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Here's a very interesting essay on the origins of language. It's partly speculation, of course, since there is no way to be certain. Do think about these questions too as you read through:
1. How did different languages arise?
2. Why do you think many languages have similarities?
3. Why do you think people invented writing?

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Luke Mastin created this very informative website for FUN. The story begins from the development of English out of Indo-European (a language family). Explore the site. It's well worth the effort as it covers many of the issues in Part 1. You can read more about Mastin and his other interesting works at www.lukemastin.com.

Questions to ponder:
1. Are there any other languages that have - or are beginning to have - the influence and dominance of English?
2. What do you think are the factors that have contributed to the dominance of English?
3. What strategies would YOU use to create influence and/or dominance for a language of your choosing?

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SUMMARY

The main influences on the development of the English language

There are many books and many websites describing the journey of the English language from its ancient origins to todays dynamic and powerful communication tool (you can find some of them on my Sources and Links page). Some follow it in minute and excruciating technical detail, some are brief one-page summaries, and you may be wondering: do we really need another?
Well, perhaps not, but I wanted to create one anyway for my own enjoyment and edification. And this one is neither too long and intimidating nor is it too skimpy and lite, but, as Goldilocks might have said, just right. Not too much in the way of fricatives and palatizations and labialized velars (this does not pretend to be a work of serious philology), but plenty of rollicking historical detail, action and intrigue.

Whatever your thoughts on the matter, English, with all its vagaries and annoying inconsistencies, remains the single most important and influential language in todays world. Throughout history, it has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time: English-speaking Britain was the leading colonial nation in the 17th and 18th Century, as well as the leader of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 18th Century; in the late 19th and 20th Century, English-speaking America was the leading economic power, and was also at the forefront of the electronic and digital revolution of the late 20th Century.

But, it has also proved itself the most flexible and resilient of languages, remarkable for its ability to adopt and absorb vocabulary from other cultures. It has survived incursions by invading armies, outfaced potential extinction on more than one occasion, and navigated the changing cultural zeitgeist, growing ever stronger in the process. Its continued vitality is evidenced by the number and diversity of its worldwide variations today.

The main part of this website, the History, can be read as a kind of story, in chapters, following the development of the English language from its Indo-European origins, through Old English and Middle English to Early Modern English and Late Modern English, before a brief look at English Today. But there is also section on Language Issues (including How New Words are Created, Language and Geography and English as a Global Language), a Timeline of important dates in the development of English, a Glossary of some of the technical and historical terms used, and a list of Sources and Links.

I would like to acknowledge at this point my debt to the various websites, books and television series which I have raided, adapted and combined unapologetically, many of which are listed in the Sources and Links page. This is a personal project not a scholarly work, and I have not provided unimpeachable references to original sources for every point I make, although I have given specific references and credits for all images used. Please feel free to contact me if you have any issues about the content or attributions (or lack thereof) or to point out any absolute howlers I may have made.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, the spelling throughout this website is largely the Canadian English of my adopted country Canada (which itself is a hybrid of British and American spelling), although the words introduced - most of which arrived before Canada was Canada - are generally in British English. Contemporary English spelling is a whole new subject requiring a whole new website, but for starters you can look at another website of mine on Canadian, British and American Spelling.

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The History of English - How the English language went from an obscure Germanic dialect to a global language

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SUMMARY The main influences on the development of the English language There are many books and many websites describing the journey of the English language from its ancient origins to todays dynamic and powerful communication tool (you can find some of them on my Sources and Links page).

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Let's focus on you now. Look back at your family history and try to identify the point where your family began speaking English. Even if you are English by nationality, your ancestors might have come from other places in Europe. If they did not - when did English become the English that we recognise today? How has it changed over the decades and centuries? Why did it change?

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Next, look at your own language development.
1. How did you learn to speak English?
2. Was it the first language you learned?
3. Or were there other languages you learned at about the same time?
4. Who were your caregivers?
5. Who taught you your languages? Where did you live?
6. Who were your neighbours?
7. Who did you attend school with?
8. How has all that affected the way you speak, in terms of pronunciation and intonation or even sentence construction?

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This short video gives a quick overview of the evolution of English and introduces the idea of class distinction expressed in language.
Consider these questions:
1. Why do societies seem to like class structure?
2. Why is language used as a marker of social class?

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Let's Begin...

What is the difference between "a hearty welcome" and "a cordial reception"? In a brief, action-packed history of the English language, Kate Gardoqui explains why these semantically equal phrases evoke such different images.

Create and share a new lesson based on this one.

About TED-Ed Animations

TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators. Are you an educator or animator interested in creating a TED-Ed Animation? Nominate yourself here "

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What is the difference between "a hearty welcome" and "a cordial reception"? In a brief, action-packed history of the English language, Kate Gardoqui explains why these semantically equal phrases evoke such different images.

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Read this article and answer the following questions:
1. What makes up your 'accent'?
2. What does your accent reveal about you?
3. Why are there different accents?
4. Can we change our accents?
5. Why might we want to do that?
6. Define basilect, mesolect and acrolect.
7. Define code-switching.
8. Define 'accommodation' (in the context of language).

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On 14 November 1922 the BBC broadcast its first radio report to the nation. We can't listen to it because it was not recorded, but we know this: the broadcast was read in flawless received pronunciation (RP), commonly known as the Queen's English. It is considered to be the language of elites, power and royalty.

For many years, the BBC would only allow RP accents to appear on its airwaves. That this accent became synonymous with the voice of a nation had clear connotations. RP was trusted, authoritarian and sincere. Fortunately, the BBC now allows all sorts of regional accents on its broadcasts - and even encourages it, aiming to both represent the diverse audience the BBC has and to draw new people in.

While the BBC no longer broadcasts only in RP, it turns out that the bias that once existed for it is still ripe in society today. Our accents can provide a window into our social backgrounds - and our biases. Our partialities can be so strong that they even affect our perception of who is, or is not, trustworthy.

Humans are very quick to judge a person based on accents, and are often unaware we do so. "Accent can trigger social categorisation in a prompt, automatic, and occasionally unconscious manner," says Ze Wang of the University of Central Florida. We often can identify a person's accent as soon they say hello.

Our trust for certain accent starts extremely young. There is evidence to show that affinity for language even starts before birth. We know for instance that babies prefer the language they heard most while in the womb. In one study, researchers repeatedly played a made-up word while women were pregnant. When the babies were born, brain scans showed that only babies who had heard this word responded to it.

By the time babies are several months old, they can differentiate between languages and dialects. Early on, babies start to have an affinity for others who speak their native language. In one 2007 Harvard University experiment, babies watched two people speak on a screen, one in a familiar tongue and one that was foreign. One on-screen speaker then offered the babies a toy - which magically popped up from behind the screen at the same time. The babies preferred the toy given by the person who spoke their native language and accent.

"Right away in the first year of life babies are starting to show this social preference - moving towards someone who speaks in a way that's familiar to them," says the study's lead researcher Katherine Kinzler, now at Cornell University.

To Kinzler, accents are under-studied. They tie us to our identity in a similar way that our gender and race does. For some children, accent can be a more powerful indicator of group identity than race, she has found. When five-year-olds were shown pictures of either black or white children, they preferred those who were the same race. At this age, they don't have the motivation to control prejudice in the way adults do, says Kinzler.

Children trust native speakers better than they do foreign-accented speakers

But when colour was pitted against accent, the children preferred those who shared their accent - even if they were of a different race.

This work reveals that in our early years, the accents we trust most are those which sound familiar. It makes sense that we trust somebody who speaks like us, says Kinzler; they are likely to know more information about your own community.

In another study, she found that children trust native speakers better than they do foreign-accented speakers.

As children grow up they become more attuned to the social status or stereotypes that have been glued on to various accents. RP English is said to sound posh and powerful, whereas people who speak Cockney English, the accent of working-class Londoners, often experience prejudice. The Birmingham accent fares even worse - which could be the result of TV shows which depicted its residents as "slow, lazy and thick", researchers wrote. Indeed, one poll found the Birmingham accent least attractive but rated Irish as having the nicest twang.
(Take our quiz on British accents to find out which part of Britain you speak most like - even if you aren't British.)

Trust in accents can change over time depending on our social circles and daily relationships

When it comes to trusting accents, there seem to be two things at play. First, an accent represents part of your identity. But as you get older this might clash with an accent you aspire to sound more like, say one that is deemed more prestigious, or less stuck-up. One 2013 poll of more than 4,000 people found RP and Devon accents the most trustworthy, while the least trustworthy was deemed to be Liverpudlian (from Liverpool). The Cockney accent came a close second for untrustworthiness. These accents scored similarly when asked about intelligence.

These are snapshot results, though. In real life, trust in accents can change over time depending on our social circles and daily relationships. A study by Ilaria Torre of Plymouth University found that trust in an accent can change depending on first impressions and judgements. In her study, participants heard either a standard southern English accent or a lesser-trusted Liverpudlian accent. If a person who spoke in the 'trustworthy'' accent then went onto behave fairly - by returning a generous monetary investment, for example - then this first impression of trustworthiness increased.

If, however, a person spoke with the 'trusted' accent and they went on to behave in an untrustworthy manner, they were deemed even less trustworthy than the person who had both an 'untrustworthy' accent and behaviour. The study participants "were punishing them, so to speak, for not living up to the participants' expectations," says Torre. The opposite happened, too: those who were judged as untrustworthy but acted nicely were able to undo negative preconceptions. In other words, the 'untrustworthy'-sounding Liverpudlians (apologies, any readers from Liverpool) were redeemed when they behaved in a desirable way.

Our accent biases can be reduced by contact with individuals we initially think sound suspicious

This reveals something Torre feels has been overlooked - our accent biases can be reduced by contact with individuals we initially think sound suspicious. "By interacting with speakers of many different accents we might realise our biases are unfounded and our trustworthy perception of that accent can change as well," she says.

The media plays a role too. Upmarket grocer Marks & Spencer frequently has a soothing, RP voice-over on its adverts, for example, while the more budget brand Iceland often featured former popstar Kerry Katona, who grew up in Warrington, a town between Manchester and Liverpool - until she was kicked off their adverts because of an alleged drug problem.

In the UK, some school teachers even have been asked to modify their accents to sound less regional. Of course, says the University of Manchester's Alexander Baratta, while some people find regional accents to sound less educated, others think they sound more in-touch, sincere and friendly and that posh accents are more cold or arrogant. (This may be one reason why the Queen has been toning down her RP voice throughout the decades.) Some studies have found that people from Yorkshire seem to sound more honest than Londoners, for instance.

People often have negative bias toward non-standard accents

Accent biases are common against foreign accents too. A study led by Ze Wang showed that US participants trusted British accents more than Indian accents. "People often have negative bias toward non-standard accents, particularly those with disadvantaged and low-prestige minority groups," she says. For instance, she found that those with Mexican or Greek accents were perceived as less intelligent or professional than those who speak standard US English.

