English is a language built on the centrality of the word and idea of “I.” “I am sad.” “I broke my arm.” “I lost my job.” Even when accidents or systemic failures are involved, English frames them as though the individual suffering the consequence is responsible for what has happened to them. To be sad in English is not just to experience sadness, but to be sadness. To lose your job is not simply to be made redundant by an economic downturn, but to have failed in some way.
This habit of grammar aligns perfectly with neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism insists that individuals are responsible for their own fates. Poverty, unemployment, debt, or illness are redefined as personal flaws or bad choices. The grammar of English feeds that narrative: it makes each person linguistically responsible for their own misfortune.
So we Amnglo Saxons are neoliberals and you Celts are not. Fuck off and be Celts then. We’ll be Anglo Saxons.
Works for me….
What’s he bloody talking about ?
Didn’t he do any French at school ?
Sais pas. See, no “Je”.
Or “ne”, which AIUI is dropped in most cases in spoken French but not in written French.
Je suis désolé
That’s because French conjugates verbs with different endings, so the pronoun is redundant.
English doesn’t, for various good and not so good reasons, so you need the pronoun to distinguish between “I see” and “You see”.
But it’s a stupid subject for him to witter on about. Admittedly there is an embarrassment of choice there.
French conjugates verbs with different endings, so the pronoun is redundant.
It does, but you can’t hear a lot of them in speech (or tenses either).
Come to that “Ich bin ein Berliner” as another mick infamously said.
J’ai pas
I was taught. I think. Long time ago now.
Ich bin ein binliner
Cracking, Otto!
At least he didn’t get “Finest kind” tattooed on his shoulder, like far too many who don’t read Japanese did.
In Japanese the polite name suffix for an adult is -san, or -sama. So, Suzuki-san; Kondo-sama (your boss). Linguistically this term is gender-neutral: it is impossible to tell whether the person being referred to is male or female. According to Spud’s logic there’s no sexism in Japan, then.
Spud really does encapsulate that old Irish stereotype, doesn’t he?
If I remember my Ian Fleming correctly, Tiger couldn’t refer to James as Bond-san as it was the name of a Japanese toilet paper…..
There used to be a bog paper in Germany called Happy End.
Which is genius marketing.
In his book Progress Johan Norberg tells the story of the American group that wrote Japan’s constitution after WW2. There was one woman and she was left to get on with the section on equality she wrote in that women were equal.
We’re roaming round France at the moment so haven’t got access to my copy so can’t post a photo of the section, but if you haven’t read the book it’s a good read anyway.
Perhaps we should do a cultural appropriation and call him Jagaimo-chan, as his outpourings are pretty childish.
He is confusing denotation (ie definitions) with connotation (ie cultural context). Generally, first-person statements of the form ‘I am F’ do not imply responsibility for being F. Empirically, rather than logically, it is true that I am responsible for my feelings in that I can control my feelings*, so ‘I am sad’ can suggest responsibility for my feeling of sadness. But ‘I have been made redundant’ does not denote or imply responsibility, though, in some contexts, it might connote or suggest failure and responsibility.
* many women and a lot of chaps don’t get this. ‘You made me angry.’ ‘No, you made yourself angry by responding angrily to what I said.’ Duh!
In Spanish, ” I dropped something” = ” Se me cayó algo”; literally: “Something fell from me”. Complete denial of responsibility for the action taking place!
Maybe this explains why the Spanish-speaking world is so f*cked up; no-one takes responsibility for anything?
How do you like them apples Spud?
Oh, you can do that sort of thing in English too.E.g.:
“What happened to that chair you were sitting on?”
“It broke.”
I remember trying to explain this use of a transitive verb in English to a class of German schoolchildren, with no success at all.
Paul, you could try to explain the use of a transitive verb in English to a class of English schoolchildren with the same result. And I would be in the class…….
Fair point. A transitive verb is one which has a subject and an object. For example, I (the subject) broke the chair (the object).
But, the chair simply broke …?! I mean, how? Who broke it? It’s a bit of English genius to allow that sort of verbal abdication of responsibility.
I did google it after making my comment and now do get it, but when I was at school all the ‘adverb’, ‘past-participle’ stuff sounded like Serbo-Croat………….
