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I passed through Singapore twice last month and that's why I read a few issues of The Straits Times. Readers are invited to write in to Singapore's English-language newspaper. The rules for doing so are set out in small type. Evidently, women must "indicate Miss, Ms, Mrs or Madam."
What the? Never mind that "Ms" was invented in order that the archaic "Miss" and "Mrs" may be consigned to the history books but, hey, the ladies in Singapore have another option just in case, you know, they happen to be in charge of a house of prostitution - or something.
But seriously, how can we expect men to take our titles seriously if we can't decide what's appropriate and what's not? Even if you remove "madam" from that robust smorgasbord of options from which people of the fairer gender may choose, it's kind of pathetic to have to decide between three different titles. Isn't it, ladies? Must we really cling onto relics from another era?
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No evidence is offered for the proposition that Australian or British accents 'feel' (shouldn't that be 'sound'?) more universal. And anyway, Hollywood's big growth opportunity is in Asia, particularly China, not an obvious market for films starring English-speaking actors, whatever their accent. In fact, another 'rule' suggested in The Atlantic article is 'Dub Animated Movies With Local Actors—or Hire Bilingual Superstars From the Start.' So maybe the future belongs to Chow Yun Fat or whoever inherits Jackie Chan's action-hero mantle, rather than Aussies like Chris Hemsworth.
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the villain in the film is safely inter-galactic, thus conforming to rule no.3, 'Don't Offend Billions of Would-Be Viewers' by making someone of their nationality a bad guy.
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. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
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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.
The bewildering feature of political correctness is the mandated replacement of formerly unexceptionable terms by new ones: "Negro" by "black" by "African-American"; "Spanish-American" by "Hispanic" by "Latino"; "slum" by "ghetto" by "inner city" by, according to the Los Angel
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THE Los Angeles Times' new "Guidelines on Racial and Ethnic Identification," for its writers and editors, bans or restricts some 150 words and phrases such as "birth defect," "Chinese fire drill," "crazy," "dark continent," "stepchild," "WASP" and "to welsh."
Defying such politically correct sensibilities, the Economist allows the use of variants of "he" for both males and females (as in "everyone should watch his language"), and "crippled" for disabled people.
One side says that language insidiously shapes attitudes and that vigilance against subtle offense is necessary to eliminate prejudice. The other bristles at legislating language, seeing a corrosion of clarity and expressiveness at best, and thought control at worst, changing the way reporters render events and opinions. -
First, words are not thoughts. Despite the appeal of the theory that language determines thought, no cognitive scientist believes it.
People coin new words, grapple for le mot juste, translate from other languages and ridicule or defend PC terms.
None of this would be possible if the ideas expressed by words were identical to the words themselves. - 4 more annotation(s)...
Until the last century, there were no teenagers.
Romeo and Juliet weren’t teenagers. Jane Austen’s characters, and Austen herself, were never teenagers. Nor were Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Dickens himself. Huckleberry Finn was 13 when he had his adventures, but even he wasn’t a teenager. In fact nobody, fictional or real, was a teenager until after the turn of the 20th century.
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It would appear, rather, that it was pedagogical and religious authorities who first used the terms teen, teen age, and teenager. They used them as they took note of the distinctive attitudes of persons ages 13 through 19, and more with worry than with approval.
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Teenager itself didn’t emerge until about 1940, but that efficient collection Google Books finds early instances of teen and teen age in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Session of the Minnesota Educational Association Held in Saint Paul, Minnesota December 26, 27, 28, 1899, in an article by John N. Greer, principal of Central High School in Minneapolis:
It is debatable whether English or Mandarin will dominate in South East Asia in the future. There are arguments for both on the economic front.
But culturally, there is no dispute.
Even Mandarin language enthusiasts like Singaporean businessman Mr Lee, says that English will remain popular so long as Hollywood exists.
The success of movies such as Kung Fu Panda, an American production about a Chinese animal, has caused a lot of anxiety in China, he says.
There have been many cartoons in China about pandas before, but none had reached commercial success, says Mr Lee.
"The moment Kung Fu Panda hit the cinemas everybody watched it. They bought the merchandise and they learned English."
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As China's economic power grows, Mr Lee believes that Mandarin will overtake English. In fact, he has already been seeing hints of this.
