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Recently there has been a lot of trouble over the early release of certain criminals. Normally, a prisoner who is sentenced simultaneously for several crimes will serve his sentences CONCURRENTLY, that is, running together, so that in effect he only serves the time of the longest sentence. But if the judge decides that this is a particularly dangerous or vicious criminal, then he may order that he serve his sentences CONSECUTIVELY, one following another, so that the times of the separate sentences add up to a grand total. The confusion arises over time spend on REMAND, that is, while the prisoner is being held for trial. (Reading gaol is now a remand centre, and no longer holds convicted criminals). The judge may order that a portion of this time be deducted from the time spent subsequently in prison.
The confusion has arisen, because the prison authorities interpreted a very badly written act of 1967 to mean that the remand time should be deducted from each of the consecutive sentences. So a cunning and dangerous criminal, who managed to spin out his trial for 2 years, and is now serving 15 years in total, might get his sentence reduced to 9 years! Moreover, where the arithmetic works out so that the criminal has already served more than the reduced sentence, they were saying that he might claim compensation money for the "extra" time spent in prison! However, the Home Secretary has acted very quickly and decisively to stop this nonsense.
Chinese people are often very surprised how the British legal system appears to be "soft" on criminals. This arises to some extent from an exaggerated sense of fairness. But in BENDING OVER BACKWARDS to be fair to criminals, we are actually being very unfair to society at large. (Bending over backwards means taking excessive or disproportionate measures to achieve an end). The minister who in 1967 was responsible for this particularly bad piece of legislation was Roy Jenkins, one of the "Gang of Four" (yes, that's what we called them!) who later left the Labour party to form the Social Democratic Party, which later merged with the Liberals to form today's Liberal Democrats.
In the late 1960's, a new phrase entered the English language - CATCH 22. This was the title of a film (and a book) which was then very popular. It was a story, comically exaggerated, of corruption in the American Air Force at the end of the Second World War. Because of the protests against the Vietnam War, this film achieved great prominence.
The "catch" was this - according to the rule book, the only way you could be discharged from the American Air Force was because of insanity - however, the fact that you wanted to leave was taken as proof that you were sane!
So, ever since, similar dilemmas are referred to as "Catch-22" situations. A typical one is that, in order to join the Musicians' Union, you had to be a practising professional musician - however, you could only get work as a musician if you were a member of the union. This was a way in which they maintained what was called a "closed shop" - one of the trade union practices which led to their widespread unpopularity, and in part helped the Conservative Party back to power under Margaret Thatcher.
One Catch-22 situation that affects overseas professionals much more strongly is the well-known difficulty: in order to work in Britain (except in menial jobs) you have to have a work permit - however the Home Office will not issue a work permit unless you have the offer of a job.
Perhaps all of us have at some time found ourselves
ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA.
A dilemma is a situation where we have to act, and both of the possible courses of action could be equally unpleasant, or lead to equally undesirable consequences - so, how to decide? The situation is like an angry bull which is charging at us, and we are going to be gored (impaled) by one or other of its horns.
That is a "straight" dilemma, but there are other similar situations, for which there are some very lively colloquial English expressions. Consider the case of a man who is in a very unpleasant job. Every day he hates to go to work. But if he quits his job, he will find it almost impossible to get another, and his state of unemployment would be even worse than his present condition. So handing in his notice to the boss would be:
(JUMPING) OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE. (see below)
A common case is what we call a NO-WIN SITUATION. This can often occur when one is confronted with people who are being unreasonable. For example, a teacher is about to punish a schoolboy whom he suspects (wrongly) of having stolen something. He is GOING ON angrily at the unfortunate boy, giving him a lecture before administering the punishment.
If the boy tries to answer back to the teacher -
If the boy remains silent -
The teacher then tries to force the issue.
If the boy admits it, the teacher will punish him, and if he doesn't the teacher won't believe him, and will punish him anyway. On the analogy of tossing a coin, there is a phrase for this situation:
HEADS YOU WIN, TAILS I LOSE.
In history there is a famous example of this. King Henry 7th was very keen to collect money in taxes. So he would send round Cardinal Morton, his chief tax collector, to visit various nobles on their estates.
If the nobleman entertained Morton well, he would say "Ah, I see you're very rich, you can give much money to the king!"
while if he entertained him very meagerly, the cardinal said "Ah, you don't spend much: you must have a lot of money hidden away which you can give to the king."
And so, either way the unfortunate nobleman was caught on MORTON'S FORK.
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[ Concerning the schoolboy's dilemma, there is a book (fiction) which I highly recommend for those with children going to school in Britain. It is:
"The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler", by Gene KEMP.
Although it dates from 1977, it still captures the atmosphere of school life (last year of Junior school), and is quite easy to read. If there are a few bits of the language which you find difficult, your school age children will explain them quite easily. I think they would love this book. And anyway, reading books together is very good for "Fu Zi Qing" (Parent-Child Relationship). You should be able to find it in your local public library, or in your son's/daughter's school library. ]
One of the problems for learners of English is to know what is the "best" literature they should read in order to get a good command of the language. Chief of the difficulties is the way words keep changing their meaning. If one takes modern writing (especially journalism) words are often used in a trendy fashionable way, unintelligible to outsiders, and which will be forgotten in twenty years' time. But if one turns to classical literature, like the novels of Jane Austen which were written in between 1798 and 1816, one finds that certain everyday words like "sensible" have changed their meaning. A most drastic example is the word "thing" which in Anglo-Saxon times meant "parliament" (it still does in Icelandic - their parliament is called the "Thing"!). But from there its meaning changed to "the matter being discussed in parliament" to "the thing under discussion" to today's meaning of "any old thing", whether material or abstract.