I didn’t really understand it until I went through school and university and then learnt German.
I was horrified at how alien a lot of the concepts were, but in fact are there in English, just with different names.
When I went off to college and started Russian, the college bookstore had a series of books for the introductory foreign language courses: English Grammar for Students of [ insert language here ].
To be honest I don’t remember which parts of English grammar were more important to know when studying Russian. But the concept of such a book was a light-bulb moment for me. Since I had already studied German (grandparents from the old country) and French (high school), there were a lot of grammatical concepts from those languages that were useful in learning Russian.
You can do it in grammatically correct German, but it isn’t common usage. Italian does the same thing as Spanish only with fewer words (and never personal pronoun), and always past tense. And Japanese usually drops the personal pronoun as well, likewise abdicating responsibility for the broken chair.
It’s this the time to bring up the ghastly Yank import of saying “they are protesting X” when what is meant is “they are protecting against X” or “Y debated Z” when it should be “Y debated [topic] with/against X”. Or “write me”for “write [a letter/email] to me” or “search X” for “search [the web] for X”.
In short, stop denying bitransitive verbs their prepositions!
TomJ, my pet peeve about the Yanks (and it spread here some years ago) is the habit of saying “can I get” when asking for something – coffee, burger etc. The reply should be “No, I’m afraid YOU can’t get it because YOU are not allowed behind the counter”
eg: “I wrote Thursday”. Oh, well done, did you manage to spell ‘Thursday’ correctly?
I think you’d have to use a passive sentence in German to get round the problem.
Was ist mit dem Stuhl passiert, auf dem du gesessen hast?
Er ist kaputt gegangen.
“It came of in me hand, Chief”
To me, everything is always someone else’s fault.
I didn’t know I was Spanish!!!!!!
Isn’t that the result of years of experience as a civil servant, BB? 😛
(Sorry.. that one was too easy to pass up on…)
Alas Grikath. You’re telling the truth all too plainly!!!
I am hesitant to link Murphy with the late Peter Simple in any way. The latter was a journalist of genius, unquestionably if not the most important influence on my politics up there in the top 5. Murphy is to be frank a moron who for some reason has persuaded people that opaqueness of thought and purblind belief in your own intellect makes you a leading thinker. One of Simple’s less well known character was Senator Patrick Flannely, of ‘Grand Rapids’ who was wont to wrap himself in an outsize Shamrock and used to make a point of saying that it was incumbent upon the international community to ‘get the English out’. I don’t think even Peter Simple could have envisaged a post this convoluted. Literally absolutely demented.
“Sadness is on me”: Language, Responsibility, and Care
In Irish, you do not say I am sad. You say tá brón orm: literally, “sadness is on me.”
At first sight, this may look like a quaint idiom. However, in reality, it embodies a radically different perspective on responsibility, care, and human experience than that to which neoliberal English-speaking societies have become normalised.
This matters because how we frame misfortune determines whether we treat it as a personal failing or as a shared condition for which society must assume responsibility. Language matters, then, not least in the political-economic inferences it creates.
I actually wonder if he has ever been to either Ireland. Also he might care to have pointed out to him that the number of Gaelic speakers, while reviving somewhat is still a minority of the Irish population and unlike in Scotland or Wales I don’t think there’s anywhere where people are not bilingual. Anyway, one effect of AI has been to increase his ‘Straw Men’ in size epically.
1. English individualism and neoliberal grammar
English is a language built on the centrality of the word and idea of “I.” “I am sad.” “I broke my arm.” “I lost my job.” Even when accidents or systemic failures are involved, English frames them as though the individual suffering the consequence is responsible for what has happened to them. To be sad in English is not just to experience sadness, but to be sadness. To lose your job is not simply to be made redundant by an economic downturn, but to have failed in some way.
This habit of grammar aligns perfectly with neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism insists that individuals are responsible for their own fates. Poverty, unemployment, debt, or illness are redefined as personal flaws or bad choices. The grammar of English feeds that narrative: it makes each person linguistically responsible for their own misfortune.
