Language

An EasyJet pilot narrowly missed a mountain range by less than 800ft with 190 passengers on board.

Paul Elsworth, 61, was flying the budget airliner from Manchester to the Egyptian resort of Hurghada last month when he flew too close to a mountain range as he descended to land.

The flight on Feb 2 was travelling at an altitude of 3,100ft, approximately 800ft above the range’s tallest point – when pilots normally fly over it at 6,000ft.

The mountain moved, obviously. Geology, eh?

Crowley, the company which manages Stena Immaculate, said the incident was an “allision”, using an obscure nautical term that refers to a moving ship striking a stationary object or other ship.

As to the actual crash:

Tom Sharpe, a 27-year Royal Navy veteran and captain of a number of warships, said of Solong’s voyage: “It seems that she may have sailed from harbour, disembarked her pilot, set the helm to auto using routing information saved from previous voyages, then maintained the exact same course and speed for about nine hours before driving her bows into the Stena Immaculate’s port side.”

Without looking to see if someone was anchored in the way….

Igot into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.

The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.

In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.

Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.

And people using the word retard is to bring back eugenics and all that. Hateful.

Except this is to entirely miss how language works. We shaved monekys see something then use a word to describe it. If we get told off for using that word – that’s naughty, hateful etc – then we still see that same thing and will use some other word to describe it.

Therefore the progression through idiot, cretin, moron, retard and short busser. Because the thing exists – differently mentally abled – and therefore a word will be used to describe it. And, as these things work, that word used will become an insult.

Shrug.

People should not use colloquial phrases like “a piece of cake” and “kill two birds with one stone” because they are “very British-English” and may not be understood by foreigners, a university has suggested.

The University of Cardiff has told students that such idioms do not usually translate well with other cultures, “not because people have poor English skills but because this is very British-English”.

You should expect the people around you to be speaking British English.

On the other hand, the Russian, the Swede and the Frog will, if they meet, converse in English and do just fine. It’s only when the Brit turns up with all the weird colloquialisms that there will be difficulties. Advice to use simple, non-colloquial, phrasing when addressing foreigners is very sensible indeed.

Remember everyone, we do not speak more loudly at foreigners because they are deaf. We speak more slowly, simply, at foreigners becaue they are stupid.

A French court has ruled that the seaside city of Biarritz must rename its La Negresse historic district, possibly named after a black woman, after a case brought by activists who argued it was an outdated legacy of colonialism.

The ruling caps a long-running attempt by activists to force authorities in the resort on the Atlantic coast to drop what they say are “racist and sexist” placenames.

The activists want city officials to rename the La Negresse district as well as one of the city’s streets, rue de la Negresse.

La Negresse is the feminine version of the French word for negro (negre), translating into English as “negro woman”.

Of course, I live in a place called Sao Joao de Negrilhos. Which really does translate, directly, as St John of the Little Negroes. Even for the Portuguese this is a little close to the bone so if you press the locals for a translation then it, well, umm, OK, could sorta mean that. I guess. And online there’s a claim that in the Beja dialect – we are in the Beja region – “Negrilho” really means “elm tree”. Well, umm, OK, could sorta mean that. I guess.

And it really could too. The idea that a village out in the boonies of the Alentejo really had much to do with the slave trade would be odd, most odd.

According to the late Japan-based naturalist CW Nicol, the musky scent of the Japanese weasel gave rise to the saying itachi no saigo-pei. That literally translates as “the weasel’s final fart”, but is used to refer to the last word or act of an unpopular or dislikable person.

Enough, at least, to consider adopting this phrasing….

“The weasel’s final fart of the Starmer speech was to….”

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

We should ship them some of ours – soon relax that rule again, no?

Crying, once viewed merely as a distress siren, is now viewed as part of the array of pre-speech sounds that pave the way for future communication. “That’s how language comes into the brain of babies,” Wermke said. “They learn the musical features of the surrounding languages. The music is always first, it’s like a scaffold for the words.”

Which is annoying. Because I’m pretty good at accents. Both code switching in English and picking up the sounds of other languages (I’ve only ever learned, other than schoolboy French, by ear).

But can’t carry a tune even if issued with a tin can to do so in.

Workplace diversity programmes have led to middle-class professionals speaking differently to how they did in the 1990s, a study has found.

However, individuals in working-class jobs that have had less influence from equality initiatives still talk in the same way now as they did in the mid-90s.

