Quotulatiousness

April 8, 2011

Swearing in soccer? Gasp! Shock! Horror!

Filed under: Britain, Media, Soccer — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Duleep Allirajah wonders how the Football Association has managed to avoid hearing what soccer players say on the pitch until now:

Rooney swore? So f***ing what

Those fretting over the footballer’s anglo-saxon turn of phrase have clearly never been to a match before.

Wayne Rooney’s angry outburst was curious. What did it mean? Who was he addressing? In appearing to pick a fight with a TV camera, it immediately struck me as an homage to Robert De Niro’s famous ‘You talking to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.

In a statement issued by his club, the player said: ‘Emotions were running high, and on reflection my heat-of-the-moment reaction was inappropriate. It was not aimed at anyone in particular.’ Maybe he was railing against his inner demons. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was a release of pent-up frustration after months of domestic strife and poor goal-scoring form.

But enough of my speculative interpretation, it’s the Football Association’s response that we should really be bothered about. The FA has banned Rooney for two matches for using ‘offensive, insulting and/or abusive language’. You don’t need to be a lipreader to work out that footballers swear quite a lot; every Saturday you’ll find them effing and blinding like proverbial troopers. But while disciplinary action for abusing match officials is nothing new, a ban for swearing per se is quite unprecedented.

February 6, 2011

“Mad Max” throws away the Quebec vote

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

At least, that’s the way most in the media are likely to interpret his position on Bill 101:

Some people say I am not a “real Quebecer” and are accusing me of “attacking Quebec” simply because I want to be more popular in the rest of Canada. They seem unable to conceive that it’s possible to have a different position than theirs on the basis of fundamental principles.

My position is this: Yes, it’s important that Quebec remain a predominantly French-language society. And ideally, everyone in Quebec should be able to speak French. But we should not try to reach this goal by restricting people’s rights and freedom of choice.

French will survive if Quebecers cherish it and want to preserve it; it will flourish if Quebec becomes a freer, more dynamic and prosperous society; it will thrive if we make it an attractive language that newcomers want to learn and use. Not by imposing it and by preventing people from making their own decisions in matters that concern their personal lives.

Mad Max for PM!

Update, 9 February: According to an anonymous Conservative, Maxime Bernier is “mostly harmless”.

February 2, 2011

The Register: Let’s replace the discredited term “scientist” with “boffin”

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:28

The Register, reacting to the decision by the Advertising Standards Authority to allow homeopaths and herbalists to be described as “scientists”, offers an alternative term:

We here at the Reg would like to offer as a new gold standard our use of the term “boffin” to replace the now officially discredited term “scientist” — which was already in our view unacceptably loosely applied, including as it did researchers in such fields as sports science, psychology etc.

A boffin, on these pages at least, will be a researcher whose work is based on hard sums and/or hard facts such as fossils, atomsmasher collisions etc. Statistics, especially ones gleaned by surveying students or counting up patents granted etc, will generally not count. Persons who work with the latter sorts of material will normally be known as eggheads, trick-cyclists, economists etc as appropriate.

And even though the word “scientist” now officially means nothing, we still aren’t going to apply it to homeopathic smellies experts.

January 22, 2011

How Big Government fans cast their arguments

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

L.A. Liberty rounds up the rhetorical conventions of Big Government sympathizers:

With discussions of “rhetoric” in the air, I thought it timely to propose what I have observed — from online discussions, family get-togethers, and everything in between — as the archetypal rhetorical conventions of big government sympathizers (i.e. the left, generally, though not exclusively):

* deflections (altering or averting the basis of the discussion to a different but seemingly related topic),
* assertions of pathos (appeals to one’s emotions, usually in the form of a sad hypothetical or a specific personal account, intended to either pity a concession or portray the opposition as a monster; this could also take the form of fear mongering),
* assertions of ethos (attempts to find hypocrisy in the opposition’s position, either by alleging that a different position held by the opposition is counter to their opposition’s current position, or by simply alleging “You would sing a different tune if it were you [or other person you care about] who needed [said government program]”)
* ad hominem attacks (related to pathos, such an attack charges either the opposition or another person who shares the opposition’s position in order to render an argument invalid, this often takes the form of accusations of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry),
* straw men (absurd conclusions, ostensibly based on the opposition’s argument, created in order to be refuted)
and perhaps most common of all…
* non-sequiturs (similar to straw men, these are failures in logic that assume incorrect conclusions; often a form of reducto ad absurdum based on incomplete or incorrect data)

These conventions can be explained by what is arguably the greatest weakness of big government sympathizers: a lack of reasoned thought and creativity that is the result of their inability to look beyond the status quo. In other words, because government does it, they have a hard time envisioning how it could be done without government.