Another study showed that our accents can even limit our professional opportunities. Regional German accents were seen as less desirable than standard German, despite the same being said. But in Switzerland people preferred their surgeon to have a regional accent than a "standard" German one, perhaps because Swiss German is the most commonly spoken dialect.

When it comes to trusting accents, we depend both on what we know and on what society has conditioned us to aspire to. But if we all took a moment to stop and really listen to each other, we might learn to love the eclectic and varied accents that make up our multicultural world... rather than basing our trust on implicit biases that we acquire even before birth.
Melissa Hogenboom is BBC Future's staff writer. She is @melissasuzanneh on twitter.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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On 14 November 1922 the BBC broadcast its first radio report to the nation. We can't listen to it because it was not recorded, but we know this: the broadcast was read in flawless received pronunciation (RP), commonly known as the Queen's English. It is considered to be the language of elites, power and royalty.

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Power of language, language of power. Language is needed to exercise power but it is also used to undermine power. Both uses are important. Although this article focuses on the mission of the Goethe-Institut which promotes the German language, the same could also be said of the British Council or Confucius Institute.

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Profitieren Sie von unseren vielfältigen Online-Angeboten auf den Sprachniveaus A1-C2. Wir bieten Ihnen nach Themen und Formaten individuell auszuwählende Übungen. Über aktuelle und unterhaltsame Filme können Sie bereits als Anfänger Deutschland entdecken. Oder Sie üben spielerisch Deutsch mit unseren Lernspielen für Smart-Phones und Tablets.

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Profitieren Sie von unseren vielfältigen Online-Angeboten auf den Sprachniveaus A1-C2. Wir bieten Ihnen nach Themen und Formaten individuell auszuwählende Übungen. Über aktuelle und unterhaltsame Filme können Sie bereits als Anfänger Deutschland entdecken. Oder Sie üben spielerisch Deutsch mit unseren Lernspielen für Smart-Phones und Tablets.

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This is a long but ultimately rewarding article that explores many of the key issues in the relationship between language and power. It is also an interesting discussion of the notion of power itself. I have one question for you: What are the issues raised in this article that are relevant to Part 1?

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How is racism hidden in language? Look at the examples here and then see if you have come across similar examples for sexism.

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Lawrence B. Glickman

How we went from "racist" to "racially tinged."

In a post-election analysis, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns described Corey Stewart, the Confederate-sympathizing Virginia Senate candidate, as a "Trump-style racial provocateur." This was only one of hundreds of recent examples of journalists employing what Adam Serwer has called "a ludicrous and expanding menu of complex euphemisms for describing racist behavior."

The media's use of "racially tinged" telegraphs that racism is normal, non-pathological, and within the range of mainstream political disagreement.

An October 22 headline in the New York Times claimed that "Trump and G.O.P. Candidates Escalate Race and Fear as Election Ploys." How exactly does one "escalate race"? The article didn't say, although it did note that "Mr. Trump and other Republicans . . . have attacked minority candidates in nakedly racial terms." A Washington Post article by Matt Viser on how Republicans were "stoking racial animosity" used the word "racism" twice. But Viser also twice used "racially tinged," employed the phrase "race-based," and modified the word "racial" in more ways than I thought possible, speaking of "racial insults," "racial undercurrents," "racial animosity," "racial fringes," "racial attacks," "racial connotations," and "racial fears."

Why the semantic somersaults when it comes to race? We never hear anti-Semitic rhetoric described as "religiously tinged," and although the Boston Globe once referred to Trump's "gender-tinged attack on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton" during the spring of 2016, it was nearly alone in doing so. Imagine if, after Donald Trump's Access Hollywood tape became public, the press had referred to Trump's "gender-tinged" comments or claimed that he had "escalated" gender or that he was a "gender provocateur"? Such phrases turn oppression into a neutral condition. "Gender-tinged," for example, suggests the infusion of gender into an issue but ignores the question of power-in Trumpian terms, of who grabs whom.

The expressions "racially tinged" and "racially charged" emerged during the modern civil rights movement. Newspaper databases show the same pattern as Google Ngrams: regular use began in the 1950s and '60s, increased in the late twentieth century, and has been rampant since 2010. ("Racially provocative" also skyrocketed in the 2010s.) Historian Barbara J. Fields has written that the substitution of "race" for "racism" "transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of an object." More than twenty-five years ago, Fields observed that "the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity" had replaced terms such as " slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation." Fields noted that such language enhanced "the authority and prestige of race," a phrase given meaning via the creation of hierarchies of power. The scientifically incoherent concept of "race" becomes real through such speech acts, which serve to stabilize "race" as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction.

Something similar is at work in the use of euphemisms which suggest that race is a fact-something that can be highlighted in a neutral way-rather than an ideology, a tool of oppression. The language of "tinged" and "charged" suggests that race can be overemphasized and exaggerated, but elides the fact that any biological notion of race is a fiction, while racism is a very real language of power. Describing Trump and others in language that uses "race" as a neutral concept, whether or not intensified by "tinged" or "charged," suggests that race can possess both positive and negative valences. This masks that, as history tells us, phrases described as "racially tinged" always involve assertions of race hierarchy, power, and privilege.
* * *

During the civil rights movement, most politicians abandoned explicitly racist appeals, insisting on 'states' rights' when they meant 'white rights' and decrying 'federal intervention' when they meant 'integration.'

A 1956 profile of Georgia senator Herman Talmadge called him "an advocate of 'White Supremacy'" and noted that "he makes no bones about this." Talmadge and his southern white colleagues did not shy away from racist language. For example, at the 1948 breakaway States' Rights Democrats (aka Dixiecrats) convention, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond claimed, "There's not enough troops in the army, to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." There was nothing "racially tinged" about Thurmond's comments. He saw no need to hide his racism, and journalists, accordingly, saw no need to describe it in euphemistic terms. When Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act, an article about it in the San Rafael Independent Journal was surrounded by pieces with the headlines "Racists Hit Rights Bill as 'Vicious'" and "Racists Rally in Nashville." These straightforward descriptions may shock modern readers accustomed to the imprecise language of "racial provocateurs" and "nakedly racial" actions.

Over the course of the civil rights movement, most politicians, however, abandoned explicitly racist appeals. As the Washington Post observed in 1965, a "new breed of legislators" was replacing the "old-style segregationist politician." As one columnist noted in the Boston Globe that year, "There is the voice of the segregationist politician who cries for 'states' rights' but means white rights and decries 'Federal intervention' when it means integrating the schools." These politicians developed a new style of rhetoric, notoriously summed up by Republican operative Lee Atwater in 1981:

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'-that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . . 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

Soon journalists began to mirror the "color-blind" language being adopted by white-power activists. One of the best examples of the journalistic shift can be seen in 1957, the same year as Thurmond's filibuster, when Little Rock's Central High School became the site of the nation's most iconic battle over school desegregation. In October of that year, many newspapers carried an Associated Press story about the "racially tinged" actions of a group called the "Segregationist League of Central High Mothers." While not necessarily causal, this moment represents a hinge: opposition to the civil rights movement was increasingly described by journalists as "racially tinged" rather than "racist." A 1963 article in the Baltimore Sun described the "racially tinged protests of some white parents." In the same year, an article by Bruce M. Galphin in the New York Times explained that "the presence of a Negro juror . . . substantially reduces derogatory racial references in jury-room deliberations and racially tinged wisecracks from judges and lawyers." What made the wisecracks "racially tinged" was that, in the year of the Birmingham Protests and the "I Have a Dream" speech, code words were beginning to replace straightforward descriptions of racist activities. The nadir of euphemism is surely a dead tie between the Associated Press's 1964 description of "racially tinged explosions" which were set off "near the recently desegregated campus of the University of Alabama" and "across town near a Negro cafe"; and a 1953 Associated Press story that described the trial of two white men who kidnapped a black motorist and set him on fire as a "racially charged case."

By the 1990s, however, when the use of such expressions began to increase dramatically, their application was less as euphemism than as matter-of-fact description of forms of racism that had become normalized as essentially non-pathological and within the range of mainstream political disagreement. Sandy Grady's article on Steve Forbes's 1996 presidential campaign, for example, explained that the multimillionaire could afford "tough pros, including Carter Wrenn, who devised racially tinged ads for Sen. Jesse Helms."

Given this historical context, what on the left has been so often treated as Trump's radical departure from political norms comes into focus as the terminal outcome of mainstreaming the color-blind language of post-civil rights white supremacy. By extension, the cure cannot be more of the same: by amplifying this language of "racially tinged" and its kin, the media replicates the very same language of indirection that was invented by right ideologues to make it difficult to speak accurately of racial oppression. Color-blind and euphemistic coverage not only masks the danger of racism, it reinforces it. If this language was harmful during the era of "Massive Resistance" to the civil rights movement in the late 1950s, it is no less so in the age of Trump, when subtle dog whistles have been replaced with overt appeals.

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the racist politics of the english language

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The Racist Politics of the English Language

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Lawrence B. Glickman How we went from "racist" to "racially tinged." In a post-election analysis, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns described Corey Stewart, the Confederate-sympathizing Virginia Senate candidate, as a "Trump-style racial provocateur."

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This article, interesting for the history alone, also looks at how language was used to excuse the genocidal wars of early US history. A hard-hitting piece, it also demonstrates the power of language in its criticism of the US military-capitalist machine.

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native Americans.

This essay is featured in Boston Review 's fall 2018 print issue Evil Empire. Order your copy!

The United States has been at war every day since its founding, often covertly and often in several parts of the world at once. As ghastly as that sentence is, it still does not capture the full picture. Indeed, prior to its founding, what would become the United States was engaged-as it would continue to be for more than a century following-in internal warfare to piece together its continental territory. Even during the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate armies continued to war against the nations of the Diné and Apache, the Cheyenne and the Dakota, inflicting hideous massacres upon civilians and forcing their relocations. Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few historians trace their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The origin of the United States in settler colonialism-as an empire born from the violent acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives-lends the country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA.

The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or bloodshed when compared to colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. Elimination of the native is implicit in settler colonialism and colonial projects in which large swaths of land and workforces are sought for commercial exploitation. Extreme violence against noncombatants was a defining characteristic of all European colonialism, often with genocidal results.

The privatization of land is at the core of the U.S. experiment, and its military powerhouse was born to expropriate resources. Apt, then, that we once again have a real estate man for president.

Rather, what distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology attached to that violence and its political uses, even to this day. The post-9/11 external and internal U.S. war against Muslims-as-"barbarians" finds its prefiguration in the "savage wars" of the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. And when there were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the practice of "savage wars" remained. In the twentieth century, well before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged invasions and occupations in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Colombia and Southern Africa. In all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in war against savage forces.

Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the first British settlement in Jamestown, pitting "civilization" against "savagery." Through this pursuit, the U.S. military gained its unique character as a force with mastery in "irregular" warfare. In spite of this, most military historians pay little attention to the so-called Indian Wars from 1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846-48 invasion and occupation of Mexico. Yet it was during the nearly two centuries of British colonization of North America that generations of settlers gained experience as "Indian fighters" outside any organized military institution. While large, highly regimented "regular" armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the continent's indigenous nations to seize their land, resources, and roads, driving them westward and eventually forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the U.S. conquest of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions, then west of the Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces and are, perhaps, what most marks U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers.

By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37), whose lust for displacing and killing Native Americans was unparalleled, the character of the U.S. armed forces had come, in the national imaginary, to be deeply entangled with the mystique of indigenous nations-as though, in adopting the practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become the very thing they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identification with the Native enemy, marking the settler as Native American rather than European. This was part of the sleight of hand by which U.S. Americans came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the continent: they had fought for it and "become" its indigenous inhabitants.

Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropriating Native American lands were then applied to fighting the Mexican Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain in 1821, the territory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence, Mexico continued the practice of allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large swaths of land for development under land grants, with the assumption that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples. By 1836 nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting the enslaved), had moved to Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the eradication of the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples in Texas. Mounted and armed with the new killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they did so with dedicated precision.

Having perfected their art in counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other Native communities, the Texas Rangers went on to play a significant role in the U.S. invasion of Mexico. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico, engaging in the Battle of Monterrey. Rangers also accompanied General Winfield Scott's army and the Marines by sea, landing in Vera Cruz and mounting a siege of Mexico's main commercial port city. They then marched on, leaving a path of civilian corpses and destruction, to occupy Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils. In defeat and under military occupation, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory to the United States, and Texas became a state in 1845. Soon after, in 1860, Texas seceded, contributing its Rangers to the Confederate cause. After the Civil War, the Texas Rangers picked up where they had left off, pursuing counterinsurgency against both remaining Native communities and resistant Mexicans.

The Marines also trace half of their mythological origins to the invasion of Mexico that nearly completed the continental United States. The opening lyric of the official hymn of the Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, is "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War of 1801-5, when the Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, shelling the city of Tripoli, taking captives, and blockading key Barbary ports for nearly four years. The "Hall of Montezuma," though, refers to the invasion of Mexico: while the U.S. Army occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and marched to Mexico City, murdering and torturing civilian resisters along the way.
* * *

White supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about.

So what does it matter, for those of us who strive for peace and justice, that the U.S. military had its start in killing indigenous populations, or that U.S. imperialism has its roots in the expropriation of indigenous lands?

It matters because it tells us that the privatization of lands and other forms of human capital are at the core of the U.S. experiment. The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse of the United States derives from real estate (which includes African bodies, as well as appropriated land). It is apt that we once again have a real estate man for president, much like the first president, George Washington, whose fortune came mainly from his success speculating on unceded Indian lands. The U.S. governmental structure is designed to serve private property interests, the primary actors in establishing the United States being slavers and land speculators. That is, the United States was founded as a capitalist empire. This was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional, though not in a way that benefits humanity. The military was designed to expropriate resources, guarding them against loss, and will continue to do so if left to its own devices under the control of rapacious capitalists.

When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible-as they have for the past decade, and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist president-they are dismissed as marginal, rather than being understood as the spiritual descendants of the settlers. White supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about. Indeed, the origins of the United States are consistent with white nationalist ideology. And this is where those of us who wish for peace and justice must start: with full awareness that we are trying to fundamentally change the nature of the country, which will always be extremely difficult work.

This essay is featured in Boston Review 's fall 2018 print issue Evil Empire. Order your copy!

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native Americans. This essay is featured in Boston Review 's fall 2018 print issue Evil Empire. Order your copy!

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This is an excellent summary of some of the more common ways racism is expressed in English. Note that WORDS themselves seldom carry racist meanings, but the NEGATIVE CONNOTATIONS of words are used to describe people that those of white European descent did/do not consider their equal. Are you aware of words with explicitly racist meaning and intent?

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How does sexism manifest in language? Is it just words like 'chairman', 'fireman' or 'policeman'? Or does it go deeper? This article takes a detailed look at how sexism in language shows itself in writing - often with long term consequences. It's a long read but it covers many important points with examples. Good reference for research.

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Here is something much shorter and easier to read - it has even more examples of the sort you are most likely to come across in media. Take note - this is for reference.

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As if one 'ism' wasn't bad enough. Aminatta Forna's experiences as a black woman are beautifully captured in this essay which also includes how both sexism and racism are expressed in language.

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I am 20. I am walking along the King's Road in Chelsea in London. It is the 1980s. Three men are coming towards me; they are clearly together, though the foot traffic on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. They are white, dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts. The first man, as he passes, looks me in the eye and says: "You're a pretty girl." The second one smirks, but says nothing. The third one leans into my face and breathes: "Nigger!"

My final year at university and I had a part-time job working for an American foreign correspondent. One of my tasks was to pick up the broadsheets each morning, and in those pre-Internet days I would leaf through them and clip and file any articles on the stories he was covering. That day was a Saturday in summer. I generally came in later on the weekend and the street was already busy with people. I was on my way to his house with my haul of newspapers when I passed the three men.

You're a pretty girl. Nigger.

The first remark did not seem designed to offend. You're a pretty girl. It intruded on my thoughts, got my attention. Then came the complicity of the second man. Then, "Nigger!" What happened afterwards? Do you imagine that the first man berated the third man? Do you think they argued? And whose side did the second man take? None of that happened. I know it didn't. You know it didn't. The three men carried on walking down the road. At some point one of them likely turned to the others.

And they laughed.
Walking
A child learns to walk. The child hauls herself up on a chair or her mother's knee, finds her balance and takes one tottering step and then another. The parents murmur sounds of encouragement, spread their arms. Come! Come! The father catches the child and swings her up in the air. My mother tells me that my approach was a little different from most infants'. I would crawl into the empty middle of the room and there I would take a breath and slowly rise. And I used my growing independence not to run towards her but to run gleefully away.

I grew up in the compounds of developing countries, in West Africa, where my father was from; and Southern Africa, the Middle and Far East, where my stepfather's career as a diplomat took us later. The hazards of the compound were snakes mainly, and army ants. As children, my brother, my sister and I didn't leave the compound alone much except to go and buy sweets or when we broke out in search of adventure. Around the age of five I began to borrow my brother's clothes. Boys' clothes afforded a greater practical freedom, were better for sliding down banisters, climbing trees, even the simple act of sitting. There was a lot of focus when I was growing up on making sure I sat properly, that is with my legs closed. My brother didn't have to sit that way, which seemed odd to me, given that he had something far more prominent to display. I wondered why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we were the ones to wear skirts.

I went to boarding school at 6 and left at 18 for university in London. The enclosed worlds of compound life and British boarding school left me unprepared for the streets of the capital, the act of walking, specifically of walking alone and female down a street. Yet in my tomboy/cross-dresser days, which lasted until I was around 14, I had already begun to understand viscerally something I couldn't articulate. I didn't want to be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw belonged to boys but not girls.

"I wondered why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we were the ones to wear skirts."

2017. I am standing on the platform of a London tube station, I'm back in the city where I lived for 30 years, before making my home in the United States. A young man is looking at me. I ignore him, but his stare is intrusive. When we board the train he stands very close to me, and at one point his hand touches mine. I am twice as old as him, which makes this situation somewhat unusual. But everything else about it is familiar, and I'm old enough now to recognize exactly what is going on. The next stop is mine and so I move to stand facing the door. He follows and stands right behind me; I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. The train is crowded, it's unlikely anyone else has followed his behavior closely enough to think it out of line. What the young man doesn't realize is that I am facing the wrong door. This is my old home station, and the doors behind us will be the ones to open. At the last moment I swing round and exit.

A week or so later, on the tube again, I catch the eye of a man sitting opposite me. For a few moments I hold his gaze and then I look away. In the moment of turning I see him smile and it is a smile of triumph. He has won something, he has defeated me. Like the first man he is very young, around 20. In that moment I realize something chilling. My God, I thought, he's

Nobody tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze. My mother never told me that men may look at me but I may not look back. That if we do our look can be taken as an invitation. Men teach us that. Over the years we train our gaze to skim men's faces, resting for only a split second, shifting fractionally sideways if our eyes happen to meet. The man on the other hand, if he so wishes, will look at your face, your breasts, your legs, your ass.

In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey described how films are created to be seen from the point of view of the heterosexual male. Their female characters are presented to him as objects of desire. This is the "male gaze." The gaze is power. Men own the power of the gaze. White people do, too. A white friend tells me of the time she took her adoptive daughter who is black to a small town in Maine and found her daughter the object of stares. "I guess there aren't too many black people in that part of the country," she suggests placatingly, because already I am visibly irritated. "And they don't own a fucking television?" I say. "And they've never laid eyes on their president or his family?" (This was early 2016.) They stare because they can, by the gift of the power vested in them by their membership in the ethnic majority. They stare because her daughter's discomfiture is nothing to them, may be the whole purpose.

When a man stares at a woman in public her sensitivities are, at the very least, immaterial to him. He owns the power of the gaze and he will, if he cares to, exercise it. The real mind-fuck is that enfolded into the action is the defense. The woman who complains may well find herself being told she should be flattered, that she is lucky men find her attractive.

"Where you going, baby?"

"Smile, little lady."

"Want some of this?"

"Look at the ass on that!"

"You wouldn't be able to walk if . . ."

"'Til . . . it . . . bleeds."

"Nobody tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze. My mother never told me that men may look at me but I may not look back. That if we do our look can be taken as an invitation. Men teach us that."

In the early 90s I shared an apartment in London's Chelsea with a friend. One week, while repairs to the roof were being undertaken, we had scaffolding erected at the front of the house. My room was on the top floor and faced the street, and from there I could see the roofers go up and down the ladders. At certain times throughout the day they would take their breaks sitting on the scaffold deck right in front of my desk unaware that I could hear them as they took turns yelling comments at the women passing in the street below. The excitement each opportunity provoked was astonishing. "'Here comes one, here comes one! Your turn!" One man in particular was actually jumping up and down on the scaffolding. The more evidently humiliated the woman, the greater the delight. From where I sat I noticed several things: Firstly, yes, the young and attractive women drew more aggressive attention, as if the men were intent on denigrating what they could not possess, to punish the woman for being desirable and also unobtainable to them; secondly, no woman who was walking alone was exempt; and thirdly, they especially liked to pick on women who were dressed for work, who almost certainly earned more than they did. The women were metaphorically stripped, just as women were in earlier times and still are publicly stripped in some parts of the world, for transgressing the boundaries of womanhood, for stepping out of their place. They were being shamed, stripped not of their clothing, but of their dignity.

