Quotulatiousness

June 5, 2013

The “threat” of American English

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:53

Things must be pretty quiet over in Britain, if some of the concerns being aired are about the baleful influence of American English on the language used in the Mother Country:

Does this actually matter? No. On the contrary, we should welcome American English, as it bequeaths to British English more synonyms. English is such a brilliant language for the very reason it has so many different words for similar things, a result of its dual Germanic/Latinate parentage. In the language of Shakespeare, Dickens and Hollywood you can describe someone as hungry or famished, fast or rapid, good or benevolent, bad or malevolent. It’s no coincidence that the first modern thesaurus was in English — Roget’s, in 1805.

In any case, many alleged ‘Americanisms’ are merely old English words that fell into disuse, notably ‘fall’ for autumn, ‘diaper’, ‘faucet’, ‘candy’ and ‘gotten’. The latter is especially useful, as in British English ‘got’ has to double up as a present tense verb for ‘possess’ and a past participle for ‘attain’ and ‘become’. The prohibition on ‘gotten’ is both chauvinistic and illogical when you consider the uncontroversial ‘forgotten’. Instead of complaining about American English, it would be more interesting to explore why Americans speak the way they do. For instance, New England was settled by people from south-east England, which is why Bostonians also don’t pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘car’ (think Cliff from Cheers propping up the baa). Much of the rest of America was settled by Irish and Scots, which is why they also articulate a strong ‘r’ in ‘Iron Maiden’. And Americans say ‘I’m good’, not to boast of their moral worth but to indicate their state of being, because Germans — another emigrant people — use gut as an adverb as well as an adjective.

Everyone in the world — except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers — learns American English because it is today’s lingua franca. It’s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: ‘Si Descartes n’avait pas écrit en latin, come le feront encore après lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n’aurait jamais été lu dans le monde entier.’ People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is ‘threatened’ by American English. It’s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever.

If any English-speaking country has to be concerned about the invasive nature of Americanisms, it’d be Canada. So far, thank goodness, nobody outside Quebec seems to feel that we need to get the government involved in defining what is and isn’t proper in Canadian English (and Quebec’s linguistic worry-warts don’t give a rat’s ass about English anyway, except where it starts filtering into their version of French…)

US policy on Syria is 1979 all over again

Filed under: Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

In the Miami Herald, Glenn Garvin points out that the US went down this geopolitical path in 1979, with less than stellar results:

The problem in our capital is not that there’s too much division between Republicans and Democrats, but that they’ve merged into a single War Party when it comes to the Middle East.

There might have been at least a tenuous case to be made for intervention in Syria back at the beginning of its civil war, at least if you accept the view that the United States cannot disengage from the Middle East because it is, for the foreseeable future, joined at the hip with Israel.

Unlike Libya or Somalia, strategically useless states in the middle of nowhere in which Washington mysteriously chose to intervene, Syria is a pivot point in the Middle East. It shares long borders with our two major allies in the region, Israel and Jordan, who cannot help but be affected by what goes on in Syria.

Two years ago, we could have acted decisively to end the Syrian civil war before it really got started. We could have made a realpolitik decision to support Assad, who, though a vicious brute to his own people, mostly minds his own business. Or we could have thrown in wholeheartedly with the rebels, picking one faction to provide with arms and international prestige, keeping (maybe) the worst elements out of power.

Instead, the Obama administration dithered, denouncing Assad and drawing lines in the sand over his behavior, then backing away every time he crossed one. We managed to alienate both sides as well as convincing all concerned that our bark had no bite.

In short, Obama has adopted as his guide Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of 1979, when the United States cluelessly half-yanked the rug from beneath the shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, then primly tsk-tsked their opponents. The eventual result was that two of our allies were replaced with regimes implacably hostile to our interests, which quickly began destabilizing everything around them. Sadly, that’s now the best possible outcome in Syria. If the War Party get its way, you’ll see the worst.

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

Do you suffer from “social jetlag”?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:27

And here’s more from Brainpickings:

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired, a fine addition to these 7 essential books on time, German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg demonstrates through a wealth of research that our sleep patterns have little to do with laziness and other such scorned character flaws, and everything to do with biology.

In fact, each of us possesses a different chronotype — an internal timing type best defined by your midpoint of sleep, or midsleep, which you can calculate by dividing your average sleep duration by two and adding the resulting number to your average bedtime on free days, meaning days when your sleep and waking times are not dictated by the demands of your work or school schedule. For instance, if you go to bed at 11 P.M. and wake up at 7 A.M., add four hours to 11pm and you get 3 A.M. as your midsleep.

Roenneberg traces the evolutionary roots of different sleep cycles and argues that while earlier chronotypes might have had a social advantage in agrarian and industrial societies, today’s world of time-shift work and constant connectivity has invalidated such advantages but left behind the social stigma around later chronotypes.

H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold for the link.

Latest Rob Ford video rumour

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In the Toronto Sun, Jenny Yuen says the quest to track down the video that allegedly shows Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack may be fruitless:

John Cook, the editor of New York-based gossip website Gawker, said Tuesday the alleged Rob Ford crack video might be “gone.”

Cook said the news came from the intermediary he had been dealing with to obtain the video.

“The intermediary called to tell me (Friday) that he had finally heard from the owner. And his message was: ‘It’s gone. Leave me alone,’” Cook said on the website. “It was, the intermediary told me, a short conversation.”

This comes just after a week Gawker, which broke the story of the alleged video, reached its $200,000 Crackstarter goal. The website has been holding on to the money in hopes of the seller will come forward.

The footage allegedly shows Mayor Rob Ford smoking what appears to be crack. Ford has denied the existence of the video and insisted he does not smoke crack.

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