charity muggers

Ah, OK.

This is an intriguing typo as well:

Critics argue Norris is a loose canon

Senior priest on the rampage sort of thing…..

Max Robins of the New York-based Paley Center for Media pointed out how significant it was to scrap a show that still attracts almost 15 million viewers an episode. “It makes CBS a tonne of money and for them to do this it had to be incredibly serious.”

The difference between tonne and ton is not a matter of mere spelling differences between English English and American English.

The ton is either the Imperial (or long) ton of 2,240 lbs, or the short ton of 2,000 lbs (either could be common in US usage). The tonne is the metric tonne of 1,000 kg (2,204 lbs).

Agreed, this might seem trivial, but to one who works in the metals trade when you see “ton” the first thing you ask is “ewhich ton”? Whereas “tonne” has a well defined meaning.

But what this means is that when an American says “ton” we do not automatically transcribe it as “tonne” in English English.

It’s fine that we change “color” and “harbor” to “colour” and “harbour”, but not “ton” to “tonne”.

Hmm, what’s that? Yes, I suppose I ought to, you’re right, get a life……

The upper chamber of Spain‘s parliament has caused controversy by allowing senators to debate in five of the country’s languages, with interpreters employed to turn their words into a tongue they all speak perfectly: Castilian Spanish.

Critics claim that allowing senators to speak Catalan, Galician, Valencian and the Basque language of Euskara has turned the Spanish senate into a tower of Babel. They accuse the senate of wasting public money at a time of swingeing public spending cuts.

Of course it’s a hugely political thing: one way of looking at Spain is that it’s a Castilian Empire imposed upon the regions. Indeed, that’s actually a pretty reasonable way of looking at it. And traditionally the conservatives have thought that this was just fine while the left has thought, again traditionally, that it isn’t.

But what’s more fun is that, Euskara aside, they’re really just four dialects of the same language. Certainly no further apart than Geordie and Cockney in our own dear mother tongue. At least one of them (Galician) is mutually intelligible with Portuguese as well.

Perhaps we should introduce this into our own Houses of Parliament? So that the Honourable Member for Newcastle can speak to us in his rich, native, tones (assuming that such a pocket Labour seat actually appoints a local, unlike the neighbouring Hartlepool which got Mandy) and we have a bank of translators to make him intelligible to the rest of us?

Although it would be a little cruel, I know, to appoint a translator for John Prescott. How could anyone ever work out what he was trying to say so that it could be translated?

As if by using their accent (as best we can mind) we’re training our own ears to understand them better: not, as some might think, in order that they understand us better (you know, on the basis that they’re so thick that we have to adapt our tones to their).

I have to admit that I’m a horror for doing exactly this. When living in the US (or, over the years, just working with septics) I do take on a very mid Atlantic accent (and you can even see it in some of my writing, “an herb” for example). But when talking to the Brit  next to me will switch back, entirely unconsciously, to the rather archaic BBC I have.

Or when I was working in an East End pub, quite happily wittering on about “nuffink”.

But this only works for me in English, with other variants of English. When in another language (not that I speak any others fluently, but over the years have had conversational French, business Russian and supermarket Portuguese) I try as best I can to get the local accent right. And when someone else is not a native speaker of one of the variants of English, when someone is, for example, French, Portuguese or Russian, but we are conversing in English, my accent becomes even more archaically BBC….World Service of 30 years ago almost. Exactly the opposite of what I do with other English speakers.

On the grounds that that is, if spoken clearly and slowly (but no, not loudly), the variant of English which is easiest for a non-native speaker to understand.

Slightly odd and entirely unthought through: I think just all these years abroad have trained me into what works best for me.

I would add though that my native Bathonian never gets used more than a mile or two from Bath Town Centre. No one more than a mile or two from there understands it anyway, making it a singularly unuseful accent to have.

As we all get told this stands for “port out, starboard home” for this is how the richer, posher, people travelled out to India back in the day. Something to do with how the sun shines through the portholes.

The problem with this is that no linguist has been able to find anyone ever actually using the word in such a sense when people were indeed being sunned through portholes on trips to India. The assumption is that posh as P.O.S.H., it being an acronym, is something we’ve made up to explain the existence of the word in hte language, rather than how the word came into the language (I’m sure there’s a proper name for that process as well).

So, I see this clipped from the NYT:

There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.

And there we see the word posh being used, in the wild, in another language. Could this be the origin?