As a child I was taught to ignore aggressive dogs, to keep walking. Once you're out of its territory, the dog will leave you alone, so goes the conventional wisdom, and mostly it works. The same is supposed to be true of men, except it isn't. They walk alongside you, they kerb-crawl you. If you tell them to leave you alone they will call you a bitch and ask you who the fuck you think you are. Every encounter, however seemingly benign, contains the possibility of violence. By the time it is over (you have entered a shop or a subway), your breath is coming quickly and your heart slamming against your ribcage. Why do men do this? Nobody asks the question and when I ask, I don't get an answer. Sometimes it is said or suggested that this is simply the nature of men. What is interrogated more often is my response. Submissiveness is what is demanded. Women are taught not to answer back, for if we do we will escalate matters and then-the subtext-whatever follows will be our own fault.

Except I do, I do answer back. For, you see, it is in my nature. In London in those early years, I get into fights. In South Kensington a man threatens to punch me after I tell him to piss off. I say I am going to fetch a policeman and if he is still there I will have him arrested. He swears at me, but he goes. A man in Camden Town pulls out a knife and threatens to stab me in the stomach. A crowd, mostly white, gathers around me and watches to see what will happen. The man is black and so am I. The stand-off goes on for long seconds. "Do you want to fuck with me? Do you want to fuck with me?" Even then the ghost of a joke crosses my mind. Well, I thought I'd made it perfectly clear. Another man, also black and wearing dreads, moves through the audience. He walks up to us both, looks at the man with the knife and says: "What's the problem, brother?" I never see that man again, not even to thank him, because the friend with whom I am walking has found a policeman and my harasser flees. But he is caught, and he goes to court and I am there, and I see him. His hair is braided and he wears a shirt and suit; he looks so different I wonder if I would have picked him out of a line-up. My statement is read to the court. He is found guilty, not of the sexual harassment which began the whole altercation, although the judge tuts at this part of my statement, but of possession of an offensive weapon. The case is over in minutes, my assailant is sent away to be sentenced at a later date. The girl I was walking with and her father attend the case. They both make it clear, though not unkindly because I have now learned my lesson, that this is my fault.

Later, when I tell the story I will discover that in the eyes of many of my white friends, the fact that I am black and both my harasser and savior are black makes this a "black thing." Something in which they have no stake and in which the mostly white onlookers are now exempt from interfering; the courage of the dreadlocked man is suddenly not so great.

On the streets race and gender intersect, the dominance of men over women, of white over black, of white men over white women, of black men over black women, of Hispanic men over Hispanic women and so forth. Layered upon that is the relationship between men, the sometime competition and sometime complicity between men of all colors, the upholding of male power. This can play out in a variety of ways. For a woman of color, men of the same ethnicity may be ally or foe.

In London men view street harassment as an equal opportunities occupation. I've endured sexually aggressive behavior from men of every color and class. In New York I am rarely publicly bothered by white men. How to account for the difference? In America the edges of racial politics are sharper and more bloodied. Human motivations are often hard to fathom, but I'd give a good guess that white men in New York City are scared to be seen harassing a woman of color. To be . In . There is also this-that within the codes of heterosexual masculinity, black men have ownership of and therefore power over black women. In some places this code is more strictly enforced than in others. On one of my last visits to the city I had to pass a group of workmen on a narrow sidewalk as they stood leaning with their backs against a building. In London this would be an inescapable moment. But we were in New York. All the

men were white except one black man at the end. I was dragging an overnight bag and so my progress was slow. The men went silent and watched me as I passed. The unspoken rule, I sensed, was that the job of calling out to me belonged to the last man, the black man. I walked towards him and it seemed we both knew what the other was thinking. Would he betray his race or his place in the patriarchy? As I passed he leaned forward and, audible only to me, whispered: "I like your jacket."

"In America the edges of racial politics are sharper and more bloodied. Human motivations are often hard to fathom, but I'd give a good guess that white men in New York City are scared to be seen harassing a woman of color. To be . In ."

Emmett Till was murdered. Emmett Till did not own the power of the gaze, at least not as far as Carolyn Bryant was concerned. 50-plus years on, white women friends in New York complain of the behavior of some black guys there. They worry about being thought racist if they complain. This is the power play between men, the revenge exacted by certain black men upon white women but in reality upon white men. Payback is the pickup truck bearing a Confederate flag that cruises me twice on a long, lonely run in Western Massachusetts, the white guy with the baseball cap who turns his head and licks his lips on each pass.
#NotAllMen
At some point most women come to the silent and terrible realization that the men in their lives-fathers, brothers, uncles, boyfriends and husbands-are not especially outraged by their experience of sexual harassment.

Late one evening when I was in my mid-twenties I had a row with my then-boyfriend. I decided to go home until I remembered the time of night, that I didn't have a car and would have to call a taxi if I hoped to execute my walk-out. I had very little money at the time and I'd have to weigh the cost of the taxi against the level of my outrage. A few months later, arguing with the same boyfriend (things didn't last too much longer) while on holiday in Southern France, I remained walking on one side of the road while he crossed to the other. We were headed for the beach and the road was more or less empty. A man driving by, assuming I was alone, began to proposition me. I ignored him for a few moments and then I told him to get lost; finally I crossed to walk with my boyfriend and the man drove away. I remember very well my boyfriend's reaction. He laughed at me.

Writing about South Africa, where the incidence of rape is among the highest in the world, the feminist activist, poet and academic Helen Moffett has stated: "Under apartheid, the dominant group used methods of regulating blacks and reminding them of their subordinate status that permeated not just public and political spaces, but also private and domestic spaces. Today it is gender rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated. This is largely done through sexual violence, in a national project in which it is quite possible that many men are buying into the notion that in enacting intimate violence on women, they are performing a necessary work of social stabilization."

In other words, rapists are the shock troops of male power.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the uneasy conclusion that, whilst #notallmen are rapists or sexual harassers, equally #notallmen are too unhappy about the status quo either. The relative vulnerability of women in public spaces limits our freedom of movement and our choices. Good practice in personal safety-telling someone where we are going, allowing ourselves to be escorted home and not walking alone at night-all add up to an effective form of social control. "The necessary work of social stabilization."

Only in the second half of the 20th century did middle-class women in many Western countries acquire some degree of freedom outside the home; before that, to walk unaccompanied was to be taken as a prostitute, a "woman of the streets," a "streetwalker." Walking, for a woman, can be an act of transgression against male authority. When a man walks aimlessly and for pleasure he is called a flâneur; a certain louche glamour attaches to the word. One rarely hears the term flâneuse. In her account of women walkers, itself called , Lauren Elkin observes that: "narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman's experience." Historically the free-ranging woman who dispensed with the domestic to claim ownership of the streets was a rare creature. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, George Sand, the flâneuses who recorded their flânerie were women who all defied male authority in other ways, too. George Sand wore male dress so that she could move more freely around Paris.

"The relative vulnerability of women in public spaces limits our freedom of movement and our choices. Good practice in personal safety-telling someone where we are going, allowing ourselves to be escorted home and not walking alone at night-all add up to an effective form of social control."

Only once has a man ever stood up for me against harassment by another man (with the exception of the dreadlocked man, though he did not know what had started the trouble) and the man who did so was gay. We were standing outside a bar in Soho in London smoking cigarettes when a young man passed me and made a remark to which I responded with a put-down. His rage was instantaneous. He was smoking too and he threatened to burn me with his cigarette, holding the lit end close to my cheek. My companion intervened and in doing so drew fire away from me, literally because now the burning cigarette tip was being held to his neck. The scene ended when a friend of the assailant pulled him away. Afterwards we talked about it. I observed that a straight man would almost certainly have reprimanded me for my comment but he, notably, had not. No, he told me, because he grew up having much the same fight on the streets: the sexual insults, the shouted provocations. As a gay man he had learned to stand up to bullies.

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I am 20. I am walking along the King's Road in Chelsea in London. It is the 1980s. Three men are coming towards me; they are clearly together, though the foot traffic on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. They are white, dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts.

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There is a branch of study in Language or Linguistics called Sociolinguistics. It studies the interaction among society, culture and language. This excellent section from the Encyclopaedia Britannica will give you a good overview as well as give you more details on some of the things already discussed. List your questions for discussion.

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It has been seen that language is much more than the external expression and communication of internal thoughts formulated independently of their verbalization. In demonstrating the inadequacy and inappropriateness of such a view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways in which one's native language is intimately and in all sorts of details related to the rest of one's life in a community and to smaller groups within that community. This is true of all peoples and all languages; it is a universal fact about language.

Anthropologists speak of the relations between language and culture. It is indeed more in accordance with reality to consider language as a part of culture. Culture is here being used, as it is throughout this article, in the anthropological sense, to refer to all aspects of human life insofar as they are determined or conditioned by membership in a society. The fact that people eat or drink is not in itself cultural; it is a biological necessity for the preservation of life. That they eat particular foods and refrain from eating other substances, though they may be perfectly edible and nourishing, and that they eat and drink at particular times of day and in certain places are matters of culture, something "acquired by man as a member of society," according to the classic definition of culture by the English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor. As thus defined and envisaged, culture covers a very wide area of human life and behaviour, and language is manifestly a part, probably the most important part, of it.

Although the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, and there is legitimate debate over the extent of this innateness, every individual's language is "acquired by man as a member of society," along with and at the same time as other aspects of that society's culture in which people are brought up. Society and language are mutually indispensable. Language can have developed only in a social setting, however this may have been structured, and human society in any form even remotely resembling what is known today or is recorded in history could be maintained only among people utilizing and understanding a language in common use.

Transmission of language and culture

Language is transmitted culturally; that is, it is learned. To a lesser extent it is taught, when parents, for example, deliberately encourage their children to talk and to respond to talk, correct their mistakes, and enlarge their vocabulary. But it must be emphasized that children very largely acquire their first language by "grammar construction" from exposure to a random collection of utterances that they encounter. What is classed as language teaching in school either relates to second-language acquisition or, insofar as it concerns the pupils' first language, is in the main directed at reading and writing, the study of literature, formal grammar, and alleged standards of correctness, which may not be those of all the pupils' regional or social dialects. All of what goes under the title of language teaching at school presupposes and relies on the prior knowledge of a first language in its basic vocabulary and essential structure, acquired before school age.

If language is transmitted as part of culture, it is no less true that culture as a whole is transmitted very largely through language, insofar as it is explicitly taught. The fact that humankind has a history in the sense that animals do not is entirely the result of language. So far as researchers can tell, animals learn through spontaneous imitation or through imitation taught by other animals. This does not exclude the performance of quite complex and substantial pieces of cooperative physical work, such as a beaver's dam or an ant's nest, nor does it preclude the intricate social organization of some species, such as bees. But it does mean that changes in organization and work will be the gradual result of mutation cumulatively reinforced by survival value; those groups whose behaviour altered in any way that increased their security from predators or from famine would survive in greater numbers than others. This would be an extremely slow process, comparable to the evolution of the different species themselves.

