"Oscars 2014: Academy Awards ceremony gets biggest TV audience in 10 years" reports that this years Academy Award ceremony attracted the biggest TV audience for ten years, possibly due to its returning host, Ellen DeGeneres, who gained some fame for herself and the Oscars by taking a record breaking selfie with the front row stars (2014).
Why did I want to blog this story? It got my attention on Tuesday evening because of an interesting misunderstanding earlier that day in the AEP Reading and Speaking class I'm teaching this term. My plan was to lead in to our real topics by a bit of discussion of the Academy Awards, which I hoped at least some of the class would know a little bit about. The plan did work well: the film 12 Years a Slave did come up, and that in turn led to an excellent discussion of slavery generally and in to the relevant US history, thus setting the background for our first reading in that class.
However, one group looked at the word academy, and thought, very reasonably, that I was asking about awards for academic achievement, which led them to discuss the Nobel Prize awards. This was a very good idea, although not exactly an answer to my question. And as so often, exploring how the misunderstanding had arisen led to a very useful discussion, in this case taking us back to the first of the definitions for the word academic listed in the OED: academy was originally the name of the school founded in Athens by the philosopher Plato, something that some members of the class remembered from our study of one of Plato's texts last term (we read Euthyphro), along with the words Lyceum (where Socrates liked to hang out, and where Aristotle later founded his school) and gymnasium (the Lyceum was a gymnasium - popular places to gather for gossip in ancient Greece) both of which come up in the opening lines of Plato's dialogue. I thought the ten minutes we spent clearing up and explaining that misunderstanding was time well spent.
It was also a useful reminder of the importance of context in understanding words: it's very dangerous to look only at one word in a sentence. In the sentence: "What do you know about the Academy Awards?" the word academy has a very different meaning to the one it has in a sentence such as "His parents were thrilled when David was accepted as a student by the Royal Academy of Music," although it is a bit closer to the word's meaning in: "Following the experimental confirmation of the Higgs particle they had predicted in 1964, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs, shared with François Englert."
With all the productive misunderstandings cleared up, today we will move on to begin a discussion of the impact of the Best Film winner on US society, which sets the scene for our coming discussion of a couple of philosophical issues about the nature of a good society and what states may, and may not, do for and to their citizens. (No Plato this term, but we might read some John Stuart Mill.)
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