I got interested in learning Esperanto in my early 20’s … and even though I never needed to speak the language in ordinary life, it was a very positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone as an easy way to limber up the brain for other learning tasks. It’s easy to learn, and success in learning helps to make the next learning experience a bit easier and more enjoyable.
September 6, 2012
August 16, 2012
Kheiriddin: Quebec xenophobia on display in election campaign
In her National Post column, Tasha Kheiriddin discusses the topic that most of the Canadian media is being ultra-careful about:
Racist or not? When it comes to the Quebec election campaign, remarks made this week by a variety of politicians provided considerable fodder for debate, and considerable distraction from the real issues — health, taxes and corruption — that voters actually want their elected officials to talk about.
First, Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault lambasted young Quebecers for being interested in living “the good life,” unlike children in Asia whose parents all want them to become engineers, and have to stop them from studying lest they make themselves sick. When he was attacked for this remarks, he retorted that the fault lies with Quebec parents, and that they should review the values they are transmitting to their children.
[. . .]
His remarks pale in comparison, however, to the xenophobic tone of those made by Parti Québécois ledaer Pauline Marois, and worse yet, the mayor of Saguenay, Jean Tremblay.
On Tuesday, Ms. Marois unveiled her party’s desire to implement a “Secular Charter” which would ban the wearing of any religious symbols by government employees. With, as my colleague Chris Selley tartly notes on these pages, one notable exception: Symbols of Christian faith, such as the cross which hangs over the Speakers’ Chair in the National Assembly. In other words, a crucifix necklace, good: hijabs and yarmulkes, bad.
[. . .]
Then on Wednesday, Mr. Tremblay took xenophobia one step further, when he launched a tirade against Djemila Benhabib, the Parti Québécois candidate in Trois Rivières. On a popular radio show, Mr. Tremblay let loose: “I am shocked that we, the softies, the French Canadians, will be told how to behave, how to respect our culture by a person who comes from Algeria, and we can’t even pronounce her name.”
Update: Convenient timing suspects Don Macpherson.
https://twitter.com/MacphersonGaz/statuses/236059349817122816
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August 13, 2012
PQ promises to “strengthen” language laws in Quebec
It’s mind-blowing that a minority in Canada are legally oppressed by their provincial government, but in Quebec, it’s just language business as usual. The opposition Parti Quebecois, who brought in the language law in question, are promising to make it even more oppressive to non-French-speaking Quebecers:
It’s an easy political move for Marois. It will appeal to her separatist base and thoroughly annoy the anglophones … which will also appeal to the base. And given that the stated intention of her party is to go pick fights with Ottawa and drive a wedge between Quebec and the Rest of Canada, it’s a good plan. Language politics are always hot-button issues in Quebec, and Marois is pushing those buttons gleefully.
But it is interesting to note her position on the issue. Marois holds that the Liberals, under Premier Jean Charest, have not done enough to promote the French language in Quebec. From the perspective of the PQ, that’s almost certainly true. But Bill 101 is a creation of the Parti Quebecois. The provincial Liberals have certainly left it intact and haven’t dared to try and strengthen it, but fundamentally, Bill 101 is a PQ law. If it isn’t working, that’s not Premier Charest’s fault.
The bigger issue, of course, is that such a law already exists. Uninformed citizens in the Rest of Canada would be rightly horrified to learn that such a bizarre, anti-democratic law exists in their country at all. Bill 101′s intrusions into the private interactions of businesses and the decisions of individual families are justified as being necessary by Quebec nationalists to preserve the primacy of French in Quebec, but to anyone who is not a language warrior, seem more like a cross between a French tutor and a Orwellian nightmare.
Of course, tougher laws will still not accomplish the intended task: forcing everyone in Quebec to speak French at all times.
August 6, 2012
Admiral Fisher: an excitable sort of man
Admiral “Jackie” Fisher was a major historical figure in the Royal Navy, advocate of the modern dreadnought battleship and a tad high-strung (“…and on one occasion, the king asked him to stop shaking his fist in his face”). His relationship with Winston Churchill at the Admiralty must have been something to observe, as two of the most influential men in London worked together (for a while). After leaving the Admiralty for the last time, he still kept in touch with Churchill. Here is an example of his communication style:
This is believed to be the first documented use of the now familiar “OMG”.
H/T to Shaun Usher.