There is no reason to believe that animal behaviour has materially altered during the period available for the study of human history-say, the last 5,000 years or so-except, of course, when human intervention by domestication or other forms of interference has itself brought about such alterations. Nor do members of the same species differ markedly in behaviour over widely scattered areas, again apart from differences resulting from human interference. Bird songs are reported to differ somewhat from place to place within species, but there is little other evidence for areal divergence. In contrast to this unity of animal behaviour, human cultures are as divergent as are human languages over the world, and they can and do change all the time, sometimes with great rapidity, as among the industrialized countries of the 21st century.

The processes of linguistic change and its consequences will be treated below. Here, cultural change in general and its relation to language will be considered. By far the greatest part of learned behaviour, which is what culture involves, is transmitted by vocal instruction, not by imitation. Some imitation is clearly involved, especially in infancy, in the learning process, but proportionately this is hardly significant.

Through the use of language, any skills, techniques, products, modes of social control, and so on can be explained, and the end results of anyone's inventiveness can be made available to anyone else with the intellectual ability to grasp what is being said. Spoken language alone would thus vastly extend the amount of usable information in any human community and speed up the acquisition of new skills and the adaptation of techniques to changed circumstances or new environments. With the invention and diffusion of writing, this process widened immediately, and the relative permanence of writing made the diffusion of information still easier. Printing and the increase in literacy only further intensified this process. Modern techniques for broadcast or almost instantaneous transmission of communication all over the globe, together with the tools for rapidly translating between the languages of the world, have made it possible for usable knowledge of all sorts to be made accessible to people almost anywhere in the world. This accounts for the great rapidity of scientific, technological, political, and social change in the contemporary world. All of this, whether ultimately for the good or ill of humankind, must be attributed to the dominant role of language in the transmission of culture.

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It has been seen that language is much more than the external expression and communication of internal thoughts formulated independently of their verbalization. In demonstrating the inadequacy and inappropriateness of such a view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways in which one's native language is intimately and in all sorts of details related to the rest of one's life in a community and to smaller groups within that community.

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The reason we do not speak in Shakespearean English is because languages are living things and change with the times (and people speaking them). Teenagers, are of course, a good source of new words designed for an 'in' group and to exclude adults. But even they don't contribute all the new words that enter the English language each year. Check out this article on 'neologisms' or new words. What new words can you come up with this year?

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English speakers already have over a million words at our disposal – so why are we adding 1,000 new ones a year to the lexicon? And how?

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New words can come from both sources. But what exactly do we mean by jargon or slang? This BBC article gives a good (and brief) answer. List your questions for discussion.

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BBC World Service | Learning English | Ask about English

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English language experts answers students' language questions.

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We've looked at this briefly earlier in the development of English. Now that we've covered how new words arise, jargon and slang as well as how language functions in society to help produce culture, let's look at how different English variants came to be. List your questions for discussion.

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British English

The abbreviation RP ( Received Pronunciation) denotes what is traditionally considered the standard accent of people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this way. RP is the only British accent that has no specific geographical correlate: it is not possible, on hearing someone speak RP, to know which part of the United Kingdom he or she comes from. Though it is traditionally considered a "prestige" accent, RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only one particular accent that has, through the accidents of history, achieved a higher status than others. Although acquiring its unique standing without the aid of any established authority, it was fostered by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so on) and the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties of English are well preserved in spite of the leveling influences of film, television, and radio. In several Northern accents, RP / a:/ (the first vowel sound in father) is still pronounced /æ/ (a sound like the a in fat) in words such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried across the Atlantic into American English.

In the words run, rung, and tongue, the RP pronunciation of the vowel is like the u in but; in some Northern accents it is pronounced like the oo in book. In the words bind, find, and grind, the RP pronunciation of the vowel sound is /ai/, like that in "bide"; in some Northern accents, it is /i/, like the sound in feet. The vowel sound in the words go, home, and know in some Northern accents is /ɔ:/, approximately the sound in law in some American English accents. In parts of Northumberland, RP it is still pronounced "hit," as in Old English. In various Northern accents the definite article the is heard as t, th, or d. In those accents in which it becomes both t and th, t is used before consonants and th before vowels. Thus, one hears t'book but th'apple. When, however, the definite article is reduced to t and the following word begins with t or d, as in t'tail or t'dog, it is replaced by a slight pause as in the RP articulation of the first t in hat trick. The RP /t∫/, the sound of the ch in church, can become k, as in thack ("thatch, roof") and kirk ("church"). In some Northern dialects strong verbs retain the old past-tense singular forms band, brak, fand, spak for standard English forms bound, broke, found, and spoke. Strong verbs also retain the past participle inflection -en as in comen, shutten, sitten, and getten or gotten for standard English come, shut, sat, and got.

In some Midland accents the diphthongs in throat and stone have been kept apart, whereas in RP they have fallen together. In Cheshire, Derby, Stafford, and Warwick, RP singing is pronounced with a g sounded after the velar nasal sound (as in RP finger). In Norfolk one hears skellington and solintary for skeleton and solitary, showing an intrusive n just as does messenger in RP from French messager, passenger from French passager, and nightingale from Old English nihtegala. Other East Anglian words show consonantal metathesis (switch position), as in singify for signify, and substitution of one liquid or nasal for another, as in chimbly for chimney and synnable for syllable. Hantle for handful shows syncope (disappearance) of an unstressed vowel, partial assimilation of d to t before voiceless f, and subsequent loss of f in a triple consonant group.

In some South Western accents, initial f and s are often voiced, becoming v and z. Two words with initial v have found their way into RP: vat from fat and vixen from fixen (female fox). Another South Western feature is the development of a d between l or n and r, as in parlder for parlour and carnder for corner. The bilabial semivowel w has developed before o in wold for old, and in wom for home, illustrating a similar development in RP by which Old English ān has become one, and Old English hāl has come to be spelled whole, as compared with Northern hale. In some South Western accents yat comes from the old singular geat, whereas RP gate comes from the plural gatu. Likewise, clee comes from the old nominative clea, whereas RP claw comes from the oblique cases. The verbs keel and kemb have developed regularly from Old English cēlan "to make cool" and kemban "to use a comb," whereas the corresponding RP verbs cool and comb come from the adjective and the noun, respectively.

In Wales, people often speak a clear and measured form of English with rising intonations inherited from ancestral Celtic. They tend to aspirate both plosives (stops) and fricative consonants very forcibly; thus, two is pronounced with an audible puff of breath after the initial t, and while may be heard with a voiceless /w/.

Scots, or Lowland Scottish, was once a part of Northern English, but the two dialects began to diverge in the 14th century. Today speakers of Scots trill their r's, shorten vowels, and simplify diphthongs. A few Scots words, such as bairn, brae, canny, dour, and pawky, have made their way into RP. Scots is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language still spoken by about 60,000 people (almost all bilingual) mostly in the Highlands and the Western Isles. Thanks to such writers as Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, many Scottish Gaelic words have been preserved in English literature.

Northern Ireland has dialects related in part to Scots and in part to the southern Irish dialect of English. The influence of the Irish language on the speech of Dublin is most evident in the syntax of drama and in the survival of such picturesque expressions as We are after finishing, It's sorry you will be, and James do be cutting corn every day.

American and Canadian English

The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its subdialects.

The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England ( Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.

The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.

The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.

These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers to arrive in Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoon and woodchuck. Later they took words from foreign settlers: chowder and prairie from the French, scow and sleigh from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as backwoods and bullfrog, and gave new meanings to such words as lumber (which in British English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and corn (which in British English signifies any grain, especially wheat) to mean "maize."

Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from Ireland. The Great Famine of 1845-49 drove 1.5 million Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved Africans working on rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many structural and lexical features of their native languages. This variety of English is comparable to such contact languages as Sranan (Taki-taki) of Suriname and Melanesian Pidgins. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central states, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal differences in the United States. On the other hand, immigrant groups have introduced new varieties in which the influence of ethnic origins is evident, and some immigrant languages are widely spoken (notably Spanish, in the southeastern and southwestern states).

The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary between dialects, and the influence of United States English is strong, being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador. Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States, British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. Less than one-fourth of its people, living mostly in the province of Quebec, have French as their mother tongue.

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English language - Dialects, Grammar, Vocabulary

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English language - Dialects, Grammar, Vocabulary: The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes what is traditionally considered the standard accent of people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this way.

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We've seen earlier how differences in accent can arise and how these have been used as class markers. A variant however, has more than just differences in accent. It often has a different vocabulary and grammatical structure too. But how different can a variety be before no one else can understand it? Speakers of different varieties who can understand each other have mutual intelligibility. This is on a continuum. Let's take a closer look at accents today.

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Is Google Translate as good as a Babel fish?

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Is Google Translate as good as a Babel fish?

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Stick that little alien fish into your ear and it will translate any language in the universe for you.

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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - The Babelfish

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Apparently, Google Translate works well enough to produce a better than average Primary 6 English essay (originally written in Chinese). What are the implications?

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How Google Translate could disrupt English classes in Hong Kong schools

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Machine translation is advanced enough to produce believable versions of primary school students' compositions. What are the implications for the way English and other subjects are now taught in Hong Kong?

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Inclusive language is a major trend in workplaces and school campuses, particularly in the US. Here is an example from the University of Missouri - it's a 4-page colour pamphlet given out to students.

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The text we will be looking at is Duffy's acclaimed collection, The World's Wife (1999). Here's an encyclopaedia entry on Duffy. Remember - such entries are also text types.

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Carol Ann Duffy, in full Dame Carol Ann Duffy, (born December 23, 1955, Glasgow, Scotland), British poet whose well-known and well-liked poetry engaged such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar, conversational language that made her work accessible to a variety of readers. In 2009-19 she served as the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain.

Duffy lived in Glasgow, Scotland, until age six, when she and her family moved to Stafford, England. Her father, a fitter for an electric company, ran an unsuccessful bid for Parliament in 1983. Duffy grew up attending convent schools and began publishing her poetry in magazines at age 14. She later attended Liverpool University. After graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1977, Duffy set to work publishing several books and traveling to read and teach her poetry. She also worked as a poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989 and as an editor for the poetry magazine Ambit. In 1996 she began lecturing in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she later became creative director of the Writing School.