Actually, I’m sure that some (if not many or even all) linguists have got here before me but as this is an original thought I’d like to record it (umm, yes, I know, “parts of this book are original, parts are good, unfortunately, the parts that are original are not good and the parts that are good are not original” type stuff here. This may well be the linguistic equivalent of rediscovering the wheel: “Oooh, roundy thing!”).

So, Dari is really the Afghan version of Persian or Farsi (not sure how far apart they are, French and Italian? Erse and Scots Gaelic? American and English?) and the “bacha” refers to “calf or young man/boy”. It’s the “posh” which refers to being “dressed up”.

But why would a Persian word end up in English and associated with the Raj at that? We didn’t after all, conquer the place.

Ah, but Persian was the court language of the Mughal Emperors and yes, all those East India Company officers from the inception of the company through to at least the Indian Mutiny did indeed learn Persian (umm, OK, many of them did then).

So we have a word in another language which means “dressing up” and we have that same word in English which means, in at least one meaning of it, “dressed up” (even now, someone dressed up in a penguin suit can be greeted with the “My, you do look posh”). And we have the crossing of the two languages at roughly the time and place where we first see the word turning up in our own English language. And it’s even associated with the Raj, which is where our folk derivation places it.

Me? I’d call that a knockout.

But then as we all know, I’m not a linguist alas: either someone’s got there before me or, worse, someone’s considered it and rejected it. Not original and wrong to boot would match the usual Worstall track record.

Hmm. An original theory according to this. And here. Here. Here. Even Oxford dictionaries.

So for the present I’ll put this in the “original” bin and wait for you lot to tell me whether it’s right or wrong.

I honestly can’t remember meeting a more gentle, modest and courteous man. Or laughing so much.

For a comedian it’s the second sentence that is important. But that Ken Dodd also merits the first sentence is, in he larger sheme of things, perhaps more important.

“My niche is that not only can I show British culture in an unfamiliar way, but I can do the same with the language. I can show how absurd English idioms sound to the Italian ear.” These include “Bob’s your uncle”, which apparently derives from the nepotistic practices of 1880s PM Robert Cecil. Palmieri proposes an Italian alternative: “Silvio fucked your daughter.” He also reveals that the Italian version of “Have your cake and eat it” is: “Have your wife drunk and the bottle still full.”

Foreigners will go on learning English, regardless. The British have an obligation, it seems to me, to reciprocate. Call it what you like – mutuality, courtesy, fair exchange, good practice. Not to do so is in every sense hateful. A self-exemption. A trusting in force and market, where – for once – force and market do not apply. A departure from international polity. A terminal and blazingly wrong conceit.

Something to do with us being the polite ones perhaps?

There will never be another s— deal at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The New York company is telling employees that they will no longer be able to get away with profanity in electronic messages. That means all 34,000 traders, investment bankers and other Goldman employees must restrain themselves from using a vast vocabulary of oft-used dirty words on Wall Street, including the six-letter expletive that came back to haunt the company at a Senate hearing in April.

Fortunately you are usually using the English language, one abnormally rich in synonyms. Such multiples of synonyms meaning that you’ll always be able to keep one step ahead of the software filters.

You might find that replacing “shitty” with “poopy” or “cacky” doesn’t quite get over the true meaning you wish to, but what about danna, Sir Reverence or pilgrim’s salve (especially useful with Bostonian or older white shoe firms perhaps?)?

Instead of pimping a deal you could beard-split it, or bull it, even buttock-broker it.

Instead of fucking someone over, you might prefer to describe it as prigging them, swivving them, even wapping.

To stop wanking about and make a decision would be to stop boxing the Jesuit.

Of course, this particular set of synonyms might not suit: not really sure what the reaction would be to the knowledge that Goldman Sachs was now using thieves cant.

But the two pieces of anecdata I have are

Anecdata: from the observation that the plural of anecdote is not data.

Before learning another language, it is useful to have something worthwhile to say.

Ed Balls, in his infinite fucking wisdom, has decided that Latin is a useless subject in schools. Like Boris Johnson, I am outraged, not least because this is my livelihood at stake.

The joy and value of Latin being taught in schools and the defence of it being of course entirely separate from this Libertarian’s sustenance being drawn from teaching Latin in schools.

Even Homer nods and all that.