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August 4, 2012
British quirks, in brief
To provide assistance to all the benighted foreigners visiting Britain for the Olympics, BBC News Magazine solicited helpful bits of advice and information from their audience. Here are a few of the responses, explaining some of the odd and illogical quirks of Britons:
Avoiding terms of address
British speakers of English try to avoid addressing each other by any sort of title. While speakers of French politely address strangers as “monsieur” or “madame”, the British are tongue-tied at the point of interaction, hoping that simple proximity will indicate to whom they are talking. These days, it’s considered condescending to use “sir” or “madam”, unless the speaker is in a clearly-defined “service” role. To fill this gap, the locals have developed various colloquial circumlocutions. In London, for example, “guv[nor]”, “mate” and “squire” are employed by males (according to complex rules) to address unknown males, with “darling” or “love” (rather questionably) filling the gap for males speaking to females. Further north, “petal” is a possible variant on “love”, while in western Scotland “pal” is used to address unknown males. In south Hampshire, the guv/pal equivalent is the linguistically intriguing “moosh”. What the British never, ever do is follow the American tradition and address those driving taxis as “driver”, those serving at table as “waiter” or those working the hotel switchboard as “operator”. To our ears, this is the height of condescension, verging on rudeness, and will ensure that the cab stops on the wrong side of the road, drinks orders are unfilled and the call is misrouted. Y’all remember that now.
Nick Stevenson, London
[. . .]
Saying sorry
Visitors should be wary of the word sorry — it has endless nuances. For instance, if I inadvertently step on your toe we should both immediately say sorry. I’m sorry for having stepped on your toe — you say sorry to imply it was your fault really, or at least no one is quite sure, so both should say sorry. It also means no hard feelings. But when I say “sorry to bother you, but…” I’m not really apologising, just prefacing a request for some trivial favour, or bit of information. Such as: “Sorry to bother you, but do you have the time?” However, if you hear “sorry?” as a question you’re most likely being asked to repeat something not quite heard or understood. But don’t get carried away with your new knowledge. If someone pronounces sorry a “so-ree” with a strong emphasis on both syllables then that is bad news. They are not sorry at all, just being sarcastic. Maybe someone has mildly offended them — perhaps by accusing them of the unforgivable sin of queue-jumping. Their “so-ree” then means “shut it mate”. But occasionally, very occasionally, sorry really does mean sorry. If someone says: “I’m so sorry to hear your mother has died” they probably are sorry. Not always, but probably.
Mike Pollak, Birmingham
[. . .]
The War
The War — always meaning World War II — is as alive in the collective British consciousness as if it only ended five years ago. A melange of manic cheerfulness, stiff upper lips, atrocious food, doodlebugs, and muddling through. Equally evocative are the sounds of the time — big band dance numbers, and the warbling note of the air raid siren — and ladies’ fashions — severe, economically cut, but with a certain dour style, and neat, off-the-shoulder hairdos, topped (in my mother’s case) with a jaunty WAAF forage cap. It is an awful example of how propaganda can take hold and become history. History is laid down by the survivors – the images we all remember so well were composed with a good deal of thought by the powers that be — the Ministry of Information and the BBC — with a definite end in mind; to endure, to tough it out, to hang on until things got better. Something very similar was attempted during the Cold War, but met with far less success — the Cold War was nasty but theoretical, whereas WWII was nasty but actually happened. As a Baby Boomer, I just remember the post-war atmosphere — grey, tatty, somewhat regimented. We ate baked cod, mashed potatoes and boiled carrots off plates that did not match.
Luce Gilmore, Cambridge
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July 24, 2012
Quebec continues to strive to exclude Anglophones
A real head-scratcher in the Montreal Gazette: telephone staff at the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec (the Quebec health insurance board) are now required to assess callers’ language skills to determine if they actually require service in English.
Where before callers were given the option of service in English or French by way of a simple touch of the telephone keypad, it has now become more complicated. Now some people who would prefer to have the information given in English could be denied the service on the basis of a subjective judgment of their ability to speak French.
The way it works now is that calls to RAMQ are answered automatically in French, and callers are told that the agency first communicates with its clientele in French. Only after half a minute of silence is it mentioned that service in English is available by pressing 9. But wait: that doesn’t automatically get you service in English.
What it gets you is another recorded message, this time in English, informing you once more that the board prefers to deal with customers in French. The agents who subsequently come on the line do not speak English right away, even though the language of service chosen is English. No, the agents proceed in French, and are then required by the new policy to “use their judgment” to determine whether the caller speaks French well enough to be able to hold a conversation about health in French rather than English. Only if the caller fails that test will service in English be forthcoming.
July 1, 2012
H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary turns 70
Terry Teachout celebrates the 70th anniversary of the original publication of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles From Ancient and Modern Sources:
The “New Dictionary” was a byproduct of its prolific editor’s fanatically industrious journalistic career. For years Mencken maintained a card file of quotations “that, for one reason or another, interested me and seemed worth remembering, but that, also for one reason or another, were not in the existing quotation-books.” In 1932 he decided to turn it into a book. When the “New Dictionary” finally saw print a decade later, Time praised it as “one of the rare books that deserve the well-worn phrase ‘Here at last.'”