Duffy's poetry collections included Standing Female Nude (1985), The Other Country (1990), The World's Wife (1999), Rapture (2005), and Sincerity (2018). During this time she also authored such plays as Take My Husband (1982) and Little Women, Big Boys (1986). At the beginning of the 21st century, much of her work was written for children, including the picture books Underwater Farmyard (2002), The Tear Thief (2007), The Princess's Blankets (2009), and Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014), as well as the poetry collection The Hat (2007). She continued to produce verse for adults as well, notably issuing the collections Love Poems (2010), The Bees (2011), and Sincerity (2018), and her stage credits included retellings of the story of Casanova (2007) and of the morality play Everyman (2015).

In 1999 British media claimed that Duffy had been considered for the position of poet laureate but that Prime Minister Tony Blair feared her homosexuality would not be well received by "middle England"; the poet and author Andrew Motion was chosen instead. Upon accepting the position at the end of Motion's term, in 2009, Duffy made it clear in interviews that she had agreed to become poet laureate only because, since its inception in the 17th century, no woman had previously held the post. She also expressed impatience with claims that her sexuality had kept her from the post; her 10-year term ended in 2019. Her work received such notable accolades as the Scottish Arts Council Award, the Whitbread (later Costa) Book Award for poetry, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, advanced to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015.

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Carol Ann Duffy | Biography, Books, Poetry, & Facts

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Carol Ann Duffy, British poet whose well-known and well-liked poetry engaged such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar, conversational language that made her work accessible to a variety of readers. In 2009-19 she served as the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain.

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This entry by the BBC is a bit more personal and gives us a sense of what Duffy is like as a poet.

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Currently reigning as Britain's first female Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy is also queen of the dramatic monologue. Duffy's poetry gives voice to society's alienated and ignored in an unstuffy but compelling manner, wrestling with ideas about language and identity. As Duffy says herself: "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way."

Born in Glasgow in 1955, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire and studied philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where she was active in the city's underground poetry scene in the 1970s. Her first full-length collection Standing Female Nude in 1985 was something of a landmark, forging an anti-establishment voice with a colloquial lyricism. Duffy reached a wider audience with The World's Wife (1999), a series of witty dramatic monologues spoken by women from fairy tales and myths, and the women usually air-brushed from history, such as Mrs Midas and Mrs Darwin. Her output has also included a formidable amount of writing for children.

Her former relationship with the poet Jackie Kay has informed some of her best-known work. Her most recent adult collection, Rapture, a first person account of a love affair, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2005. Duffy's poem Education for Leisure, about a violent teenager, was controversially removed from an examination board's GCSE syllabus in 2008. In a move typical of the poet, Duffy responded with a sardonic new poem about knives in Shakespeare.

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BBC - Poetry Season - Poets - Carol Ann Duffy

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Currently reigning as Britain's first female Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy is also queen of the dramatic monologue. Duffy's poetry gives voice to society's alienated and ignored in an unstuffy but compelling manner, wrestling with ideas about language and identity. As Duffy says herself: "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way."

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It's been two decades since this collection was published

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It's been two decades since this collection was published, but it still has its admirers. What makes it such a special and beloved work?

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Poetry is pleasure.

Sometimes people say to me, "why should I read a poem?" There are plenty of answers, from the profound - a poem is such an ancient means of communication that it feels like an evolutionary necessity - to the practical; a poem is like a shot of espresso - the fastest way to get a hit of mental and spiritual energy.

We could talk about poetry as a rope in a storm. Poetry as one continuous mantra of mental health. Poetry as the world's biggest, longest-running workshop on how to love. Poetry as a conversation across time. Poetry as the acid-scrub of cliche.

We could say that the poem is a lie detector. That the poem is a way of thinking without losing the feeling. That a poem is a way of feeling without being too overwhelmed by feeling to think straight. That the poem is "the best words in the best order" ( Coleridge). That the poem "keeps the heart awake to truth and beauty" (Coleridge again - who can resist those Romantics?). That the poem is an intervention: "The capacity to make change in existing conditions" (Muriel Rukeyser). That poetry, said Seamus Heaney, is "strong enough to help".

Yes.

And pleasure.

Carol Ann Duffy has often spoken about poetry as an everyday event and not as a special occasion. She wants us to enjoy poetry, to have as much as we like, to be able to help ourselves to a good, fresh supply, to let poetry be as daily as talking - because poetry is talking. Words begin in the mouth before they hit the page. Speech is older than writing, and poetry is as old as speech. Poems are best spoken to get the full weight and taste of the words and the run of the lines. Difficult poems become easier when spoken.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry.

Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in 20th-century classical music - atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness - so modernism rebranded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea towels; not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet.

It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap and the rise of performance poetry have played a part in that return.

As a powerful modern voice, Duffy has been unafraid to use rhyme from the beginning. In her TS Eliot prizewinning collection, Rapture, poem after poem deployed rhyme with accurate beauty.

Her poetry is a practical proof of rhyme as expressive, flexible, purposefully baited. Dangle a rhyme at the end of a line and the mind-fish bites. Not only end-rhymes, but off-rhymes, hidden rhymes, half-rhymes, ghost rhymes, deliberate near-misses that hit the mark:

I was wind, I was gas

I was all hot air, trailed

Clouds for hair.

I scrawled my name with a hurricane, When out of the blue

Roared a fighter plane. ("Thetis")

The poems in The World's Wife - about women behind the scenes, women behind the throne, women behind history - are rhyme-rich, though not always obviously so:

I flew in my chains over the wood where

we'd buried

the doll. I know it was me who was there.

I know I carried the spade. I know I was

covered in mud.

But I cannot remember how or when or

precisely where.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The complacent end-rhymes of lines two and four are taunted by the askew "buried" and "carried", and made sinister by the pagan sacrifice embedded in "wood" and "mud" with the ancient "wude" and "daub" sitting behind the rhyme. Repetition of "I know", three times in four lines, works as a locked rhyme - lethally right for a mind that can never escape itself or be set free by others; a mind that belongs to Myra Hindley.

Other poems rhyme with cheeky exuberance. In "Mrs Sisyphus" the repetitive idiocy of the rock and its roll suits the uphill build of the poem (towards its inevitable collapse). The punishment of the gods turns out to be a 24/7 meaningless managerial job, where no matter how many emails you answer, your inbox will be full again the next day.

Then there's the glorious "Mrs Darwin" with its Edward Lear nonsensical sense: "7 April 1852. // Went to the Zoo. / I said to Him - / Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you." Hidden behind this ditty in diary form is the shadow of Dorothy Wordsworth, endlessly walking, endlessly writing her Lake District journal so that William could use it for that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" he liked a poem to be. The famous daffodils, we remember, were Dorothy's.

The title of The World's Wife is both a tacit understanding that it's (still) a man's world, and a joke on the world's most popular dedication: To My Wife.

Ask who was at a party and the answer is often, "Oh, the world and his wife." Our language pictures are inherently patriarchal - unless challenged. But the fact that three simple title-words can be the challenger affirms the power of language to disclose the unthought norm.

William Wordsworth. Photograph: Alamy

And the unthought known. Men and women alike know that more than half the world is female but men and women alike forget it every day. It takes a poet to jog our memory.

The characters in The World's Wife come from fairytales, Bible stories, legends, modern horrors (Hindley, here recast as the devil's wife) and ancient myths. Their common link is that the poems themselves are told by the spouse-voice of the famous male.

This headstand, the world turned upside down, gives us another look at history through her-story. The "other"; the angry and the ignored, as well as the sure-footed and sexy. Of course there's a political agenda - there always is: poets write poems because they have something urgent to say.

First-world-war poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen claimed of his work that "the poetry is in the pity". In The World's Wife, the politics is in the poetry. The politics is feminism.

But there's nothing po-faced about these poems. They are written with such humour or poignancy, or insight or recognition, that we get the point, the many points, the points of view and the points of light. Like every good atom, these poems are composed out of empty space and points of light - the dazzle of the poet's vision, the space for the reader to reimagine matter, the matter, what matters, what is the matter?

Here is Frau Freud, in mad lexical delight, listing every word she can think of for Penis - and at last, in a bout of new theory-making that would have given us a very different psychoanalysis, she drops Penis Envy and opts instead for Penis Pity. It's a short poem - a loose sonnet - but it says as much as bookshelves of debate. The fact is that women don't suffer from penis envy. (Actually or symbolically, practically or poetically). Only a man would think anyone could.

Here's Red Riding Hood gutting the wolf-poet to get at his words. She has no objection to sleeping with him first, or bringing him breakfast in bed. When she gets on with the axe-work and slits him "scrotum to throat", she discovers it's her grandmother's bones inside. The skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue.

There's Mrs Midas, who has to lock the cat in the cellar and jam a chair against the bedroom door, while her husband turns their life into gold. What you risk reveals what you value. This thoughtful, funny poem questions the masculine obsession with money - far from the stereotype of woman as a gold digger. What Mrs Midas misses most about her husband is the one thing she can never have: his touch. "Mrs Faust" conjures up a much more money-minded female. It's Faust who has amassed world-pools of cash but she's happy enough to spend it:

"I grew to love the lifestyle / not the life. / He grew to love the kudos / not the wife."

The ballad-form rhyming here is tidy and deadly. Duffy, throughout her work, has made good use of both the English ballad and its 19th-century development, the dramatic monologue.

The ballad form is made for narrative stretch. It's an old form - the Robin Hood ballads date from the mid-to-late 15th century. It's a form for storytelling, for late-night firesides, for pub entertainment, for the popular chapbooks (cheap books) that were just folded printed papers sold at fairs. It's street corner, it's troubadour, it's busking.

Ballads had a lucrative disruptive sideline as political agitprop, in broadside ballads, as they became known. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Lennon and McCartney of the 18th-century poetry scene, published their Lyrical Ballads, a moody, up-close, melodic extension of the ballad form, making it both personal and political - about ordinary people, not legends or hate figures, and using natural speech and the sights and sounds of what was around them. They were modernising poetry.

The ballad is usually a third-person narrative, and it can run on forever - it was designed to have verses added - while its later development, the dramatic monologue, throws the reader into a highly charged first-person narrative, closer to the urgencies of the stage than the shaggy dog of a story.

But both forms have a story to tell. The poems in The World's Wife are hybrids: first person, dramatic situations, at once intimate and theatrical, as you'd expect from a monologue, but with the authority of a ballad - a legend being told, a larger-than-life figure that belongs in myth as well as history. And there's something of the broadside here, too, in their high-stepping protest at the truth that the story unfolds. Some of these poems are laments for women in captivity.

The dramatic Mrs Beast pictures a world where smart women with their own money ditch the prince and choose the beast. Better sex. Keys to the wine cellar. The women run a weekly poker game.

Marilyn Monroe. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt

But behind each player stood a line of

ghosts

Unable to win. Eve, Ashputtel. Marilyn

Monroe.

Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair.

Bessie Smith unloved and down and out.

Bluebeard's wives, Henry VIII's, Snow White

Cursing the day she left the seven

dwarfs, Diana,

Princess of Wales.