Of course, it is not only in English that this happens. I once read a history of the character "ru2", meaning "if" and written with a woman on the left and a mouth on the right. Originally, it meant "obey", and in the traditional world, a woman was supposed to follow orders from the mouth. From obey, it could easily change its meaning to "follow", and from there it could branch into its two main meanings today, thus:
"following A, then B" would come to mean "if A, then B"
while
"X follows Y" could imply that "X is like Y"
While I was invigilating an examination two weeks ago, I was reading "Studies in Words" by C.S.Lewis, and it alarmed me to see how many simple words and phrases in my favourite books and poems actually meant something rather different from what I thought, even though written less than two hundred years ago. But I will now tell you about a useful everyday English word which seems to have changed its meaning in this century. That word is DITHER, and can be either a verb or a noun.
Looking this word up in a 1976 Webster's dictionary (American, I know, but I prefer it to many of our English productions) I find the meaning "nervously excited or confused". This I take to be the original meaning of the word, and it is obviously the source of its use in computer terminology. If you want to produce an orange colour, but your printer only has red and yellow inks, you have to print a mixture of red and yellow dots. However, simply going one red, one yellow, may give an undesirable microscopic striped effect, so one (mathematically, not physically) makes the printer jump about in a dither by producing a random mixture of the two colours.
But this is not the meaning of the word that I grew up to know. Here on this side of the Atlantic, I and many others take it to mean either vacillation (hesitation between two alternatives - shall I or shan't I? - just like an indecisive politician!) or even the time wasting that results from such behaviour. And it's always reprehensible, that is, one is finding fault with it, for example a parent might scold his or her child, saying "stop dithering!".
I think how the word has come to change its meaning is simply this. If the boss is bothering one at the office, then it's easy to become flustered* (red faced and overheated) and to start dithering about (in the old sense). But from the other person's point of view, this is simply indecision and delay, and time-wasting. I think the transition was occurring, in Britain at least, around the middle of this century. Here is an extract, written in 1953, which appears to show the word in a transitional state between the older and newer meanings. It's from "Letters to an American Lady", again by C.S.Lewis.
"... Yes, we have the word "dither" - and the thing too. And our offices are in a dither too. This is so common that I suspect there must be something in the very structure of a modern office which causes Dither. Otherwise why does our "College Office" find full time work for a crowd of people in doing what the President of the College, 100 years ago, did in his spare time without a secretary and without a typewriter? (The more noise, heat, and smell a machine produces the more power is being wasted!)
And this was well before every office had computers!
*P.S. regarding "flustered" - I understand that in Chinese culture it is considered reprehensible to allow oneself to become flustered - even if one is very put out by the behaviour of one's superiors or subordinates, one should not let it show it in one's face. Am I right?
When the pressure is on, some people say "hurry up, hurry up!", and others say "take it easy, take it easy!". The Ancient Romans had a saying:
FESTINA LENTE
which is Latin for "Make haste slowly". I cannot think of any similar short saying in English - the nearest perhaps is "don't panic". It describes perfectly the attitude of a hurdles champion, who has to go as fast as possible, but not so fast as to break his or her rhythm of running and jumping.
When William the Conqueror invaded the South of England in 1066, King Harold was in the North, having just defeated a Scandinavian king who had invaded there. His men, still tired from battle, had to make a forced march south, and they engaged William's army at Hastings, without having any time for rest. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Perhaps Marshal Zhu De understood this principle better, so that in spite of the hardships and dangers of the Long March, the People's Liberation Army still won. Which leads me to ask: is there an equivalent saying in Chinese?
And now for some more common English expressions. I will be talking about political matters, but not for their own sake, more by way of introducing these sayings, rather than being a political commentator. One of these:
(JUMPING) OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE
is a very common saying. The present Conservative government has lost much popularity, even among those voters in the middle class who should be its natural supporters. Apart from major political reasons, such as the perceived increase in crime, drop in educational standards, etc., I suspect that people are increasingly feeling HARASSED by the general incompetence of people behind desks. Even if they are friendly and want to be helpful, all too often it is a case of "I'm not authorized to deal with this, I'll have to consult the Senior Manager". It may not be a case of dealing with government officials, but rather clerks in banks, or assistants at gas or electric showrooms, and other such places, but even so, the general feeling of frustration is bound to reflect on the government of the day. It may well be true, that in certain proper political matters the people have suffered under this administration: for example, although income tax has been reduced, the government has simply taken back more in the form of VAT and other taxes. But it is these petty (small-small) frustrations which
ADD INSULT TO INJURY.
So now we see that everybody is threatening to vote the Tories out of office. However, when it comes to voting time, they may think again. Both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are very pro-Europe, and "Europe" in practice means more administration, more taxes, more incompetence. No country in Europe really benefits from the stupid decisions made in the name of the Common Agricultural Policy, or the Common Fisheries Policy, the practical effect of which is to set French farmers against the British, Spanish fisherman against the Irish, etc. I cannot tell what the real political motivation behind these decisions is, in other words if there is a
HIDDEN AGENDA,
but the effect of all these decisions is to weaken the member countries of Europe in order to impose a "New Roman Empire" in the form of a centralized European administration. This is a policy of
DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
So at voting time, the British electorate may reconsider, and think that voting in Labour or the Liberals would be jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire!