Actually for me it’s the collectivist that makes the generalization that everyone is a victim, making no distinction between people who make an effort to rectify their own situation and those who do nothing about it, whatever the cause. To take an example, someone that has five children by five different partners will automatically go to the top of the housing list, and indeed housing allocation encourages such people to indulge in such behaviour. By contrast that individual who has ‘kept it in his pants’ and got a job at modest wages is so far down the housing priority list he can look forward to still potentially living with his parents into his thirties. No distinction made in terms of conduct, behaviour or merit. It’s the most obvious way to encourage pathology because the worse you behave the more the state comes to your aid.
I have no doubt if some denizens of this thread have greater awareness of language and etymology than I then they could probably fisk it in the same degree Ottokring did. Certainly French and German definitely define themselves in similar ways.
2. Irish relationality: states “on” us, not “in” us
Irish undermines this frame. Hunger is “on” you (Tá ocras orm). Joy is “on” you (Tá áthas orm). Sadness is “on” you (Tá brón orm). These states do not describe your essence; they are conditions that come upon you. They may describe your current condition, but they can also pass.
This phrasing acknowledges transience. Sadness “on me” does not mean I will always be sad. Hunger “on me” does not mean I am by nature hungry. Emotions and conditions are visitors, not permanent labels. They can come and they can go. Crucially, they do not define who you are.
That is inclusive and non-judgemental. It recognises that different people may experience different states at different times, without making those states into permanent marks of identity or failure.
Is that why a million Largely Irish speakers buggered off in the 18th century rather than tough it out? Was that the ‘politics of care’, leaving their women folk to literally manage on their own for decades while they found a reputation for louche behaviour on the other side of the Irish sea or Across the Atlantic?
Besides which, English can use a simple negative – ‘I am not broke’ – that’s why we have conditionals, negatives and other grammatical features.
3. Beyond binaries: no “yes” and “no”This logic extends to the way Irish handles affirmation and denial. Irish has no single word for “yes” or “no.” If asked An dtuigeann tú? (“Do you understand?”), you cannot answer with an abstract “yes” or “no.” You must respond with Tuigim (“I understand”) or Ní thuigim (“I do not understand”). The verb itself carries the affirmation or negation.
That makes answers always contextual, specific, and provisional. They are about the situation, not an abstract binary. Ní thuigim does not mean “No forever.” It means “I do not understand now.” Understanding may arrive later. Again, transience is emphasised.
Contrast this with English, which thrives on binaries: yes/no, success/failure, worthy/unworthy, striver/skiver. Neoliberal ideology depends on these divides. They allow it to categorise populations into the deserving and undeserving, the winners and losers, the employed and the work-shy. The grammar of English fits seamlessly with this worldview. Irish grammar resists it.
Perhaps explains why one country until Socialism got a foot in the door has consistently outperformed the other overall, to the extent that hundreds of thousands fled poverty on that side of the Irish sea to build a life here, a population decline that has still become even more acute after the last global financial crisis.
I’d again come back to the ‘language of care’ which seems to me to lump everyone in to the same bucket. Universal, low quality provision, as witnessed by the NHS, State education, the policing system. It runs entirely contrary to human nature, and as such is arguably responsible for almost every issue we face, not least the desire of the Gazans as a whole to murder every single Jew on the planet.
I ran out of energy to fisk it much further. It’s boiler plate bullshit for 6 more bullet points rabbiting on about neoliberals and how Gaza is the fault of neoliberalism, rather than an tragedy caused by he and his fellow neo Nazis over there. It illustrates the perils of the untrained AI user simply accepting as rote whatever it comes up with. Shit even by his low standards
You have more patience than me. But I did note that the “beyond binaries” sections is utter nonsense.
Understand/no understand sounds pretty binary to me.
If someone asks in English, ‘do you understand’ and you say ‘no’, that doesn’t imply your lack of understanding will last forever.
OTOH, Spud’s lack of understanding is indeed eternal and has only been magnified by his adoption of AI.
In an early Latin lesson we were told ‘Latin has no word for “yes”.’
‘What did they say for “yes”, sir?’ ‘Ita vero.’ ‘How would we translate that, sir?’
‘As “yes indeed”.’
“making no distinction between people who make an effort to rectify their own situation and those who do nothing about it, whatever the cause.”
I am inclined towards ending the welfare state, completely for this reason. People will help the deserving poor. A lot of people helped the Jarrow marchers. They put them up for free, they fixed their boots. I hate arts funding, because it’s always been the case that poor, brilliant people get help. Actors will do work for almost nothing for films they like. Directors will mentor directors they like.