* That should perhaps be Bellae, Bellum, Bellam, dunno….for my Latin education was cut cruelly short. On arrival at prep school I was greeted with the Cambridge Latin Course. The first parts of which were set around the Bay of Naples, whence I had just come to attend said prep school. The second part is when the family moves to Bath, my new home town after Naples. I really never did quite work out why all these people were talking about home in this funny language. My solution was to take the Latin exam at the end of my first year at senior school while woozy on the cider traditionally offered to the scorer of the Masters/Pupils cricket match (although it could have been the Old Boys match, the First XI or Eton/Harrow for all I can recall. Cricket being about the only thing worse than Latin.) and thus for proven incompetence I was allowed off to do something interesting, like Italian.

Falling and being in love is a glorious feeling. We need a different word to describe our love for our neighbour

We have two perfectly good words which make this distinction.

Eros and agape.

True, we simply nicked ‘em from the Greeks but then we’ve done that with large parts of our language along with a goodly chunk of mathematics and other things.

“As the most over-examined generation, which invests the most money into its education, polyglots should get more recognition for their language skills. They are still sorely underrated here, particularly if you do not wish to pursue professions traditionally associated with languages, such as interpreting, translation or teaching. Abroad of course, the demand is high for native English speakers but it seems that British companies do not make the most of hiring employees who have a working knowledge of several languages. We are in a veritable stalemate: those who do not learn foreign languages are criticised for being inward-looking and for those who do, they do not seem to reap any additional employability benefits on UK turf.”

Err, yes. It’s called a “market”. If there was value to be able to speak languages other than English then companies would pay for said value. Companies are not paying for said value therefore there is no value to being polyglot.

Thus the educational effort to become so has no economic value (it may well have great personal value but that ain’t the same thing at all).

So we shouldn’t be spending tax money on it.

At an Intelligence Squared debate last week, Professor Mary Beard gave some indications of how the teaching of languages has suffered in state education.

- Fewer than 500 state schools now offer any classical languages and much of this teaching is offered in the ‘twilight’ hours after most classes have finished.

- The government is not providing enough training of classics teachers to replace the ones who will retire.

- The numbers taking French GCSE have fallen by 100,000 since 2004.

Umm:

TEACHERS in one town are struggling to understand their pupils – because they speak 127 languages.

Kids turn up for class talking any lingo from Afrikaans and Armenian to Uzbek and Zulu.

Others chatter away in an incredible variety of tongues including Assamese, Chichewa, Kurdish, Lithuanian, four kinds of Chinese, Nahuati and even English. It means Reading, Berks – population 233,000 – has more languages than almost any town of similar size in the world.

Sorry, can somome remind me what the problem is again? We seem to have an abundance of people who can speak not English….so why does anyone want to train more?

When something has crossed the parody horizon, it becomes impossible to parody (that, of course, is a common idiom) for the simple reason that any parody would be indistinguishable from the original.

Similar to “jumping the shark” perhaps.

“Polly has crossed the parody horizon”….yes, works for me.

The widow of Ferdinand Marcos disclosed last week that she is pushing her son Ferdinand Jr, 51, known as “Bongbong”, to stand for president next year.

…

He was educated at Worth, a Benedictine boarding school in West Sussex.

I remember, when I was at the prep school there, seeing the limo coming to take him off for a weekend exeat or half term or some such. Whether Ma and Pa were in the back I don’t know although I was told they were.

Anyway, on to the question.

If elected would he be the first head of state to have been educated at an English Catholic (err, yes, specifying Roman, not the Apostolic etc claim of the CoE) school since the Reformation?

The Tudors and Stuarts weren’t educated at schools and we’ve not had a Catholic HoS since then (neatly leaving aside all the arguments about whether Charles I, or II, or James II were in fact Papists). Then there were no Catholic schools in England until what, 1837 and the Emancipation (maybe earlier?)?

I doubt very much if any member of any other Royal Family who has ascended the throne was educated in England which leaves elected Presidents and the like since around 1850 or so.

So, anyone any idea?

Ah, looking it up I see that Ampleforth has already had a Grand Duke of Luxembourg and a King of Lesotho. So how about elected heads of state?

For the past couple of days it’s been difficult to load a page. Keep getting “Connection reset” page.

“connection reset while this page was loading”.

Is this something on my machine? Or further down the line at my ISP?

Hitting “try again” four or five times usually loads the page.

Any ideas?

Update: All fixed now. Something weird that I don’t understand but still, all fixed.

France’s new education minister has become a national laughing stock after he handed out a document on how to tackle poor spelling which was full of mistakes.

Muphry’s points out that any attempt to correct the spelling or grammar of another piece will contain further errors of spelling or grammar of greater magnitude than the original.

Works in French as well as English.