was bad or when I had a deadline looming or was just feeling a bit low and couldn't be bothered.

#wetwalking

#walk1000miles2019

Then friend and ELT colleague, Karen White told me about a walking challenge to walk 1000 miles during the calendar year (that's about 1600km). It's a semi-organized thing which you can sign up for or which you can just decide to do individually and you can set your own rules about what counts. I already walk quite a bit generally because I don't own a car and walking is the main way I get about. What I needed though was to get out regularly for conscious breaks that were just about walking and fresh air and clearing my head, not nipping to the supermarket to get some groceries. So I decided to log just those 'proper' walks using an app on my phone.

To do 1000 miles in a year works out at around 83 miles a month or 20 miles a week or 3 miles a day.  From where I live I can do a walk of just over 3 miles around Bristol harbour which takes me between 45 mins and an hour depending on how fast I walk and whether I stop en route to take photos or get stuck crossing roads. That doesn't sound too difficult until you realize you need to do that EVERY day .... you miss a day and you have to fit in 6 miles the next!

My regular route

I've just reached the two-thirds point in the year and so far I'm bang on target with 669 miles walked to the end of August. Looking back at my stats, I don't generally manage to walk every day, but I typically fit in my 20 miles a week spread over about 5 days. The missed days tend to be when I just can't fit in a walk because of other commitments in the day. I also swim twice a week and I can't always justify an hour out of my working day to swim and an hour to walk, although I do have some swim+walk days.  And although I do walk in all weathers, I am occasionally put off when it's really heaving with rain.

I mostly do my regular route around Bristol harbour just because I can go out on autopilot without having to plan. And it's a great route with so many different things to see, people to watch and stuff going on. I've developed a few other regular routes too, including a couple of good 5-milers for when I need to catch up on my mileage. 

A snowy harbour walk

Cranes and a steam train on a grey day

Always something to see in Underfall boatyard

A sunny day on the harbour

The #walk1000miles2019 challenge has definitely kept me motivated to keep it up as has sharing my walking with friends on social media and via the #StetWalk hashtag on Twitter which aims to encourage editors and writers to get out and away from their desks - 'stet' being an editing term meaning 'let it stand'. 

Has it made a difference? I think it has. It definitely kept me from slipping into depression through some of the more miserable, lonely winter months. Not only did the actual walking and fresh air often perk me up and give me a sense of achievement, but coming up with suitable photos to share on social media - even if they were rather grey and soggy - gave me a reason to stay connected.

It was helpful during a lull in work at the start of the year, giving me a regular activity to plan my days around. And more recently through a particularly busy, full-on patch of work juggling numerous different projects, when it felt like I had a hundred things whizzing around my head, an hour out walking often either let me switch off completely and come back and start afresh or else it helped me settle everything back into order and get stuff back in perspective.

Will I be doing #walk1000miles2020? Probably not, but I'll definitely be trying to keep up the habit for the sake of both my physical and mental health.