"The decline of the English language probably follows the decline of the US dollar.
"If the renminbi is becoming the next reserve currency then you have to learn Chinese."
More and more, he says, places like Brazil and China are doing business in the renminbi, not the US dollar, so there is less of a need to use English.
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Even companies in China, who prefer to operate in Chinese, are looking for managers who speak both Mandarin and English if they want to expand abroad, he says.
"They tend to act as their bridges."
So the future of English is not a question of whether it will be overtaken by Mandarin, but whether it will co-exist with Chinese, says Vohra.
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Q. A friend of mine became upset when I used the phrase “to call a spade a spade.” She says that it’s a vicious racist term. Is she right?
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If you go back to the earliest written version of the saying, you bump up against a Greek satirist named Lucian (2nd century A.D.). To express the idea of speaking bluntly, of calling things what they are, he used the phrase (in his language), “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat.” So where did the word spade come from?
It’s based on a mistranslation by the Dutch Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus [ca. 1466 - 1536]. In Greek, skaphis is a shovel or spade, and skaphos is a boat, a skiff. He chose the wrong word, and “to call a spade a spade” came into being. In 1539, John Tavener brought Erasmus’ Latin version into English in his Garden of Wysdome: “Whiche call . . . a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade.” A mattock, by the way, is a digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. So Tavener was advancing the meaning of the proverb to show that even allied objects should be carefully distinguished. After that, the saying was off and running, and it was used by dozens of writers, eventually dooming it to cliché status. -
Twisted minds can take innocent words and images and turn them into an attack, but sometimes the fault is with the listener or reader who, through ignorance, interprets an innocent or unconnected word with verbal assault. This is why I take Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words to heart: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
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“Until I signed on to Weibo, I never saw the real China,”
The Financial Times is debating capitalism, but what it is really debating is the future of the market economy.
Karl Marx never used the word capitalism. But after the publication of Das Kapital, the term came to describe the system of business organisation which had made the industrial revolution possible. By the mid-19th century that system was central to the economic landscape. Werner Siemens in Germany, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller in the US, and in Britain Richard Arkwright’s successors. As individuals or with a small group of active partners, they built and owned both the factories and plants in which the new working class was employed, and the machinery inside them.
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The political and economic environment in which Marx wrote was a brief interlude in economic history. Yet the terminology devised by 19th-century critics of business continues to be used by both supporters and opponents of the market economy, although the industrial scene has been transformed. Legislation passed in Marx’s time permitted the establishment of the limited liability company, which made it possible to build businesses with widely dispersed share ownership. This form of organisation did not become popular until the end of the 19th century, but then expanded rapidly. By the 1930s, Berle and Means would write of the divorce of ownership and control. At the same time, Alfred Sloan at General Motors demonstrated how a cadre of professional managers might wield effective control over a large and diversified corporation.
So the business leaders of today are not capitalists in the sense in which Arkwright and Rockefeller were capitalists. Modern titans derive their authority and influence from their position in a hierarchy, not their ownership of capital. They have obtained these positions through their skills in organisational politics, in the traditional ways bishops and generals acquired positions in an ecclesiastical or military hierarchy.
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Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. By continuing to use the 19th-century term capitalism for an economic system that has evolved into something altogether different, we are liable to misunderstand the sources of strength of the market economy and the role capital plays within it.
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1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. This is a consequence of both the proliferation of knowledge — and how much of it any student can truly absorb — and changes in technology. Before the printing press, scholars might have had to memorize “The Canterbury Tales” to have continuing access to them. This seems a bit ludicrous to us today. But in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.
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2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.
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It is thus difficult to point to the number of languages that are needed, as well as to which ones are needed. There is no unique solution. It is clear today that globalisation has taken its toll, at least on some, if not on many of us. Do we need more of it by going to a unique language, whichever it is?
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Language is an essential expression of culture (and culture is, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, shaped by one’s native language).