January 19, 2011

Hollywood gets exposed to “the nihilism of the British way”

Filed under: Britain, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:55

Did you watch the Golden Globes awards the other night? I didn’t, but I rather enjoyed watching Ricky Gervais do his introduction (courtesy of YouTube and literally hundreds of contributors). It may be one of the larger gaps between image and reality . . . the way Americans think Brits talk and how they slag one another off:

Anyone from anywhere can be cruel, anyone from anywhere can be witty, but there is something particularly British about cruel wit. John Lennon, with his withering remarks about Ringo Starr (“Not even the best drummer in The Beatles”) and the avant-garde (“French for bullshit”), had it. Writers past (Evelyn Waugh) and present (AA Gill) have it. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, has it, and gets into political scrapes when he flaunts it.

The anything-goes approach applies as much to everyday conversation as it does to comedy, where the subject of British irreverence has been analysed to death (and where America has plenty of acid-tongued geniuses itself). It feels natural to those of us who grew up with it, but British banter — the playfully barbed conversational style adopted by groups of friends in bars, offices and even classrooms up and down the country — can baffle and perturb foreigners. It is especially jarring when set against the popular image of Britain as a more decorous and civil place than most. Even tamer badinage in this country can, to a foreign ear, sound like enmity. The moment the ice is truly broken between two newly acquainted Britons is when one teases the other about something. Reginald D Hunter, an American comedian who does most of his work over here, says Britain is the only country where people will introduce you to a friend by saying “This is my mate Barry, he’s a bit of a twat.”

America is a land of Regency etiquette in comparison. So much so that it pays any Briton to be a bit more mindful of what he says and how he says it when enjoying the company of Americans (with the exception of fervently Anglophile Americans who, judging by friends of mine who fit that description, are caustic conversationalists). The rules are just different. For example, the c-word, which in Britain has lost much of its toxicity, remains a no-no.

December 4, 2010

Insults in other languages that don’t translate well

Filed under: Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:30

A fascinating thread on AskReddit asks “What are your favourite culturally untranslatable phrases?”

Language warning, so I’ve put it below the fold.

(more…)

October 30, 2010

Shakespeare in the original pronunciation

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

It doesn’t sound much like your traditional Shakespeare production does it?

Like an archeologist reconstructing the fossilized skeleton of an ancient species, a University of Kansas theatre professor has pieced together the bones of a form of English that has never been heard in North America in modern times — the original pronunciation of Shakespeare.

Thanks to the work of Paul Meier, audiences can get a sense of what it might have been like to eavesdrop on opening night of “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet” at the Globe Theater in London or to listen in on a shipboard conversation on the Mayflower as it approaches the shores of the New World.

“What did English sound like back then?” Meier said. “Was it posh or down to earth? Was it anything like today’s British or American English? Would we understand it?”

H/T to A Blog About History for the link.

October 22, 2010

Stephen Fry on language

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

October 21, 2010

QotD: Linguistic voids and what they say about that culture

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

I thought a bit more about how languages differ on how they assign words to concepts and how this affects the thought processes of people who think in those languages. For example, imagine if some language had only one word that meant both “buy” and “steal”, and you had to express the notion of free markets to them. Yet equally absurd examples abound in English that, despite its huge vocabulary, still uses one word “love” to express how newlyweds love each other, a parent loves a child, a Southerner loves good barbeque and a liberal loves Che Guevara, even though all four are utterly different things. Equally oddly, the verb “play” is used for poker, hopscotch, trumpet and Hamlet: maybe this somehow makes sense for native speakers, but in Finnish all four are different words. Another gap in English that I find ever stranger the more I think about it is how you have to say “extended family” since English does not have a separate word for this hugely important concept (at least I have never heard of it). Such gaps reveal a lot about the speakers who develop the language; for example, recall how the Chinese have one word “crisatunity” to mean both crisis and opportunity, Russians have no word for “freedom” and the French lack the word for an “entrepreneur”.