Painstakingly organized and cross-referenced by subject, with each entry arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, the “New Dictionary” is formidably wide-ranging. Indeed, the only major writer missing from its index is Mencken himself. (“I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself,” he told a curious reporter. “I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.”) Its 1,347 pages abound with such innocent-sounding rubrics as “Civilization,” “Flag, American,” “Hell,” “Hypocrisy,” “Old and New” and “Science and Religion.” At first glance you might mistake it for a cornucopia of the world’s wisdom—but don’t let appearances fool you. The fathomlessly cynical Mencken wisely warned his readers in the preface that the “New Dictionary” was aimed at “readers whose general tastes and ideas approximate my own…. The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose.”
He wasn’t kidding. Look up “Evolution,” for example, and you’ll find this 1925 statement by the Bible-thumping evangelist Billy Sunday: “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” Look up “Critic” and you’ll be confronted with a rich catalog of ripe insults, among them this passage from Samuel Coleridge’s “Modern Critics”: “All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, / Disinterested thieves of our good name: / Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.” Or check out “Irish,” under which can be found no less than a page of invidious comments, including a sideswipe from, of all people, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.”
Teachout is the author of a brilliant biography of Mencken: The Sceptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, which I happen to be re-reading at the moment. For more on Mencken himself, the wikipedia entry is here.
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June 14, 2012
The “victim” mindset among Quebec protestors
Dan Delmar on some of the long-standing grievances being channelled by Quebec’s most recent protestors:
“White Niggers of America:” That’s how author Pierre Vallières famously described the Québécois people in his 1968 book, which the former Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) terrorist leader wrote from his prison cell.
Vallières argued that the struggles of French settlers in British North America were similar to those of pre-segregation era blacks in America, and the lingering effects of English repression were reason enough to issue a call to arms in the late 1960s. FLQ members then kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, who was Quebec’s deputy premier, and sparked a national crisis that ended in martial law.
Vallières and the FLQ may be dead, but the notion that Quebecers are an oppressed people lives on.
[. . .]
Although the “N Word” hasn’t made a noticeable comeback just yet, it’s only a matter of time before fringe elements search for new and more shocking tactics to attract attention to their cause which, at least legislatively, has hit a dead end.
Upon seeing the salute images, many jumped to the conclusion that protesters were racists or that Neo-Nazism was on the rise in Montreal; neither is true. They aren’t racist – at least not intentionally. There is a genuine belief, as Vallière expressed, that Quebecers are in the midst of an epic battle to save democracy and break away from the shackles imposed on them by their Anglo overlords.
[. . .]
In many ways, he [Amir Khadir] embodies the Quebecois victim mentality. At a press conference last week, he compared his struggle with those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. He turned to a CTV News reporter, a black woman, and said that “Law 78 is as unacceptable as segregation of blacks was in the 60s.” And he said that in all sincerity, with a straight face.
The culture of victimization runs deep. Some Quebec laws are based on the concept that Francophone culture is under attack, and restricting the use of other languages, as is the case with Bill 101, is an important weapon in the war against Americanization. And make no mistake: This is a war, ideologically speaking. Political elites, particularly within the separatist movement and the opposition Parti Québécois, believe the mere existence of the English language in this province is an assault on French.
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May 29, 2012
QotD: London slang of the 1930s
London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it — a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct1. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.
The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
1. It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like this: head — loaf of bread — twopenny loaf — twopenny
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.
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April 17, 2012
Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec
Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:
A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.
The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.
The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.
The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.
April 12, 2012
Sweden pushes past “gender equality” to “gender neutrality”
Nathalie Rothschild in Slate:
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa.
I’ve always thought it a bad idea to allow governments to decide what names parents are allowed to give to their children. Obviously I’m an old fogey and should be ignored on critical issues like this.
Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils’ genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as “buddies.” So, a teacher would say “good morning, buddies” or “good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack” rather than, “good morning, boys and girls.” They believe this fulfills the national curriculum’s guideline that preschools should “counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles” and give girls and boys “the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles.”
The next step, of course, is to require the Prime Minister to address the Sveriges riksdag as “Buddies”. That’d set a proper tone of intimacy and co-operative inclusiveness, right?
To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing “gender pedagogues” in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
And you thought helicopter parents were bad? Imagine living your entire pre-school-to-high-school career under the watchful gaze of “gender pedagogues” whose task is to ensure that you never display any behaviour or utter any phrases which are gender-specific.
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March 21, 2012
Learn another language to boost your intelligence
My son bitterly resented being sent to French Immersion after kindergarten (many of his friends were not entering FI and he wanted to stay with them), but recent studies back up our decision:
Most people would already describe someone who knows multiple languages as a smart person, but there’s new research that shows learning and knowing more than one language can have a deeper impact on the way your brain works than previously believed. In reality, people who know multiple languages are able to monitor their surroundings better and switch between mental tasks faster, and those benefits extend from the early years to old age — and you can harness them even later in life by picking up a new language.
