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O Tempora, O Mores

She said that in principal restorative policies are fine but poor implementation can lead to teachers becoming “disempowered” and discipline getting worse.

The Telegraph used to catch those….

In recent years there has been a rise in popularity of restorative justice policies in schools, prompted by a greater focus in the principle in the criminal justice system, according to Ms Keates.

See?

17 thoughts on “O Tempora, O Mores”

  1. The Tellygraph also has had this heading online (for the past 15 hours)

    “Carlos Ghosn was treated like a ‘diety’, Nissan report finds”

  2. For fun, you should try teaching idiomatic preposition use to forriners. Though, for “idiomatic” there are often multiple possibilites, and certainly regional – at least preferences – if not outright variation – in usage.

  3. @BiG: it must be even harder if you’re teaching American English, with its diarrhoea of prepositions.

    moor a boat -> moor up.
    park a car -> park up.
    I met Fred -> I met up with Fred.
    And so on.

    You can mount a feeble defence of this sort of thing by pointing at purported penumbras of difference, formed by emanations of distinctions, blah, blah, blah. But mainly it seems to be a tic. It reminds me of the strange southern English habit of peppering speech with “one” to mean, exactly, ‘I’.

  4. @dearie,

    The worst thing is that the Americans attempted to collate all that disparate and ever-shifting usage, pacakge it as grammar, fixed irrevocably for all time, and force it down the throats of generations of students in the form of “The Elements of Style”.

    The result being that Americans can’t even correctly identify the passive voices they have been, bizzarely, trained to loathe, but are certain as hell (and, to be fair, correct, not that many British English speakers gives a fuck) as to whether you should use “which” or “that”.

  5. Don’t know about met up with Fred, but met with Fred is obviously more comprehensible than the english english met Fred. Former is a verbal contraction of had a meeting with Fred. The emphasis on the meeting. Second can strongly imply meeting Fred for the first time.& nothing more than a passing introduction.
    Much of the Yank english oh such superior Brits sneer at is the language Brits were speaking a century or so ago. And when will Brits get used to being on the periphery of the english speaking world? It’s geographical centre is probably somewhere off the Pacific coast of the US.

  6. @ Tim: I thought that was you showing how it ought to have been written, rather than a further quote from the Telegraph. It might help if you laid out your posts properly.

  7. ‘It reminds me of the strange southern English habit of peppering speech with “one” to mean, exactly, ‘I’.’

    Except: one does not pepper one’s speech with one instead of I.

    ‘One’ means a person in general… does not pepper their speech with ‘one’ instead of ‘I’.

    ‘I’ is the first person singular pronoun, ‘one’ is an impersonal third person pronoun and it is gender neutral. (English already has one, so no need for the transgender Ghestapo to invent more.)

    Use of ‘one’ is common in French: On dit, rather than, Je dis… It is said, or someone said, rather than I said.

    ‘Don’t know about met up with Fred, but met with Fred is obviously more comprehensible than the english english met Fred.’

    It is tautological. If ‘One met Fred’ does not mean ‘One met with Fred’ then what did one do or with whom did one meet?

    Met with Fred gives no more information about whether it was the first time or not, than ‘met Fred’.

    American English is heavily influenced by the idiomatic baggage that Italian, Greek, German, Polish, etc brought to the US which then was melded with English. Like the Irish who don’t say they have been to the shops, but I’m after having been to the shops, so I have.

  8. “If ‘One met Fred’ does not mean ‘One met with Fred’”
    “met with” is a meeting, “met” is more of a chance encounter.

  9. This sort of abusage permeates cooking programmes, even 9especially?) British ones – nothing can be simply ‘cooked’ or ‘fried’, it must be ‘fried off’. Fried off what? (A pan, I imagine.)

  10. “pan-fried” is just a reframing. It sounds more wholesome and healthful. It’s effective pre-suasion.

  11. “‘One’ means a person in general”: oh balls – it means what it’s used to mean. If I use it it means “on” in the French style, as you say. But if you’ve really not heard it used to mean “I” then you must be remarkably unobservant.

  12. She said that in principal restorative policies are fine but poor implementation can lead to teachers becoming “disempowered” and discipline getting worse.

    Like Socialism, it isn’t that restorative justice is a bad idea, it’s just that it’s implemented badly.

    Every single time.

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