RTQ | RTFQ | RIC | SIO | U/M | NICE | RO? | WNA | WA! | TM | NBN | NO | NF | M
Means Read The Question. You would be amazed how often it turns up. And of course, you can now work out RTB and similar encodings.
This also means Read The Question. And hints, gently, that your marker would like you to be on the ball.
Labels something that we would like you to Raise In Class. For a variety of purposes. Sometimes we merely wish to deal with a point for the class as a whole, rather than to make parallel comments on many scripts. Sometimes we want you to remind us of a nice point you have made, so that we can pass it on to the others. And sometimes the matter to be discussed is just too damn complicated to deal with through commentary on your work.
Please make sure that you deal with all the RIC's on your script: we won't remember them.
A Forder Favourite. This means Spell It Out, and the suggestion is that your answer is too sketchy or gestural to convince the reader. You need to be explaining (often much) more fully.
Charges you with the heinous crime of Use/Mention confusion. Sophisticated writers of English know when they can be casual with quotation marks and when they must be rigorous. This term we ask you to practice the art of scrupulous rigour in the matter.
For those who are unsure what a use-mention confusion is, discipuli examplem spectate:
This sentence
The Bible contains exactly two words
encodes a falsehood. The words 'The Bible' are therein being used to talk about The Bible. The sentence
'The Bible' contains exactly two words
encodes a truth, a truth about the phrase 'The Bible'. Here, the words are being mentioned, not used.
And the sentence
The Bible contains exactly two words is true
encodes nothing: it is gibberish.
Not In Correct English. A gentle hint that you might care to look at that sentence, and rethink. A minor solecism, no doubt.
Most important. Do you have religious objections to writing in grammatically correct sentences of English? Part of the training this term is to acquire someof the habits of Basic Intellectual Hygiene. Attention to spelling, grammar, accuracy, conciseness, clarity, and so on. We will not be asking you to write a lot of sentences under time pressure, as for a tutorial essay, and we want you to aim for simple perfection with the few sentences you do need to write.
Just a coinage for the first class, to save time. we will probably never use it again. It stands for What's Not Ambiguity, and marks all those places where you were confusing ambiguity with other phenomena - like indexicality, or vagueness, or with different ways in which a single message can turn out true.
An important one. Wachet auf! Ruft uns Die Stimme is Bach's glorious cantata BWV 140. As this is Oxford, I need not, of course, translate.
Oh, all right then. It is German for a complex but important message:
You are off-track in a potentially disatrous way. Here you have got some important matter so disastrously W-R-O-N-G or confused that you need to pay very careful attention to it. And to do so until you are absolutely clear that you are back on the the path to righteousness.
Once a word of the vernacular has been Trade-Marked, you are no longer able to use it as a word of the vernacular in your philosophy and logic. For it now will only have the precise, technical meaning that The Academy has allocated to it. So far we have only trademarked one word, namely reference™ and its cognates. By 5 pm tomorrow we will have also trade-marked 'valid'. So you have less than 34 hours to use the word as you will. After that period of grace, it will mean only and always valid™
In many of the weeks to come, we will set a revision exercise on the previous week's work. This will be by and large a voluntary exercise, although we hope that almost all of you will be taking advantage of the opportunity to get feedback from your tutors on your understanding of the material in question.
But if your script carries the label Naughty Boy Nets, then we require you to complete the exercise. Almost always this will be because we judge that your understanding of the material is in some way lacking.
Means straightforwardly; NO. But it does mean in it capitals, and is intended to direct your mind to the point at issue. Just as you need to get your Wachet Auf's sorted out, so you need to correct your NO's. The difference is that the NO's are minor points, and the Wachet Auf's are major.
Is shorthand for the Narcissism Factor. Your Examiners will be men and women of high intelligence and broad education. They will know many things. But there are some things they will not know. There are certain things they are not allowed to know: for instance, whether Candidate No. 43271 is from Balliol, or whether Candidate No. 43271 is male. And there are certain matters on which they are invincibly ignorant. They do not know whether or not said candidate has a car called 'Sharon'. Or whether or no Sharon has a pink dashboard. These things are no doubt known - indeed, are commonplace - to Candidate No. 43271.
But not known by the person reading your script. So they are hopless as examples (of. e.g.true propositions), examples intended to demonstrate your understanding of the material you are explaining. So make sure that your examples are straightforwardly accessible to. and assessable by, your reader.
But surely, I hear you cry, if I write down
Fred is a communist
then my reader will understand that I intend it to be taken as a truth. And that's all that matters.
Alas, no. That requires your reader first of all to decide that you have understood, and then work out what you must therefore mean. Which is absolutely the wrong way round. The golden rule here and elsewhere, is
Write not so that you can be understood. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood
... is for Modal Confusion. And it indicates that you have inserted modals ('can', 'could', 'might', 'may', and so forth) where they do not belong. The whole point of the canonical vocabulary of possible worlds is to analyse out the modal notions. Thus
The proposition that Oswald shot Kennedy could have been false
translates as
There is a possible world in which the proposition that Oswald shot Kennedy is false.
Locutions like 'There could be a possible world in which Oswald did not shoot Kennedy' are confused. At best this would mean 'There is a possible world in which there is a possible world in which Oswald did not shoot Kennedy' . Where one of the 'there is a possible world' strings is clearly otiose.