“unlike in Scotland … I don’t think there’s anywhere where people are not bilingual”
I’m astonished but if you say so.
What Murphy should explain is what features of Scots Gaelic resulted in its speakers never having been viewed as thick. Fey? Yes. Fanciful? Yes. Drunken? Sometimes.
But thick? Nope.
P.S. Here’s an oddity.
In neither Scots nor Scots English have I ever met a word meaning “yokel”. There is no assumption that the countryman must be dim. The contrast with English English is striking. Why?
Teuchter ?
No, or at least not in my experience. The teuchter is a bit naive but not dim. Nor ignorant, save about the wicked ways of the urban man.
There was a young couple behind us in Tesco’s in Ullapool speaking what we presumed was Scots Gaelic, it sounded quite nice, very easy on the ear.
I suppose it’s possible that in some mountain fastnesses there remain monolingual Welsh or Scots Gaelic speakers, who genuinely can’t understand English, but you could count such people on the fingers of both hands. At the last count there were more Klingon and Esperanto speakers in the UK than Scots Gaelic, but they don’t get their own BBC Channel.
The last monoglot Gaels died in the 20th century. They literally can all speak English now.
In Irish, you do not say I am sad. You say tá brón orm: literally, “sadness is on me.”
At first sight, this may look like a quaint idiom. However, in reality, it embodies a radically different perspective on responsibility, care, and human experience than that to which neoliberal English-speaking societies have become normalised.
Even in Irish you can argue it’s personal responsibility: why did you let on you?
So he wouldn’t be so fucking sad if only he stuck to Erse, a language which has no word for ‘no’ and therefore is always positive. Unless it’s got no word for yes.
Murphy speaks a load of old erse
Individualism is, I believe, a lot about the quality of the land. Good land gets fought over. And so you need a tribe to defend it. Shit land doesn’t. It’s why Switzerland industrialised early and also why Switzerland never got invaded by the Nazis. Shit land, not worth nicking. It’s also why the Nazi support was in good farming areas, and not industrial areas.
It’s also broadly the Catholic/Protestant split. Arable farming in Catholic areas. More pastoral farming and crafts and then industry in Protestant ones.
A lot of Europeans are still of this mindset. Because for a long time, survival in France or Italy was thinking like this, so it’s in the genes and the culture. Britain has been thinking like this for a lot longer. And not just industrial revolution, but craft, pastoral farming.
I have been known to observe that Danes just suit British offices better than French and Italians. Maybe it’s all that time of Cnut and the genes from that, but also, I think it’s the environment. How people think about work. Like you know, being unemployed in Provence means sunny days so isn’t that bad. Unemployed in Swindon means you don’t get your holiday in Provence. The service in Northern France is like the UK, southern France is total shit.
ie also shit.
Depends on your standards, but service in the southern part of France is worse.
Think of all those poor Cathars murdered so that Southern France would come under the dictatorship of Northern France.
Denmark picked the wrong side in the Napoleonic Wars, and was forced to modernise and industrialise just to basically survive, and were forced to eject any culture of sitting around doing nothing.
“Poverty, unemployment, debt, or illness are redefined as personal flaws or bad choices.“
If I gamble every penny I have and then go do some extreme sport and wind up disabled, is none of that my bad choice then? Given I don’t need to do either?
If I libel a peer of the realm, refuse to retract when his lawyers make the consequences of not doing so quite clear and end up having to sell my house, that’s not my fault. So the taxpayer should give me another one.
If I inherit a house, I then get hit with a massive tax bill.
I am then in debt to the government until it is paid.
Is it my personal choice for the other person to die? (Maybe if I encourage them to assisted suicide…)
The company I work for goes under because the CEO made some bad business decisions.
Clearly that’s my fault for, erm… working for that company?
What country do you live in? In the UK the dead person gets the massive tax bill, not the beneficiaries. I’m actually minded to prefer the beneficaries get taxed as bog standard income, not the dead person.
“In the UK the dead person gets the massive tax bill, not the beneficiaries.”
Ask Mr Worstall to explain to you the concept of “tax incidence”.
Under communism, the state is responsible for their fates.