Guys'n'Dolls is the title of a famous American musical, but in Britain we have other words. Sometimes you will hear English people talking about a "chap" where the Americans use the term "guy". This is simply a general colloquial term for a man (never a woman). It is actually a shortened form of the Old English word "chapman" meaning a small businessman or shop keeper - it is from the same root as the common German surname "Kaufmann" meaning, literally, "buy-man".
In UK English there is also a term "bloke", but this is more vulgar (the English tend to be class-conscious about language!) and I do not recommend you use it, as you might slightly offend certain people if you apply the word to the wrong people at the wrong time.
In regard to what I had just written there, I had an informative reply from one of my readers:
"I know you meant "chap" when you wrote this but someone might misread the above as referring to "guy" as well. Our American friends always refer to a group of people, including girls and women, as "guys", e.g. 'Come on you guys, do you want to miss the movie or what?'"
This is an instance of a phenomenon in English grammar called something like "the masculine subsuming the feminine", so that one can use a the pronoun "HE" to cover the general case of "HE or SHE". Although the terms GUY and CHAP in the singular do both refer to a male, in the American usage GUYS can cover mixed company. I don't think that CHAPS will cover mixed company so easily in UK English. Sometimes women do try to act in an aggressively masculine manner. In such cases we might say;
But this grammatical usage is HATED by feminists, especially in America. PC (politically correct) people will go around attacking (usually verbally) other people for writing in the traditional way. They want people to write "he or she", or to alternate "he" and "she" in their texts, or implement some other bizarre or cumbersome solution. This is very like the Red Guards, don't you think?
And another reader wrote .....
"Sorry to disillusion you Robert but 'guy' (or more likely 'guys') is now used as a catch all term by schoolchildren for both sexes. It's obviously come with the American books the girls read and presumably (though I don't have one) from American soaps etc.
I have a 12 year old and she has, very occasionally, walked in and either addressed us as 'hi guys' or to her group of followers (all girls) 'come on guys'. It's horrid. I wonder if this is something that is coming up from the schools to the campuses later?"
Did any of you watch the interview given by the Princess of Wales last night? In her closing sentence, she expressed the wish that her husband would have PEACE OF MIND. Of course, the meaning of this phrase is obvious, and it is a very common one in English, for example:
The Chinese equivalent would be, I think "Fang Xin" (release your heart).
However, there is a very similar sounding phrase which means something entirely different. To give someone A PIECE OF YOUR MIND means to tell them forcefully what you think. I heard the following at the counter in the bank last week:
But then, in order not to seem threatening to the cashier, he added, as a joke:
One situation in which I often find myself at work is having to cut short work on one project in order to give attention to another. This is neatly described by the Chinese proverb:
We have a similar proverb in English:
but it is even wider in context, since while it can apply to things it can apply to people as well. I am sure many of you have found yourselves in the situation where your supervisor is asking you to do two things at once.....
But why the two names Peter and Paul? Whoever invented the saying may have had in mind the two great saints. Most of you will have heard of St. Peter's church in Rome and St. Paul's Cathedral in London. In history, Roman Catholics have tended to prefer Peter, and Protestants Paul. The relative extent to these two saints are esteemed in Europe is a good indicator of the cultural changes over two millennia. (It reminds me of what I have been reading recently, how the figure of the Chinese hero Hai Rui was alternately "in" and "out" during the years after Liberation in China.)
Who were these two men? Surprisingly, both of them were Jews who lived at the same time.
Let us deal with Peter first. He was originally called Simon, and was a fisherman, who became one of the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Of the disciples he was the one who naturally took the leading role, and became the leader of the early church in Jerusalem. He has always been the favourite of the Roman Catholic church, largely owing to what they have built on one particular incident. Simon recognized Jesus as being the Christ (that is, the king whom the Jews were waiting for). Because of this, Jesus gave him the name Peter, meaning "rock", and said "on this rock I will found my church". They have taken this to mean that Peter was to be the head of the church after Christ, and that there should be an unbroken succession of bishops (later called popes) stemming from Peter. The Roman Catholic church has always been very centralized, and this fits in with their belief that the organizational structure is what is meant by the church. Indeed, after the collapse of the Roman empire and right through the middle ages up to about 1500, the Roman church with its monasteries, etc., formed the administrative backbone of Europe. During this time, the name of Peter was very popular, and Paul hardly given at all.
Paul was a very different man. He was originally called Saul. He was highly educated, and a member of the Jewish elite. To start with, he was the most severe persecutor of the early Christians. But while he was on the road to Damascus to take the Christians there into prison, he was met by the risen Christ and was converted to Christianity. (People still talk about a "Damascus Road conversion" when a politician or author with strongly held principles experiences a sudden reversal). Some time after this he changed his name to Paul. He wrote several letters to the local churches which are the earliest Christian documents known, and form the basis of Christian theology.
Paul's letters are remarkably "modern" for a person of his time. The Ancient Roman world was a slave-holding society, and women had no position in society at all. One horrible by-product of this society was dug up recently in Palestine, a mass grave of babies. It was thought at first that girls would predominate, but in fact there were far more boys. It is most likely that these were the children of slave girls. The boys were thrown away because they were economically useless, but the girls were raised to earn money as prostitutes. Paul did not try to stir up the slaves or women to revolution, because he taught that people should be subject to authority, and that governments are God's agents for controlling the spread of evil in society. (There had recently been a revolt of the slaves led by the gladiator Spartacus in 55 BC. Those that were captured after the final battle were crucified along the Appian Way in Italy, which was the Ancient Roman equivalent of the M1). Instead, he warned masters of slaves that they too had a Master in Heaven. It is the working out of these ideas that they gradually led to the abandonment of slavery in Europe, and why so many people opposed and abolished the slavery of Africans in America.