The startling last line? A paraphrase of Auden: "Let the less-loving one be me."

From women who need a lesson in loving less to a creature who could not love more, "Queen Kong" is the story of a female gorilla who falls in love with the documentary film-maker who turns up in her remote part of the world. They have an affair. He leaves for home, much like Aeneas leaves Dido, but this gorilla doesn't kill herself: she goes after him to New York city, squeezing herself between the skyscrapers, "pressing my passionate eye / to a thousand windows, each with its modest peep-show / Of boredom or pain, of drama, consolation, remorse." Until ... "I picked him, like a chocolate from the top layer / Of the box, one Friday night, out of his room".

It's a wonderful image, and as she dangles him there, high over the Manhattan grid, we get a new sense of what is meant by arm candy.

The range of Duffy's imagination is vast. She moves easily from gorilla-scale to the interiority of the sonnet. Duffy loves the sonnet form - she says: "They remind me of prayers." "Anne Hathaway" is also a sonnet - a gentle vindication of the love between the famously neglected wife and the most famous writer in history. For those who fear that feminism doesn't include men, except at the level of anger or contempt, read this one.

The final poem in the collection, "Demeter", is also a sonnet, as mysterious and complete as the moon. It is about nobody's wife. That choice is an audacious signal. A message that something else is happening now. We are leaving for elsewhere. A new beginning.

"Demeter" celebrates mother and daughter in their ancient form as the two-that-is-three of the Great Goddess - mother, daughter, wise woman. I guess the invisible third is writing the poem - or perhaps she's renewed, as she always is, in the new moon of the last line. "Demeter" is a love poem. A poem of spring and the coming future - its symbol, fresh flowers. A future, perhaps, where there will be no need to voice history with the words we never heard.

A future that starts with a prayer.

The World's Wife is published as a Picador Classic. Carol Ann Duffy will be reading from The World's Wife at the Picador Classic Day at Foyles bookshop, London WC2, on 7 February. foyles.co.uk

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Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy - of course it's political

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Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife gives the women behind the scenes - from Mrs Midas to Queen Kong - a glorious and powerful voice. She is a poet of vast imagination. By Jeanette Winterson

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This was how the collection was received when it was first released.

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Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss. Appropriate, too, for a poet whose new collection The World's Wife (Picador, £10) features such imaginative rewritings of history as the figures of Queen Herod, Queen Kong and Pope Joan. The figure that emerges from the looming leather canopy is plumply elegant in a tailored black trouser suit. Together, we move to a quieter corner of Manchester's Midland Hotel.

Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss. Appropriate, too, for a poet whose new collection The World's Wife (Picador, £10) features such imaginative rewritings of history as the figures of Queen Herod, Queen Kong and Pope Joan. The figure that emerges from the looming leather canopy is plumply elegant in a tailored black trouser suit. Together, we move to a quieter corner of Manchester's Midland Hotel.

Carol Ann Duffy has had a difficult fortnight. Her partner, the poet and novelist Jackie Kay, has been in hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a midge bite. Jackie's son Matthew has started secondary school; her own daughter, Ella, has begun primary school and, to cap it all, she has been trying with limited success to house-train the latest addition to their home: Dinks the dog. "All of this would have been a lot easier without the dog," she declares grimly.

Such images of bustling domesticity are not what one associates with a poet famed for fierce feminism and uncompromising social satire. The World's Wife will, however, please those who like such labels, as well as just about everybody who picks it up. It's a playful and extremely funny look at history, myths and legends through the eyes of the invisible wives. Mrs Faust recounts the meteoric rise of a husband who "didn't have a soul to sell". Mrs Midas has to install her husband in a caravan "in the wilds" in order to avoid the deadly effects of his magical touch. Pilate's Wife swaps a thrilling glance with the rugged, sexy Christ before her husband washes his "useless, perfumed" hands. Mrs Aesop gives her boring, pompous husband a little tale of her own: one that involves an axe and a cock. "I laughed last, longest," she announces triumphantly.

"I wanted to use history and myth and popular culture and elements from cinema and literature, but also to anchor it in a deeply personal soil and make an entertainment," Duffy explains as she nibbles a ham sandwich. "It was fun to juggle around with and there were times when I sat laughing as I was writing." Certainly, her subversion of history is a far cry from the earnest "herstory" that is usually associated with such enterprises. It sparkles with wit, intelligence and an impressive lightness of touch, while drawing on some weighty emotional experiences: loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, the fierceness of a mother's love.

These are archetypes, of course, but Duffy admits that the book is also a kind of autobiography. She is famed for her dramatic monologues, which combine compassion, rhythmic verve and an astonishing gift for ventriloquism, and for her tender, lyrical love poems. This collection brings both genres together in the form of masks which, she says, gave her the freedom to explore intensely personal experiences.

The most personal poem is the last one, "Demeter", a deeply touching lyric in which she writes of the transition from winter to spring, from "a broken heart" to "a blue sky smiling" through the arrival, "at last", of "my daughter, my girl, across the fields".

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The World's Wife seems to me much less angry than her previous work, the satire more affectionate. Does she agree? "My great angry days were in the Thatcher years," she replies, before going on to admit that yes, it might have something to do with her current domestic happiness. "There's no doubt about it that for me having a child was a revolutionary experience. I can't now remember my life before I had her - it seems to have been lived by someone else."

Certainly, little Ella has been the impulse behind the children's poems she is now obsessively writing. Her first collection for children, Meeting Midnight (Faber, £3.99), is published later this month. Every day, while walking the dog, she mulls on a poem for the next one. Meeting Midnight combines the playful wit of The World's Wife with the exuberance and sublime nonsense of the best children's writing. From the "electrifying rustle" in "Chocs" to "Toy Dog", in which a toy dog becomes a real one - "alas, that poem came true, it's appalling!" - it is full of the child's energetic delight in the world.Faber will also publish Duffy's collection of children's fairy tales, Rumpelstiltskin and other Grimm Tales (£8.99). These originally arose out of a commission for theatre director Tim Supple at the Young Vic. Duffy did one batch in 1995 and another in 1997. Initially, she was intimidated by the weight of the tradition and read five or six different versions, some going back to the 19th century. She followed Supple's advice to "stick completely to the original stories as they were, in a language his actors could speak now".The resulting tales are punchy and poetic, bringing the freshness of contemporary idioms to the reassuring familiarity of the originals. Duffy enjoyed writing them a lot and now wants to do all of them. "I'd love it when Ella has children if she said, 'Go and look it up in Grandma's Grimm,'" she says with a grin.

It's amusing to read them in parallel with the legends of The World's Wife. Mrs Aesop, for example, provides an ironic counterpoint to "The Hare and the Hedgehog", though the moral of that tale - that hedgehogs should marry hedgehogs - seems delightfully subversive. "I think in Grimm hedgehogs should marry hedgehogs and you shouldn't look elsewhere," says Duffy, with a wicked glint in her eye. "But in our world we can marry who we want, or even better not marry at all." You can see why New Labour might feel she was not the ideal New Laureate.

Duffy is sick to death of the laureate issue. She was bruised by the brouhaha and what she sees as the media's invention of imagined rivalries. She does, however, speak generously of Andrew Motion, of his recent TUC poem and his comments about education, but has made it very clear that next time she would declare herself "out of the picture".

Does she think there's a role for a laureate? "Yes, absolutely," she insists, "particularly for young people. It's nice to have a poet laureate in the way that it's nice to have a football manager or a mayor, and it's good to have someone who's prepared to say poetry is part of our national life."She believes passionately in the public role of poetry, predicting that it will "become more important and take a larger place in our lives in the next century". She thinks poetry should be splashed everywhere: "The newspapers should get their act together and follow the Independent's example; radio should have poetry all day, every hour. You should have a poem last thing at night on TV, the Royal Mail should put them on stamps. It doesn't trivialise it - put Milton on milk cartons!" We laugh at the prospect of the devil displayed on full-fat milk.

As one of the few living poets who has always been a full-time writer, Duffy has done plenty of the readings, workshops and school visits that are the poet's bread and butter. She has less time these days, and can afford to be a little more selective. After walking Ella to the school gate and dealing with the dog, she settles down daily to what she does best: bringing language alive in the near-miraculous act of poetry.

"The beginnning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation," she explains, "a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it - and then the impulse is to catch that with a pen and paper." For her, the process usually takes a few days "until the poem seems to have assumed the same shape as the original revelation".

She and Jackie have separate writing lives, separate studies, diaries and phone-lines. They don't criticise each other's work. They do, however, meet for cups of coffee, indulge in impromptu shopping trips and laugh together over reviews. "In our household, reviews are great fun," Duffy smiles. "They're a form of entertainment." Does she ever get upset by them? "No, not really," she replies, as if considering a fascinating new concept. "I regret to say that it's quite thrilling to get a bad review."

It all sounds enviably cosy: writing, reading "all the time", chatting about poetry, looking after and playing with the children and, of course, the dog.In the great tradition of poets, Carol Ann Duffy goes into the countryside nearly every weekend. She also plays poker and watches the football - she supports Liverpool - and Coronation Street. "Tony Warren is Ella's godfather," says the queen of modern poetry with a smile, "so she's a very lucky girl."

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955, the only daughter of left-wing working-class Catholics, and grew up in Stafford. After reading English at Liverpool, she started working as a full-time writer, of plays as well as poetry. Her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was hailed by Robert Nye as "the debut of a genuine and original poet". Selling Manhattan (1987) garnered further awards and praise. It was followed in 1990 by The Other Country and in 1993 by Mean Time, which won the Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. The World's Wife appears next week from Picador. Her many other awards include the National Poetry Competition and Dylan Thomas award. She lived in London from 1981 to 1995, but moved to Manchester in 1996, where she lectures part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has edited a number of anthologies including Stopping for Death and Anvil New Poets. Her Selected Poems were published in 1994.

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Carol Ann Duffy: Street-wise heroines at home

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Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss.

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This is the Grimm's version from 1905. Do note that the 'riding hood' was sometimes used instead of the 'cap'. What is the moral of the story? How does it apply to Duffy's poem? How does Duffy subvert the original story or play off it?

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The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!

Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was nothing that she would not have given to the child. Once she gave her a little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else; so she was always called 'Little Red- Cap.'

One day her mother said to her: 'Come, Little Red-Cap, here is a piece of cake and a bottle of wine; take them to your grandmother, she is ill and weak, and they will do her good. Set out before it gets hot, and when you are going, walk nicely and quietly and do not run off the path, or you may fall and break the bottle, and then your grandmother will get nothing; and when you go into her room, don't forget to say, "Good morning", and don't peep into every corner before you do it.'

'I will take great care,' said Little Red-Cap to her mother, and gave her hand on it.

The grandmother lived out in the wood, half a league from the village, and just as Little Red-Cap entered the wood, a wolf met her. Red-Cap did not know what a wicked creature he was, and was not at all afraid of him.