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Remember Sri Lanka, and the many lives it cost because one language group (out of the two main ones) decided that its language would become “more important” than the other. The reverse is also true, and the European Union is ludicrous in its defence that 24 languages (including Croatian, spoken in the recently admitted 28th member) are official, and that all official documents should be translated into all 23 other languages. This is by the way not the case in practice, but the EU still spends over $1.4 billion every year to interpret and translate from one language into all others. Just walk in the corridors of the many buildings of the European institutions in Brussels, and you will realise that the non-native English that is spoken is hardly understandable by a native English speaker, and that English native speakers lose others when they go into somewhat deeper discussions (Wright 2007).
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.
... When you call lower-income people "losers," you're falsely assuming that we're all racing for the same finish line: material success. But to a large extent, lower-income people are just racing for other finish lines. Leftist outrage over income inequality is therefore deeply misguided. To a large extent, incomes differ because priorities differ. And if poor they don't consider their lack of riches a big deal, why should anyone else?"
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... When you call lower-income people "losers," you're falsely assuming that we're all racing for the same finish line: material success. But to a large extent, lower-income people are just racing for other finish lines. Leftist outrage over income inequality is therefore deeply misguided. To a large extent, incomes differ because priorities differ. And if poor they don't consider their lack of riches a big deal, why should anyone else?"
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Another of the many interesting findings reported:
"Simpler language is better than complex language for making people think you are credible and intelligent."
the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader.
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in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.
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In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.
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It is by the use of obscurantist language and labelling that formalist critics batter the text and bury it. They assert their egos and insult their own readers by making them feel ignorant. Much as they criticize anti-intellectual bourgeois society, they add to the contempt for art and thought by alienating readers even further. Their jargon, the hieroglyphics of a self-appointed priesthood, makes reading seem far more difficult than it is. In an age of declining literacy, it seems suicidal for the supposed champions of arts and letters to attack and incapacitate readers.
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I agree with Gayatn Spivak that our marginality is important—but there is very little room in the margins when that space has been claimed by Marxists and theorists of all stripes. With all this jostling in the margins, who is in the center?...
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Shari Benstock challenges us: “Feminist criticism must be willing to pose the question of the differences within women’s writing. . . . Feminist criticism must be a radical critique not only of women’s writing but of women’s critical writing.” She calls for us to “inscribe the authority of our own experience” (147) and to question the assumptions of that authority. I am not sure that Shari Benstock realizes how dangerous this project can be. My own career began with such critiques of feminist criticism and I have concluded that years of joblessness were a direct result of that practice.’ Old girl networks exist; hierarchy is imposed and some feminist journals have “better” reputations than others. Star feminist critics perform their acts on platforms all over the country. The only difference is that we like what they have to say, and fall asleep less easily than at a male critic’s lecture. One feminist critic says that she would not have the “hubris” to criticize Gilbert and Gubar, It is not hubris but a pledge to our collective future as practicing critics to point out differences in theory and practice. I am sure that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would be the first to insist that such sisterly criticisms of their work be offered, for they continue to write, to grow, and to change. If feminist criticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to question authority, each other’s as well as our oppressors’. There are some cases in which theorists ignore scholarship at their peril.
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The reality about "offensive language" is that there's a euphemism treadmill. The PC terms we come up with today will be considered offensive tomorrow. "Idiot" and "retarded" used to be medical terms.
How long will the list of words and terms that we should avoid using be, if everything that could potentially offend someone is avoided?
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It's not really about double standards here, but rather people deciding to decree on a semi-arbitrary basis what is "offensive" and imposing standards on others.
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Are you a different person when interacting or thinking in one language as opposed to in another?
Not that much different, I'm the same person in either language after all. It's like an asymptote—the curve comes awfully close to the line... But the two do not become one. -
the storehouse that is language (with its deeper structures that change only very slowly) necessarily affects and constrains the growth of the culture that is contained within.
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all good reasoning expresses and proceeds from prior commitments and beliefs and relies, at every step along the way, on believing – however cautiously and critically – the testimony of others engaged in this and similar collaborative enterprises. I emphasise "collaborative" because at the heart of the inadequacy of frequently repeated accounts of the supposed incompatibility of "science" and "religion", and of the imagined conflicts between "faith" and "reason", is the failure to appreciate all our intellectual enterprises are social enterprises, projects undertaken in community.
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George Steiner argued that "any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs … is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence". One supposes many of his readers found this contention bizarre. But Steiner believed there would be "no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, so fundamental as to be constitutive of the relation between word [the logos] and world".
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