The letters of Paul remained in Latin translation through the middle ages, largely inaccessible to the people at large. Around 1507, an earnest young monk called Martin Luther was studying Paul's letter to the Romans. From what he found there, he began to oppose the idea that a man's wrong deeds could be forgiven through the "official channels" of the organized church, for example by paying sums of money. He decided to go back to first principles, and the development of this led to Protestantism, with one of the main features being that authority lay in the written word of the Bible, and not in the organizational channels of the church. This phenomenon is known as the Reformation, one by-product of which was the liberation of people to study science directly, and through this to the technological predominance of Europe.
However, in the 19th century intellectuals started to attack the ideas of Paul. This was not on any basis of science, but rather because many people found his strict morality uncomfortable. They started to portray him as being a hater of women (in fact, Paul only opposed sex outside marriage, and warned against people who would come after him teaching that people should remain celibate like monks or nuns). But as western society has fallen away from his teaching, we can see the consequences. In the moral vacuum we even allow pop singers and film-makers to mould our ideas.
But how did the two saints view each other? In fact, there was no conflict between them; they knew each other well, and were of one heart and mind. Peter, although starting as a fisherman, learnt to write Greek, and in the second of his two surviving letters tells his readers to pay close attention to the writings of his "dear brother Paul".
A headline in last week's newspaper said "Magna Carta no help to poacher". The man in question was an angler, appealing against a conviction for poaching, after having been caught fishing for salmon in the mouth of a river. The barrister acting for him argued that when King John signed Magna Carta in 1215, he gave up the future rights of the Crown to tidal waters, and challenged the National Rivers Authority to prove that there had been an established Crown fishery before that. Since a survey dated 1234 described a salmon fishery in the area, the angler lost that particular ground of appeal, though he is still expected to contest other legal points.
This particular incident illustrates how long and complicated the roots of British law are. The King John is the same king in whose reign Oxford University nearly moved to Reading. Near the end of his reign he was forced to sign Magna Carta (the great charter) in which the Crown was forced to sign away much of its powers to the church, the barons, and the merchants.
However, the poacher is often a popular figure in English folklore, because he stands for the small man defying the big landowners, and getting away with it. These days, however, poachers are far from nice, sometimes using hi-tech equipment to steal thousands of pounds worth of fish from rivers. But if you hear people at work talking about a poacher, they are probably not talking about a rural game thief. Instead, they are probably talking about an agent from a rival company or university, trying to take away your best executives or scientists with a better job offer.
Similar to the poacher is the rustler. He is a thief of livestock, best known from Western stories set in cowboy times, as stealing cattle from the big ranches. But even in Britain we have cattle, sheep, or pig rustlers, stealing tens of thousands of pounds worth of livestock from farmers. Rustlers have never had the reputation of being "peasant heroes", rather they are dangerous criminals who threaten and intimidate people who might inform on them.
But just as the poacher has entered the language of the modern business world, so has the head-hunter. This term originally referred to tribal people in equatorial forests, who used to collect the heads of their enemies as trophies after wars with neighbouring tribes. But in company jargon, a head-hunter is also a recruiting agent, but a rather more respectable one than the poacher. It is very common to say "X was one of my best PhD students, but he wouldn't stay to do a post-doc, because he was head-hunted by company Y".
After collecting the heads of their enemies, some tribes would shrink the heads as a method of preservation, and these tribes are known as "head-shrinkers". But this term has come into popular usage as a slang term for a psychiatrist. But you would not be popular in medical circles, or the RU psychology department, if you were to call someone a "head-shrinker" (though use in ordinary conversation is not so bad, because people generally are suspicious of the psychiatric profession). The abbreviated form, a "shrink", which you may meet in cartoons, is even more vulgar and offensive if spoken directly.
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One poacher of a different sort is Walt Disney and his company. They have often caused offence among educated people in Britain by taking our things and rewriting them in a sickly, sweet, and sugary version. From the British point of view, the latest villainy is the film "Pocahontas". Now the lady really did exist, she was a Red Indian king's daughter, and she did fall in love with an English settler. But where the film departs badly from history is in the final part of the story. In reality, she married her English lover, came back with him to England, and today there are many descendants of hers around, including Lady Mountbatten, a member of our Royal Family. In the Disney version, she leaves her English lover and, full of Green Party politics, goes back to her animals in the forest.
Now Disney have upset the French with their version of "the Hunchback of Notre Dame". They are going to move on to the Greek Legends next. I issue this warning, because if they ever move on to Chinese history or legends, your children's minds may be filled with sweet but false versions before they learn the real ones.
You may sometimes hear the violin referred to as a "fiddle". This colloquial term does in fact have a respectable Latin origin, but a member of the London Symphony Orchestra would probably be rather offended if you were to call his instrument by this name, because it tends to be associated with less "classy" situations. For example an Irish fiddler might be called on to play at a country dance or CEILIDH (pronounced "kei-li" - that's Irish for you!)
But the verb to "fiddle", although deriving from the dexterity required to play the violin, is generally derogatory. One common use is to mean "muck around with in a misguided or aimless manner" - so you may hear someone shout:
When applied to accounts, however, it means purposeful falsification:
or:
However, there is another colloquial expression closely relating to the violin, namely "second fiddle". In an orchestra, the string section includes two distinct violin sections, first and second violins. An even more refined unit in Western classical music is the STRING QUARTET, consisting of four individuals playing 1st and 2nd violin, viola and cello. This has been postulated as an ideal model for management, even though as a model for leadership, many people prefer the solo piano. Consider the following quotation from Chairman Mao Zedong, "Methods of Work of Party Committees" (March 13, 1949):
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Learn to "play the piano". In playing the piano all ten fingers are in motion; it won't do to move some fingers only and not others. But if all ten fingers press down at once, there is no melody. To produce good music, the ten fingers should move rhythmically and in co-ordination. A party committee should keep a firm grasp on its central task and at the same time, around the central task, it should unfold the work in other fields. At present, we have to take care of many fields; we must look after the work in all the areas, armed units and departments, and not give our attention to a few problems, to the exclusion of others. Wherever there is a problem, we must put our finger on it, and this is a method we must master. Some play the piano well and some badly, and there is a great difference in the melodies they produce. Members of Party committees must learn to "play the piano" well.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This might be all right for a small task, but where complicated issues are involved the String Quartet is a much better model, with the 1st violin providing leadership, the 2nd violin harmonizing with the 1st, and the viola and cello performing complementary tasks. However, regardless of the personalities and intentions of those involved, a situation such as that in China in the early 1960s with the two chairmen Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi was bound to be unstable, simply because where there are two people with the same title, neither would be willing to PLAY SECOND FIDDLE to the other.
There are three little words which all have something to do with the class structure in England.
SNOB is the first of these. Originally, it meant a person having no wealth or social rank, but now it almost invariably means someone who attaches great importance to social position, looking up to and trying to associate with those he considers his superiors, and having contempt for those he considers inferior. Such people can be very vexing as neighbours. One also finds intellectual snobs, who only listen to the more refined kind of classical music, and despise pop music.
One theory about how the word acquired this meaning was told me by a Bulgarian friend. Many upper class people send their sons to Eton College, and it is said that these young aristocrats used to call their non-aristocratic schoolfellows SANS NOBLESSE (French for "without nobility"). This, of course, is easily shortened to "snob". These unfortunate youngsters would in later life always try to act in an upper class way, and in their resentment they would refuse to associate with those who were formerly on their level. I do not know how sound this derivation is, but it is at least plausible.
A SLOB is almost the exact opposite of a snob: he is a fellow who acts in a sloppy, coarse, or gross way. The Chinese for this would be "cu1 lu3" (Cantonese "chou lou"). This is one of many words in English beginning with "sl", which derive from ancient roots associated with looseness or lack of rigidity. Originally they simply had a physical meaning, like SLOPPY which refers to liquids like wet mud or porridge. (I used to find the Cantonese rice porridge too sloppy for my taste, preferring the firmer Chaozhou variety, but now I am very fond of "baak juk"!) But like many of these words, this one now often applies to behaviour or careless workmanship. Another "loose" word is SLOVENLY, often referring to manner of dressing. A schoolboy whose socks kept slipping down to his ankles might be told off by the teacher for slovenly dressing: the word could also be used for handwriting which was very untidy and SLIPSHOD or careless. And of course, such a person might SLUMP (collapse in a heap) in his chair - but a slump in the economy would be bad for everyone!
And finally the YOB. This is simply formed from "boy" spelt backwards! A yob (or yobbo) differs from a slob in that he is rather aggressive, and tends to threaten people or cause destruction to property. And he may not necessarily be a slob. Some yobs from well-placed families, during their days as university students, antagonize the locals by getting drunk and then damaging people's garden gates, etc.
Much worse than all these, however, is the deliberate adoption by TV presenters of slobbish accents in order, so they think, to appeal to today's children and teenagers. In certain cases, this is a deliberate attack on middle-class values, but sometimes I think it arises from an undercurrent of fear of the masses. While the deliberate degradation of values is perhaps a feature of our time, class tension is far from being unique to England. Somehow, the following words of Confucius seem to apply to a situation very like ours:
"... people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it."
Analects XVII:25
This would appear very snobbish if applied to the whole of the working class, but definitely there are many such people around. Moreover, these tend to be the sort of people, vociferous and noisy, who are presented on television criticizing the government of the day.
Finally, class tension might have been an extra cause tension between the Prince and Priness of Wales. On the one hand, we had the Prince of Wales trying to restore the old standards, and on the other, the Princess going for the popular culture. It's a no-win situation!
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Thank you to all of you who contributed answers to my question concerning the Chinese translation of "Querulous". One of the most interesting was
which literally translates as "a full stomach of complaints". A very similar but colloquial expression occurs in English:
But in this case, the donor has a head full of silly ideas, or whatever, while it is the recipient who actually gets the full stomach! Another expression relating to the internal organs is even closer to the Chinese:
which describes anger as a gas emanating from the spleen. Again, a similar idea occurs in English, though it refers to severe or prolonged anger:
The word "vented" here conveys the idea of opening a window to let out noxious fumes or vapours.
Another one which corresponds very closely to the English is
meaning bold or audacious. I remember watching the Taiwan TV serial "Bao Qingtian", where the judge would call out severely "da dan" if he felt the defendant or witness was not showing proper respect for the court. The term "dan" refers to GALL, a bitter digestive fluid found in the gall bladder. As in Chinese, so in English it is associated with courage, particularly impertinent or insolent courage. For example:
"That salesman had the GALL to tell me it was my fault his product didn't work, and blamed me
(Younger people would tend to say NERVE instead of gall, but this is not nearly so forceful).
I would think that these expressions originated when most people lived in the countryside, and they would be much more familiar with such things by seeing animals being butchered for meat. However, I fear that as life becomes more artificial, and children learn about things from cartoons and computers, we will lose such forms of speech.
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The original "querulous" article was as follows:
There has been much complaint lately (1996) about the Water authorities cutting back on supplies. Is this justified or not? After all, Britain has a very much better water supply than most countries. Perhaps only America is better off, while for many people in Asia gathering water is a daily burden, and in parts of Africa they may not even be able to get to water.
It is true that the situation seems worse than in 1976, where the water table was already low in spring, following a very dry winter, whereas this last winter was wet and left the reservoirs full. So it may be, that the water companies have become less competent. But with so many benefits, some British people have become like the cat, fed every day at lunch time: one time its owner was out all day, and when he returned to feed the cat in the evening, it gave him a hefty scratch.
But this is nothing new. This kind of person is described in the following extract (somewhat shortened) from a letter of John Newton, who lived in the late 18th century, and is the author of the very popular hymn "Amazing Grace".
"QUERULOUS* wastes much of his precious time in complaining against the management of public affairs; though he has neither access to the springs which move the wheels of government, nor influence either to accelerate or retard their motions. Our national concerns are no more affected by the arguments of Querulous, than the heavenly bodies are by the disputes of astronomers. While the newspapers are his chief sources of information, he cannot be a competent judge of matters of fact or matters of right..... Most of God's people may do their country much more essential service by pleading for it in prayer, than by finding fault with things they have no power to alter. If Querulous were to spend a few months under some of the governments upon the Continent**, he would be more grateful to God for appointing him to live in Britain.... Let me remind him that in future times the matters which now so concern him will appear as strange as the things which now take place among the Tartars or Chinese."
* could someone please tell me a translation of this word in Chinese?
** think of France before and shortly after the revolution!
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Hello everyone! I'm typing this short message while I am waiting for the departmental photocopier to warm up. But it's not only machines that have to warm up - people do too, and you can often see athletes warming up before their race, or hear opera singers in the dressing room practising their scales as a warm-up (when you use the term like this as a noun, the hyphen is recommended).
Other uses of the word "warm" are:
which means you're searching for something or guessing (perhaps in a party game), and you're quite close to the target. A detective might say:
as he receives new clues as to the identity of the criminal. Warm can also be used in regard to personality. A particular variant of this is:
which means that I didn't like him at first, but now I am beginning to like him.
Have you heard the word YUPPIE? This is a word which appeared in the English version of the English language in the 1980's. It stands for:
Young UPwardly mobile person.
These were the young executives, highly paid and energetic, who appeared in large numbers in the economic recovery brought about by the reforms instigated by Margaret Thatcher. They were recognizable not only by their dress, but their fashionable accessories, to start with the personal organizer or Filofax, and the high-tech brief case, later by the Cellular Phone which they could sometimes be seen using (illegally) as they drove along the motorways. I like to call them "The Red Guards of the Thatcher Revolution", and just like the original Hong Wei Bing, they showed little regard for the experience and culture of the generations before them.
However, the Thatcher boom started to totter in 1988, and collapsed in the early 90's, perhaps mainly as a result of grossly inflated house prices. People were led to believe that house prices would only rise and rise, and were encouraged to take out mortgages to higher and higher percentage on increasingly expensive houses. This led to a vast amount of "virtual money" in the economy, which soon evaporated, and leaving many people trapped in "negative equity", owning a house with a mortgage on it considerably larger than the present day value if they were to sell it.
One monument to this period is Canary Wharf, the huge tower in the middle of the Docklands Development in East London. What the planners hoped for would have been a great new centre like a smaller version of the Pudong in Shanghai. This largely unoccupied office block now stands there, like a pointer to the mistaken belief in the power of money.
In the early 1990's, one started to see the spectacle of Yuppie stockbrokers earning vast sums one day, and out of a job the next. But the species is still with us, witness the notorious Nick Leeson whose escapades recently wiped out Britain's oldest merchant bank. Nevertheless, the "free" market, which << wants instant results and wants 'em quick >>, still prefers to gamble with energetic young people, and leaves middle-aged and older experienced people on the scrap-heap.
Many of the Yuppies have survived however, and a proportion of them have gone on to become "Dinkies". This group is a favourite target for marketing men, who have coined this word meaning "Double Income No Kids". These are Yuppie couples who want to go on enjoying the material and social pleasures of rich young people (which constitute what they consider to be the "good life"), and have deliberately adopted a "no child policy".
Mrs.Thatcher was very concerned with "responsibility". Up to a point, she was right, in that there is a section of the population which takes no care of itself, and expects the state to provide. Nevertheless, she seemed to think that every family should be able to cater for itself in every way, and completely plan for its own future in terms of property, health care, etc. However, it is absurd to think that everyone can be a financial master, and now there seems to be an ever-increasing number of financial advisors, etc..
And people are no happier, because with all this responsibility comes more to worry about. In the Story of the Sower, of the four kinds of plants, there are those which grow on stony ground and are baked dry by the sun, while there are those which are strangled by weeds which grow up around them. We in Britain should be thankful that our country is not poor, nor do we suffer a large degree of political oppression. The choking weeds, however, stand for the desire to get rich, and the anxieties of life. Interestingly, the English word WORRY is from the same root as the German word WUERGEN, meaning to choke or strangle. Since the the reunification of Germany, the East Germans (Ossi) have had to catch up with the West Germans (Wessi). They have gained many freedoms, but they have lost the freedom not to worry about money.
(P.S. A number of my Chinese friends have travelled in Germany, and liked it very much.)