Ilkka, “A word for everything and everything in a word”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2010-10-21

September 27, 2010

QotD: Explorers and translation

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:55

When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic, 1986

August 14, 2010

Business jargon got you down? Unsuck-it!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

I’ve been known to print off Business Bingo cards for the inevitable business meeting jargon-fest, so I wholly support the notion behind Unsuck-it:

H/T to Xeni Jardin for the link.

July 28, 2010

“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:17

If you’re not a bit of a word geek, you can safely skip this post. “Johnson” looks at the role of the copy editor:

Having recently had my forthcoming book copy-edited, I jumped right on the link (at Andrew Sullivan) to read Lori Fradkin’s “What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor”. I’d struggled for hours with my manuscript, wondering what to stet and what not to stet, marvelling both at my copy editor’s care and at the confusion she introduced in places. So I was eager to see what Ms Fradkin had to say about the other side of this relationship.

But the experience isn’t quite what he hopes: Ms Fradkin is inclined to a “because the dictionary says so” approach that “Johnson” finds overly restrictive.

This is not to say “everything is right” and to get back into the tired prescriptivist-descriptivist debate. A debate about hyphens or compounds should have something useful to say about language itself. For example, The Economist hyphenates compounds when they are used as modifiers: interest-rate hikes, balance-of-payments crises, and so forth. These aren’t hyphenated when used as nouns. (“Interest rates must go up.”) I like this hyphenation. It helps prevent so-called garden-path misanalysis, by letting the reader know that even though he’s seeing two nouns in a row, they should be understood as a compound modifier, and another noun is coming up. In other words, if someone asked me why I hyphenate “interest-rate hikes”, this is what I’d tell them, and not “Because the style book says so.” The latter answer is worse than wrong; it’s not interesting.

In some cases I might disagree with our style book. I obey it nonetheless, because rulings, even when arbitrary, keep a style consistent, so readers aren’t finding “Web sites” here and “websites” there in the same article. Readers expect and enjoy uniformity as a mark of quality.

July 26, 2010

Verily, it is to LOL, forsooth!

Filed under: History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 18:30

Period Speech

July 23, 2010

Define, or be defined

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 22:28

Jesse Walker looks at efforts to take the notion of “capitalism” and wrap it up in the more user-friendly term “free enterprise”:

[T]here’s an effort afoot to rebrand “capitalism” as “free enterprise.” On the face of it, I like the idea. Capital is going to be a central part of any modern economic system, whether or not there’s a lot of government intervention. By contrast, the phrase “free enterprise” implies economic liberty.

Unfortunately, MSNBC identifies the chief force behind the idea as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group whose commitment to economic liberty is so strong that it came out for TARP, the Detroit bailout, and the 2009 stimulus. If the Chamber were more honest about its outlook, it would reject “free enterprise” for a more frank label, like “corporate welfare.” But I suspect that wouldn’t be good branding.

In the same way we had to give up the historical meaning of the word “liberal” to folks who used it to imply almost the opposite, we should probably abandon the word “capitalism”. For a start, the word was popularized by that great pamphlet writer Karl Marx, and it has a pejorative connotation to most people who hear it used. “Capitalists” are folks in top hats who ride in chauffeured limousines and have no sympathy or respect for “the working man”. Try subbing in “Plutocracy” or “Rich F*cking Bastards” and you’ll get close to the popular image of the current term.

In any argument where you try using terms that have been appropriated by your opponents, you’re already ceding the high ground. “Capitalism” is a word that comes pre-loaded with all the negativity your opponents delight in — don’t play their game by their rules!

March 18, 2010

You can’t say that . . . except in a wine column

Filed under: Humour, Media, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:19

Michael Pinkus collects a few choice things which can only be said on a wine tour, or in a wine column:

Top Ten Things That Sound Dirty In Winespeak, But Aren’t
Courtesy of fellow wine writer Dean Tudor (www.deantudor.com):
1. “Spit or swallow?”
2. “Stick your nose all the way in”
3. “She’s needs to open up a bit”
4. “I’ve had a ’69 with my sister”
5. “My God! Check out the legs on that Blue Nun!”
6. “I keep Sherry on the rack in my cellar”
7. “I find the Italians flacid and the French hard”
8. “There are too many whites in this room”
9. “You have to pull it out slowly, otherwise it’ll shoot all over the place!”
10. “Wow that really swelled up, can you stick it back in?”

Here are two more, just to make it an even dozen:
11. “Me and the guys did a 10 year old Tawny, it was sweet”
12. “I’m sorry Madame but your Pouilly-Fuisse is awfully dry”

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress