Due May 2, 2025 Crownsville Hospital Public History Manager The Cultural Resources Section in the Planning Division is hiring a Contractual Crownsville Hospital Public History Manager. The primary role of this position is to: The position will work under the direction of the Program Administrator for the Cultural Resources Section in the Office of Planning and […]
Due April 17, 2025 The purpose of this Temporary Project Manager position is to support the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department’s Historic Preservation and Tourism Program by conducting and transcribing oral histories regarding the Montopolis Negro School. The individual in this position will research approximately 15-25 interview candidates, who include former students, their […]
Since January 2025, the federal workforce has been experiencing unprecedented changes. Researcher Jason M. Chernesky is one of those affected, having been recently terminated by the DOGE from his role as Historian at the FDA. With Chernesky and the Organization of American Historians, the OHA is embarking on a project documenting the experiences of federal […]
From our partners at Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University
Written by award-winning playwright Leigh Fondakowski and starring some of Houston’s finest actors, SPILL vividly portrays the events and aftermath of the explosion, as told by those who lived through it. The play brings to life over 200 hours of interviews with surviving crew members, scientists, and Gulf Coast residents. In this intimate theater, don’t miss this exciting drama of the way we live life on the Gulf Coast, walking a precarious balance between risk and beauty.
Friday, April 11, 2025 at 7 p.m.
Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Moody Center for the Arts Rice University 6100 Main St.
Free registration, seating is limited.
Q: Am I showing my age? Once upon a time, a couple of decades ago, when you were ill or had an emergency, you would “call in sick.” Now it’s “calling out.” When did that happen?
A: People have been calling “in,” “out,” and “off” sick for dozens of years, but “call in sick” is the oldest and by far the most common expression for reporting one’s absence from work because of illness.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “call in sick” as “to contact one’s employer, school, etc., typically by telephone, to report one’s absence that day, esp. due to illness.” The OED’s earliest example is from the 1940s:
“This being a holiday weekend, employees in Treasury’s loans and currency section … were warned yesterday not to call in sick either today or Monday under any circumstances” (The Washington Post, July 3, 1943).
The dictionary’s first citation for “call off sick” is from a West Virginia newspaper: “Personnel who frequently call off sick … should be checked at their homes to ascertain the legitimacy of their absence” (Charleston Daily Mail, May 24, 1958).
The earliest OED example for “call out sick” is from a Massachusetts newspaper: “Bray said no one called out sick in the DPW at all this week … [due] to his demands that anyone out sick must have a doctor to certify illness” (Sentinel & Enterprise, Fitchburg, April 16, 1976).
A similar expression, “call off work,” has been around since the the mid-1960s and means “to report one’s absence from (work, school, etc.), typically by making a telephone call,” Oxford says.
The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1965 labor arbitration decision: “He would receive a final warning if he didn’t improve on the tardiness, absenteeism, and calling off work without notice” (from Labor Arbitration Awards, Vol. 65-2).
A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that “call in sick” is clearly the most common of the four expressions.
We’ve seen suggestions online that “call out sick” may be especially popular in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but we’ve seen no linguistic evidence to support this. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn’t mention the usage.
The 2025 slate of Oscar nominees recognizes many writers, directors and actors whose scripts and performances don’t necessarily reflect their own cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, both white, co-wrote “Sing Sing,” a story about rehabilitation through art in a maximum security prison where the characters are almost entirely people of color.
Meg LeFauve has now earned her second nomination for penning a script that gives voice the gamut of emotions surging through a young girl in “Inside Out 2.” She’s in her 50s.
The director of “Conclave,” Edward Berger, its writer, Peter Straughan, and its lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, are all self-proclaimed lapsed Catholics. Yet they brought to life a political thriller set in the Vatican.
“The Brutalist” was written entirely in English, but much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, with two leads who are not native Hungarian speakers.
Most screenwriters endeavor to craft characters outside their own backgrounds and experiences. But concerns about authentic language representation and cultural accuracy persist, and accusations of cultural appropriation and lazy research are commonplace.
“Emilia Pérez,” for example, has been heavily criticized not only for unrealistic portrayals of gender transition but also for inauthentic depictions of Mexican culture and accents.
We surveyed over 50 current members of the Writers Guild of America, and they broadly told us that sensitivity to linguistic representation has increased since the 2010s.
Several commented that there’s been more commitment to hiring writers who represent the characters’ voices and backgrounds. There’s also more “freedom to include diverse characters and worlds… but a commensurate emphasis on authenticity and a higher bar for what that means,” as one writer explained.
“Authenticity” was consistently cited in our survey as a principal consideration when writing dialogue. Other concerns included scripts’ intelligibility, historical accuracy and believability.
In our study, we also reviewed screenwriting manuals published as far back as 1946.
Manuals didn’t begin to raise explicit ethical concerns, such as the use of inaccurate linguistic stereotypes in dialogue, until the 1980s. For example, many older films, such as “Gone with the Wind,” often used phonetic spelling in their scripts, with features such as g-dropping – “quittin’” for “quitting” – to mark only the speech of lower-class or racially marginalized characters, despite the fact that all people, regardless of background, have accents.
In fact, limiting oneself to standard U.S. English restricts diversity in the written dialogue itself. Some writers may want to use dialect or language to convey character authenticity on the page.
Our survey respondents described this as “flavor” – the strategic use of dialectal words or phrases to create distinct voices, with limited phonetics. Jesse Eisenberg, in his Oscar-nominated script “A Real Pain,” lightly blends American English with occasional Yiddish words to great effect: “… landed in Galveston for some fakakta reason,” or “crazy” reason.
Attempts at authenticity can become muddied when AI gets involved.
When making “The Brutalist,” Corbet controversially used AI technology to refine the movie’s Hungarian dialogue.
Some questioned the film’s authenticity due to the use of AI, arguing that nothing can be authentic if it’s achieved artificially.
But the film’s creators, including editor and native Hungarian speaker Dávid Jancsó, defended this choice. They argued the technology actually enhanced the language’s authenticity, particularly since Hungarian’s system of vowels and consonants is especially hard for nonnative speakers to capture accurately.
Whether writers use phonetics or standard language, and whether producers use AI or dialect coaches, questions of ethics and linguistic authenticity will remain. It’s important to research language choices and dialogue, and to consult the diverse speakers portrayed in scripts.
These are among the many essential checks and balances that are becoming bigger parts of the filmmaking process.