In its examination of the topic, the New York Times points to a trio of studies, one from 2004 and published in the journal Developmental Science from researchers at the York University Department of Psychology that indicated bilingual individuals are more adept at certain mental challenges and tasks than people who only know one language.
However, it’s still true that the best time to learn a second language is early in life.
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“Euphemisms, like elevated temperature, are usually a sign of sickness”
George Jonas on the redefinition game, as currently being played in the European Union:
The subject was the justice commissioner’s office beginning a 10-week period of “consultation” with Europe’s publicly listed companies about breaking the “glass ceiling.” That’s the invisible barrier that supposedly keeps women from Big Capital’s boardrooms. Not altogether, of course, but at only 13% not in the volume Ms. Reding thinks right. After 10 weeks, Europe’s companies will either comply “voluntarily” with Ms. Reding’s idea of the correct percentage, or she will start considering “legislative measures.”
[. . .]
After putting discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, etc., beyond the pale, the government introduces programs whose specific — indeed, only — aim is to compel discrimination on the very grounds it prohibits. The first casualty is the language; its first symptoms, a rash of euphemisms. Liberal-fascist societies break out in euphemisms faster than you can say “affirmative action.”
Doctors of the body politic — a.k.a. writers — react to euphemisms as medical doctors react to fever. Language strives for accuracy; it has a built-in bias for calling a spade a spade, so hearing something called something else shows up as a tick on the diagnostic chart. Euphemisms, like elevated temperature, are usually a sign of sickness.
This is Stage One. In Stage Two the interventionist state abandons all, or at least some pretense, and admits to doing what it’s doing. It’s feeling strong enough to feel its oats.
The EU is now a Stage Two tyranny. It still has lots of room to grow before it becomes a monster-state, but it has started coming clean.
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February 24, 2012
Star Wars in Icelandic saga form
A Google+ post by ESR led to this delightful post at Tattúínárdœla saga:
Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son. Below I present some remarks on the Old Icelandic version of the legend, with some spare comparative notes on the cognate traditions in other old Germanic languages.
The story as presented in George Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that — the Middle High German epic called Himelgengærelied (Song of the Skywalkers). There is also an Old High German palimpsest known to scholars, later overwritten by a Latin choral and only partly legible to us today, which contains fragments of a version wherein “Veitare” survives to old age after slaying “Lûc” out of loyalty to the emperor, but is naturally still conflicted about the deed when the son of his daughter Leia avenges the killing on him.
This is also the ending that we infer for the Icelandic Tattúínárdœla saga (the Saga of the People of the Tattooine River Valley), though unfortunately the ending of that saga is lost and has to be reconstructed from the scant remains of the Old High German poem and from references in other sagas (it should be noted that the later chivalric Lúks saga Anakinssonar is derived from another tradition and may well be a translation of a continental epic, probably one closely related to the extant Middle High German Himelgengærelied, from which Lucas’s narrative is drawn). The author of the Old English poem Déor also knows an “Anacan, haten heofongangende” (“Anacen, named the sky-walker”), who later in the poem is referred to by an alternative byname, “sunubana” (“son-killer”), suggesting that the more tragic version of the tale was current among the Anglo-Saxons too. Hammershaimb seems to know a Faroese ballad on the two Himingangarar, but there is no trace of the text of this ballad in any known collection, and it was not known to the last exponents of the Faroese oral tradition in the early twentieth century.
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January 24, 2012
Robert Fulford: Nietzsche’s inescapable shadow
Writing in the National Post, Robert Fulford traces all the ways we still live with a long-dead madman:
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those philosophers you just can’t kill.
He’s been in his grave since 1900, having been silenced by insanity many years before. In 1898, The New York Times ran an article headed, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in the Madhouse.” He’s read, as he was then, only by a small minority, many of whom it would be flattering to call eccentric.
Nevertheless, he runs through our social bloodstream. Francis Fukuyama’s remark has the sound of truth: Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”
[. . .]
We don’t know it but Nietzsche scripted many of our conversations, putting words in our mouths. When we talk about culture (the culture of this, the culture of that) we echo him. Anyone who discusses “values” (instead of, say, ethics) is talking Nietzsche-talk.
People who claim to be in a state of “becoming” are Nietzscheans, knowingly or otherwise. He believed (now everyone believes) that we are all constantly reconstructing ourselves. In Nietzsche there’s no such thing as a permanently stable personality.
He was the original culture warrior. He laid the foundation for the struggle between traditionalism and modernism, an enduring battle. The more important a tradition, the more he wanted to see it challenged.
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