Around 800, England was being invaded by bands of Viking warriors from Scandinavia. Sometimes a warrior would dress up in the skin of a bear, and fight furiously, killing many men before he himself was cut down. These warriors were known as BER-serks (bear-shirts), and their name survives in the English language today, so that someone might say;
meaning he will run around madly smashing things. However, he will probably pronounce the work "be-ZERK", since the pronunciation has become degraded. Another word meaning battle frenzy has come into English from the Malay language, so we can talk about someone
In the Pacific arena during Second World War, much damage was inflicted on Allied warships by KAMIKAZE pilots, Japanese airmen who would crash their aircraft, blowing up themselves along with their target. This word is Japanese for "divine wind" (Shen Feng), originally applied to the gales which wrecked the Mongol fleet which was attempting an invasion of Japan. We still use the word in English, sometimes humorously, as in:
ASSASSINS are named after a similar group, the Hashishiin who round about 1200 in the Middle East used to work themselves up with hashish (Cannabis) before going and killing their political target, believing that they would gain paradise by so doing. They were led by "the Old Man of the Mountains", who thought his mountain fortress was impregnable, but it was captured by the Mongols.
And what drives the English mad? See BBC1 tonight (Monday 19th January 1998) at 9.30, in NEIGHBOURS AT WAR. Tonight's programme will feature the Leyland Cypress, a hedging plant turned vegetable terrorist, which turns the neighbour's garden into a green prison.
Yesterday, a Chinese friend asked me why "bloody" was such a bad word - do the English people really have such a horror of blood?
In fact, there are really two words, only one of which has the apparent meaning.
may mean simply that, if I punched him hard on the face. But often people use that expression to mean that they have seriously hurt their rival. It could be a politician saying this, meaning he has defeated his opponent in a public debate, or it could be a businessman who has conquered in a battle to gain a particular market. Similarly:
means exactly what it says. However:
are aggressive statements, using the swear word. Note that the "mess" could be an untidy room or a damaging and complicated commercial or political situation.
So how did "bloody" come to have this meaning? Simply, as a swear word, it has nothing to do with blood at all, but is a contraction for "By Our Lady". "Our Lady" is a term that the medieval church (and many Roman Catholics today) gave to the Virgin Mary. In Christianity as found in the Bible, Mary the mother of Jesus is simply a human being, although a very special one. However, over the centuries, in the imagination of Europeans, she has evolved into a figure very similar to Guan Yin in Chinese Buddhism. This came about as Christian leaders evolved into priests, who began to teach that ordinary people could not pray directly to Jesus, but indirectly, either through dead saints (officials in heaven) or by getting the priests to pray for them (officials on earth). But because people wanted some more direct form of access, they started to promote Mary in their imaginations, as a kind of sympathetic figure who might get past the heavenly officialdom. And there were plenty of surrounding ancient middle eastern religions from where they could get the idea of a "Queen of Heaven".
In Shakespeare's plays, we see an intermediate form of this swear word, no longer the full form, but as a single word "Birlady" which is well on its way to becoming the modern "bloody".
I recently read of a doctor, who was saying how many of his patients were always complaining, even when there was nothing wrong with them. How different was the case of one old lady, weak, poor, and with only two teeth. "But thank God" she said, "they are opposite each other".
Not many people can face hardship in quite the same spirit as that old lady. But the British have many set phrases for trying to cope with a bad situation. Here are a few of the commonest:
There are other reasons for trying to make a bad situation appear good. This is a situation commonly faced by schoolteachers, who often have to deal with the sort of parents who THINK THE WORLD OF their child, and won't hear anything bad about him or her. So the teachers often have to resort to EUPHEMISM, which is a form of speech for putting a bad thing in a good way. Sometimes this can be in the form of an UNDERSTATEMENT:
when the boy is really quite a troublemaker. Or again, one can use a mild negative:
when in fact the boy is quite stupid (or THICK, as we say in common speech). When reading the school report of one's own child, however, one must not automatically assume that the teacher is speaking in this way. A statement such as"
may mean just that. One does not have to READ BETWEEN THE LINES and assume that the teacher means that he or she is no good at science! However, I will leave you with two very funny stories. One of them is not British at all, but Japanese. However, it is so funny I simply had to tell it. It's about a matchmaker trying to arrange a marriage, and it's in the form of a little poem:
The other is a story which a become a sort of "Cheng Yu" or set saying in Britain, although some of our young people, who have been educated since our "Slow Cultural Revolution", may not know it. It's about a Curate, a sort of local minor official in the Church of England, who acts as an assistant to the Vicar:
The Curate was invited to tea one day with a respectable family. In those days, "tea" was served at about five o'clock, and consisted mainly of bread-and-butter with a boiled egg, followed by cakes.
"How is your egg?" asked the host, kindly. Unfortunately, the egg was a bad one. This was before the time in the 1960s when, in a fit of bureaucracy, all eggs in Britain had to go through the Egg Marketing Board, and be stamped with a little lion to show that they were sound. (What good was that? Was the lion supposed to put its paw to its nose when the egg went off?). But the curate was a kind-hearted man, and did not wish to upset anybody.
"Ah yes", he said, "it's GOOD IN PARTS".
So if anything is a mixture of good and bad, one can call it a curate's egg. For those of you doing a PhD, your supervisor may well have this phrase in mind at times.
One of my PET HATES is when people mis-use that little word "Just". Sometimes I see a television cook giving instructions, and she says *just* chop the onion, *just* beat the egg, *just* this, *just* that ... it all looks very simple, but then she has had years of practice, and she probably has a team of helpers to buy all her ingredients, and clear up after her.