Linguistic experts have found that people working in middle-class jobs such as managerial roles, in politics or within the university sector have adopted more “resonance” in the way they speak since the advent of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) programmes around the turn of the Millennium.

Resonance is a feature of conversations where people imitate and adopt the words of others in their own language.

It is a well-established aspect of human conversations and more common in some cultures than others. It is also a trait often absent in how autistic people speak.

So, code switching.

It used to be possible to speak to everyone in RP. That was rather the point of RP, it was the reference version of the language that everyone understood even if not spoke.

Now that not everyone does learn RP it’s necessary to code switch into the mubled argot they do understand. This might not be an advance.

Given the vagaries of English spelling:

It was a shock and awe tactic that divided opinions, with some critics branding it a “Gerald Ratner approach”, the British jewellery magnate who called his own company’s products “total c—”.

Given that I have a long memory I remember what he actually said – total crap.

But given what is usually elided that actually reads, to a modern, as “total cunt” which doesn’t really quite work, does it?

Neoliberal: Someone who thinks markets are the correct answer more often than you do.

Some Americans I know are calling the campus camp outs for Gaza the “Tentifada” Which I think is pretty good.

Once they start the drag story hours as well does it then become the campifada?

This is a job ad for a government website:

What you’ll do:

Researches, conceptualizes, writes, proofreads, and edits original content and digital experiences

Sure, sure, they’re Americans, but even so…..

Shoot them, obviously.

This is less so in American Englsih and obviously, both vastly less so than bleedin’ French:

It’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition, according to a shock ruling from the American dictionary publisher. But is it OK to recklessly split infinitives?

It is an observation that these things are now OK, not a decision that they are. Just because that’s how the English language works. We do it, they then write up the apparent rules of what we do.

Britain’s unique drinking culture and sense of humour have given the English language 546 words meaning drunk, researchers have found.

Linguists have discovered that in Eng­lish virtually any noun can be transformed into a “drunkonym”, a synonym for intoxication, by adding “ed” at the end, and have listed hundreds of formally identified examples. These ­included expressions such as “trolleyed”, “hammered”, “wellied” and ­“steampigged”.

Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, of Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, believes that it is down to Britain’s drinking habits and absurdist sense of humour. “In Eng­lish there’s an extremely large number of words that can mean drunk, and more can be formed simply by adding ‘ed’ to the end. It means pretty much any word in Britain can inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ from the context.

One reader here – and it must have been at least a decade back – once explained his son’s (hmm, maybe nephew?) go to comedy routine. Which was to tell a story about copious drinking while creating these new synoyms for being drunk. One of which I recall was “lawnmowered”. The linguistic point of the routine being absolutely what our German Professor has now discovered.

So, you read it here first. The Tim Worstall blog, beating academia by a decade.

Now, to get really linguistically interesting, you can also do the same with tits. The technique is a little different but the linguistic trick is the same. Boobs, boobies, baps, puppies, norks and on and on. The meaning comes from the context, not the word.

‘House hacking’: the latest trend in Britain’s broken property market
Young homeowners are turning to ‘house hacking’ to pay the mortgage

AKA “taking in a lodger”.

Ultimately, we need to find robust, reliable forms of language learning that aren’t driven by profit or demand. While there’s certainly a place for big tech, we can’t depend on it alone to provide us with resources to maintain endangered languages. Anna Luisa Daigneault echoes a similar thought, advocating for language learning “made by the people, for the people”.

Speak Welsh to each other then. If no one wants to then that’s it for Welsh.

Shrug. It is what happened to Mercian, Northumbrian, Cumbrian and on…..

Say you had something that coule be translated into other languages. Presumably you’d go with the ones that provided the largest possible market. Not everything will work in every language, obvs. Scrabble would be difficult in Chinese perhaps, given ideograms.

But:

Scots Gaelic version of Scrabble released after Isle of Lewis campaign
Latest edition of the board game which is available in 29 languages will be in 1,500-year-old dialect spoken by 60,000 people

Really?

Is there one in Lallans already?

“He just said the most famous Hitler phrase there is in this world,” Zverev told the umpire of a fan in the stands to his left.

What? Drive East? They don’t actually tell us what was said…..

‘Black market’ is racist phrase and should not be used, say bank leaders

We have a well established vocabulary here. Black market – illegal. Grey market – legal but not tax paying. Or possibly legal but not wholly so – so things like parallel imports without IP protection and so on. White market – fully law and tax abiding.

Just bugger off and go touch yourself up over your virtue signalling somewhere else.