Under communism, all receive poverty, unemployment and debt from the government. The difference in commie dick Murphy’s dystopian world is that there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. He condemns all to poverty, with no chance of escape.
Communism notwithstanding, you are still responsible for what happens. That is, it’s still up to you to do something about it even if sickness, weather, government, crime or the other various slings and arrows are not your fault. Itstill happened to you and you have agency to if not fix it, make the best of it. Your responsibilty for what happens to you is innate, part of reality. You can’t turn it off or delegate it to somebody else. To deny it as Murphy does is to deny agency and personal responsibility. To envisage a world of cyphers, not people at all.
That’ll do nicely, if you’re interested in telling a load of identical proles what to do.
rhoda, I think back to my days in US Air Force basic training. Living in barracks/dorm with 60 others. Everything was regimented.
We did not fix our meals. We went to mess, where others fixed the food [which was fabulous. Many stories of Navy and Army personnel going to USAF mess].
I don’t know what’s in Murphy’s brain. He might visualize everyone living in towers/dorms, such that others do everything.
But you are right at some level. Surely you must wipe your own arse.
A bit like Islam, then.
The Oirish are a funny bunch. I used to knock around with a lass of the N.Oirish Catholic persuasion. She never used I at all. She always used we. So she’d say “We’re coming to bed. ” and you’d think you’re fortunes were looking up, but her sister was sleeping on the sofa.
Anyway, the Oirish have a long history of blaming others for their misfortunes. Goes back to the Vikings, doesn’t it?
Personality disorder is term for blaming others for your problems.
US Democrats have given US Blacks! a severe case of it. It eliminates franchise and establishes dependence. The new, improved slavery II.
I assume that’s where Scousers get it from…
I knew a few Irish at Uni.
I think the best contribution they could give the English language would be the widespread adoption of the plural youse.
For use when there are more than one of you in a group. To clarify the confusion between referring to someone as an individual or as part of a group.
“You” is the plural in englsh. If asked for my pronouns I would reply “thee, thou, thine.”
Actually, come to think of it “þee, þou, þine”. Let’s fuck the forriners & all switch to middle-english. If the Oirish can do it, why can’t we? Dual language road-signs next.
And Spud doesn’t understand the nuances of the English language. It’s “You are (a) sad (cunt)” “I broke your arm.” “You’re fired.”
Well, yes, immigration has never turned out to be a good thing for the Irish natives, has it? “Darling, good news! We get to be a despised underclass in our own country, but this time also not allowed to own property…”
Apart from Saint Patrick, because they needed a Briton to tell them to pack in the slaving and human sacrifices (frightening to think how fertile Irish peat bog is). Saint Oswald, who knew a thing or two about the mischief of foreigners, pray for us.
A benefit for some is, if you aren’t of the kind who go to court and successfully say ‘My religion made me do it’ maybe you can try ‘My language made me do it’ instead.
Off topic but there was a story in yesterday’s news about a gang rape taking place in an Oxford churchyard on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Terrible thing. Witnesses have been called for. Anyone who might have seen anything being asked to come forward. What should these witnesses be trying to remember? What did this gang of men look like? “So far, no description of the offenders has been released.”. So if you saw a gang of men of no description in the area, you know to contact the police.
SOP.
I read somewhere that there is a modern German expression that translates as “If they don’t tell you, then you know.”
I saw that and immediately assumed we can rule out a bunch of white youths and men.
It was Banbury (unless there was a similar case in Oxford, which I wouldn’t rule out).
So is he advocating for using impersonal verb formations (if that’s the correct term). So instead of “I stabbed that man” he advocates “a man was stabbed.” No cause, no agency, it just magically happened.
Instead of “we massacred our neighbours and now we are getting bombed” he advocates “bombing is happening – comprehension is absent – how can this be????”.
No cause, no agency, it just magically happened.
That’s left-wing economics in a nutshell.
Active or passive voice.
The supposed property of English is complete nonsense. If I say “It is too hot”, referring to a mug of coffee, that is exactly the same as saying “he is too hot” or “I am too hot”. There is no implication that my predicament is my fault any more than there is an implication that the coffee is responsible for its predicament.
‘Sarah Ferguson may be stripped . . . of her royal title.’