But back to the university, here I am, working in the lab., and up comes somebody's supervisor and says something like:
or even worse
It is true that the essential part of the "little thing" for student <X> will only take 5 minutes. However, the preparation for it may take tens of minutes, and the washing up afterwards take several hours. With <Y> it is even worse. The microscope is a delicate instrument, and if <Y> is a clumsy fellow he could damage it. Even if he is careful, there is much more to using even a simple microscope than **just** sticking a specimen under and looking at it. In the earlier parts of this century, people reported the generation of simple forms of life under an electrical discharge, when all they were seeing was spidery looking optical phenomena under a badly adjusted microscope. But in order to observe things properly, especially under electron microscopes, we have to align the lenses until they are //just// right.
What am I doing? Even in the last paragraph, first I tell you not to use the word **just** and then I use the word //just// myself! It is like the old Greek story where the centaur (a mythical creature, half man, half horse) paid a visit to the house of a forester. It was winter, and first the man came in and blew on his hands to warm them, and then he blew on his porridge to cool it. The centaur walked out in alarm, saying he could not stay in the same house as a creature that blew hot and cold out of the same mouth.
But if we dig back into history, and find where this word comes from, then we will understand what it's all about, and when to use the word and when not to.
So where does this terrible word come from? Perhaps the easiest place to start is with your word processor, and JUSTIFICATION of text. This high-tech lining up of words EXACTLY along the RIGHT margin may seem very modern, but it's what the monks used to do by hand in the Middle Ages, and this meaning of "exactly right" is really quite an old meaning of "just". But the primitive meaning has to do with judges and JUSTICE, and getting things "exactly right" in law: if one of family <A> killed a member of family <B>, then <B> would demand a life from <A> in return. Or even more simply and exactly:
And so people try to justify things in order to make them appear right in front of their boss or their subordinates:
Or it may be before the public, their conscience, or even God himself:
So it is quite legitimate to use the word "just" in the sense of "exactly right", when talking about quantities or qualities:
but it doesn't always have to be right in both directions:
One of the commonest expressions in spoken English is the following:
There are two things happening here. The speaker is using the word "just" to put a limit in the time (though I doubt if it's exactly 1 minute, more like 10) but he is also simultaneously using the word as an excuse (probably legitimate here) for not attending to the other person immediately. But people often tend to use the word to excuse anti-social behaviour:
And very often at work, <C> says
and interrupts what <B> is saying to <A>. What <B> required needed only 2 minutes, but now he is kept waiting while <C> TIES UP <A> for 15 minutes!
And perhaps the commonest and worst use is simply:
So the simple answer is, use the word "just" to mean "exact", but don't use it as an excuse!
In Britain, when one sees the initials NEC, one has to think, because this could stand for one of at least three things:
Recently Mr. Blair had the unpleasant shock of seeing his "right hand man", his "spin doctor" Peter Mandelson, being defeated in an election to the NEC by the left-wing activist MP Ken Livingstone. This former leader of the Greater London Council is one of the group known as the "Loony Left", whose extreme socialist policies frightened off the voters and helped the Conservatives stay in power for so many years. Perhaps the greatest disgrace he brought on himself was in being sympathetic to the IRA.
The word "Loony" is short for "Lunatic", a word for mad people derived from the Latin "Luna" = the Moon, because mad people were thought to have had their minds affected by our major satellite. Indeed, when I was a boy, mental hospitals were still often referred to as "loony bins". But it puts me in mind of two government buildings in Croydon, called Lunar House and Apollo House. These names date the buildings as having been constructed shortly after the NASA missions to the moon in the Apollo spacecraft. Apollo House, as I remember, was/is the Tax Office, while Lunar House was for the Home Office (and I suppose it still is - can any of my readers please tell me?). One thing that struck me as particularly non-sensical was that students would come to this country on a one-year visa, and if they wanted a holiday on the continent of Europe before returning home, they would have to renew their visa for such a short duration - surely someone could have had the sense to issue 14-month visas instead? But what strikes me as even more crazy, and nasty with it, is that Chinese friends who have completed a PhD and have been offered a postdoctoral position have to return to China in order to renew their visa. If the Home Office is still there in Croydon, I think they should rename the building "Lunatic House".
But back to Mr.Livingstone. I think that the Irish would have the measure of him, because his career as leader of the Greater London Council is well summed up in the following Irish election speech, reported in the "Limerick Echo":
"The poor people always voted for me, and there are more poor people today than ever".
The words SHAME and DISGRACE, whether as nouns or verbs, are very closely related in meaning, and if one turns to the dictionary, one finds definitions such as:
ð [xiu1] shy; bashful; shame; disgrace; feel ashamed. [chi3] shame; disgrace; humiliation.
which is not very helpful when it comes to deciding which to use. Indeed, generally it makes little difference. If one wants to make a distinction, in "shame" and its relatives the emphasis is on the feeling at the time:
or the action at the time:
while with "disgrace" the emphasis is on the lasting result:
"The disgrace that resulted from the exposure of his corrupt activities meant that he could not
So a parent or teacher might say "shame on you" to a child as an immediate reaction to some bad behaviour, but "you're in disgrace" would suggest a period during which the child might not be allowed to play with friends or to watch television.
But now here comes the catch!!! It is very common to hear people say "what a shame!" or "what a disgrace!". And these two set phrases have very different meanings.
WHAT A SHAME! is used to express (usually minor) disappointment:
but WHAT A DISGRACE is much more severe:
("It's a shame" and "It's a disgrace" operate in a similar manner).
So there you are! And just to make things worse, occasionally people deliberately mix these two up for humorous effect. That's English being English!