'Good day, Little Red-Cap,' said he.

'Thank you kindly, wolf.'

'Whither away so early, Little Red-Cap?'

'To my grandmother's.'

'What have you got in your apron?'

'Cake and wine; yesterday was baking-day, so poor sick grandmother is to have something good, to make her stronger.'

'Where does your grandmother live, Little Red-Cap?'

'A good quarter of a league farther on in the wood; her house stands under the three large oak-trees, the nut-trees are just below; you surely must know it,' replied Little Red-Cap.

The wolf thought to himself: 'What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful-she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act craftily, so as to catch both.' So he walked for a short time by the side of Little Red-Cap, and then he said: 'See, Little Red-Cap, how pretty the flowers are about here-why do you not look round? I believe, too, that you do not hear how sweetly the little birds are singing; you walk gravely along as if you were going to school, while everything else out here in the wood is merry.'

Little Red-Cap raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing everywhere, she thought: 'Suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay; that would please her too. It is so early in the day that I shall still get there in good time'; and so she ran from the path into the wood to look for flowers. And whenever she had picked one, she fancied that she saw a still prettier one farther on, and ran after it, and so got deeper and deeper into the wood.

Meanwhile the wolf ran straight to the grandmother's house and knocked at the door.

'Who is there?'

'Little Red-Cap,' replied the wolf. 'She is bringing cake and wine; open the door.'

'Lift the latch,' called out the grandmother, 'I am too weak, and cannot get up.'

The wolf lifted the latch, the door sprang open, and without saying a word he went straight to the grandmother's bed, and devoured her. Then he put on her clothes, dressed himself in her cap laid himself in bed and drew the curtains.

Little Red-Cap, however, had been running about picking flowers, and when she had gathered so many that she could carry no more, she remembered her grandmother, and set out on the way to her.

She was surprised to find the cottage-door standing open, and when she went into the room, she had such a strange feeling that she said to herself: 'Oh dear! how uneasy I feel today, and at other times I like being with grandmother so much.' She called out: 'Good morning,' but received no answer; so she went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.

'Oh! grandmother,' she said, 'what big ears you have!'

'The better to hear you with, my child,' was the reply.

'But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!' she said.

'The better to see you with, my dear.'

'But, grandmother, what large hands you have!'

'The better to hug you with.'

'Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!'

'The better to eat you with!'

And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of bed and swallowed up Red-Cap.

When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed, fell asleep and began to snore very loud. The huntsman was just passing the house, and thought to himself: 'How the old woman is snoring! I must just see if she wants anything.' So he went into the room, and when he came to the bed, he saw that the wolf was lying in it. 'Do I find you here, you old sinner!' said he. 'I have long sought you!' Then just as he was going to fire at him, it occurred to him that the wolf might have devoured the grandmother, and that she might still be saved, so he did not fire, but took a pair of scissors, and began to cut open the stomach of the sleeping wolf. When he had made two snips, he saw the little Red-Cap shining, and then he made two snips more, and the little girl sprang out, crying: 'Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf'; and after that the aged grandmother came out alive also, but scarcely able to breathe. Red-Cap, however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf's belly, and when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead.

Then all three were delighted. The huntsman drew off the wolf's skin and went home with it; the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine which Red-Cap had brought, and revived, but Red-Cap thought to herself: 'As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.'

It also related that once when Red-Cap was again taking cakes to the old grandmother, another wolf spoke to her, and tried to entice her from the path. Red-Cap, however, was on her guard, and went straight forward on her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that he had said 'good morning' to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes, that if they had not been on the public road she was certain he would have eaten her up. 'Well,' said the grandmother, 'we will shut the door, that he may not come in.' Soon afterwards the wolf knocked, and cried: 'Open the door, grandmother, I am Little Red-Cap, and am bringing you some cakes.' But they did not speak, or open the door, so the grey-beard stole twice or thrice round the house, and at last jumped on the roof, intending to wait until Red-Cap went home in the evening, and then to steal after her and devour her in the darkness. But the grandmother saw what was in his thoughts. In front of the house was a great stone trough, so she said to the child: 'Take the pail, Red-Cap; I made some sausages yesterday, so carry the water in which I boiled them to the trough.' Red-Cap carried until the great trough was quite full. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip, and slipped down from the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned. But Red-Cap went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.

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The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today! Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was nothing that she would not have given to the child.

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Some readers say that the poem references Duffy's early relationship with poet Adrian Henri. Would you agree?

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Adrian Henri (b. 1932- d. 2000) was a much-loved figure in the world of performance poetry, fine art and beyond. Born in Birkenhead, Henri grew up in Rhyl, Wales, during the war years and trained as a painter at King's College, Newcastle where he was influenced by the abstract expressionists and the then newly-emergent pop artists. Painting would always remain a huge part of his life, influencing his writing and running alongside it. He first came to prominence as a poet as part of the Liverpool scene in the 1960s appearing alongside Roger McGough and Brian Patten in the groundbreaking anthology Penguin Modern Poets 10, more famously known as . This volume spearheaded the revival in performance poetry and gave it a genuinely popular status, in the words of one critic "wrestling poetry out of the hands of academe and taking it into pubs, clubs and the lives of everyday people." To date the anthology has sold over half a million copies and was highly influential in opening the doors to other performance-orientated artists who followed in subsequent decades including John Hegley, John Cooper-Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson and others. The three poets' wit, lack of pretension, street-wise energy and embracing of contemporary culture, combined with Liverpool's pre-eminence in the music scene of the period, all helped imbue the anthology with legendary status. For many people the idea that poetry could open itself to working-class language and landscapes was genuinely liberating. Always a hugely energetic man, the success of The Mersey Sound marked the start of a frenetic period of activity for Henri as he took part in performances around the country and the globe and even formed a poetry band, The Liverpool Scene. Meanwhile he continued to produce his art, winning a major prize for his painting in the John Moores competition in 1972.

For the rest of his life Henri happily combined the twin activities of writing and painting, branching out into children's poetry, stage plays and television dramas. He taught at schools, colleges of further education and at both Liverpool and Manchester Colleges of Art, and he also undertook lectureships around the country, writers' tours for the Arts Council and a number of writer-in-residence appointments. He was president of the Merseyside Arts Association and Liverpool Academy of the Arts in the 1970s and was honorary professor of the city's John Moores University. At the end of the 1990s he suffered a severe stroke which severely impaired his capacity to communicate, but he remained undaunted, learning to walk, talk and paint again. However, the illness took its toll and he died in 2000 at the age of 68. Throughout his peripatetic life, Henri had continued to make Liverpool his base, saying there was nowhere he loved better. It was more than appropriate therefore, that just before his death, the city council conferred the freedom of the city on him.

Henri's poetry retained a freshness and directness of approach best savoured perhaps in performance when he was often accompanied by musical instruments. Influenced by the French symbolists and the Beat generation, Henri's work was often free in form and rich in imagery. These qualities are to the fore in 'Death in the Suburbs' which captures Henri at a public reading in his beloved Liverpool. The poem itself, with typical verve, imagines if the world were ever to end "it would start ending in Orpington" and demonstrates a characteristic Henri ploy, taking the everyday world and giving it a surreal twist. His reading is charged with the energy of his undimmed political and social commitment, but the piece rises above simple sloganeering in his painter's eye for the objects of the world, both beautiful and debased; the cherry blossom alongside the pre-packaged meals. Although the poem envisages destruction and has a satirical bite, in its energy and closing images of beauty it's typical of the generous vision of this eclectic and tolerant writer.

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Adrian Henri (b. 1932- d. 2000) was a much-loved figure in the world of performance poetry, fine art and beyond. Born in Birkenhead, Henri grew up in Rhyl, Wales, during the war years and trained as a painter at King's...

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Read this article and decide how many forms of media and mass communication (or miscommunication) are used. What are the issues here? What is lost in translation? And how does all this connect to Part 1?

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When I was a child, I often joined my mother in prayer at the shrine in her bedroom. The shrine looked to me like a doll's house, a wood-and-glass scale model of a human-sized sanctum. It housed small bowls of rice, water and salt.

My late Japanese mother married an American in 1958, and despite her insistence that her children not speak Japanese for fear people would think we were foreign, she never gave up her Japanese religion. As the daughter of a priest in the Konko Church, she eschewed the Latter-Day Saints of my father and practiced a Shinto mindset, stubbornly and daily, alone at our home.

"Clap three times," she instructed me, "so the know you're here."

Kami are Shinto spirits present everywhere - in humans, in nature, even in inanimate objects. At an early age, I understood this to mean that all creations were miracles of a sort. I could consider a spatula used to cook my eggs with the wonder and mindful appreciation you'd afford a sculpture; someone had to invent it, many human hands and earthly resources helped get it to me, and now I use it every day. According to Shinto animism, some inanimate objects could gain a soul after 100 years of service ―a concept know as tsukumogami ― so it felt natural to acknowledge them, to express my gratitude for them.

"Tell the what you're grateful for," my mother would say to me, referring to God or the supreme kami, "and what you want."

I had my mother in mind when I watched Marie Kondo's Netflix show "Tidying Up" for the first time. In each episode, Kondo, a professional organizing consultant, instructs her clients to identify the objects in their homes that "spark joy" and devise a plan to honor those objects by cleaning and storing them properly.

She also encourages people to part ways with the objects that fail to spark joy, but not before thanking them for their service. The way Kondo pledges gratitude for the crowded houses she visits, and thanks the clothes and books and lamps that serve so much purpose for the families seeking to declutter their homes, struck me as a powerfully Shinto way of conducting life.

My mother could pick up any of the treasures in our small home and tell me their story, how much joy she said they gave her. A sparrow figurine reminded her of the birds that came to our feeders. There was the small glazed ceramic pitcher my brother made in fifth grade. A plain black cup was a medieval antique from her father's church. Each one was dusted regularly and displayed with care.

Kami are Shinto spirits present everywhere - in humans, in nature, even in inanimate objects. At an early age, I understood this to mean that all creations were miracles of a sort.

The Shinto mindset was present in everything my mother did. Both she and my father grew up in poverty, she in rural Japan and he in a coal mining town. After they married, they didn't have much money compared to others in our neighborhood - my father supported us on his Navy retirement salary and by selling jewelry at JCPenney's - but we had a nice, if modest, home.

Whereas my father's response to the wealth we had resulted in Neiman-Marcus credit card debt and a garage stuffed full of 30-plus years of cheap goods, my mother disliked the disposable, acquisitional mentality of Western culture. She recycled long before it was popular, repurposing objects others might throw away. She washed out plastic bags and reused them, because a great deal of energy and materials had gone into their manufacture. She composted. She saved rainwater. She took glass bottles and made them part of her garden display. She cut up old shirts and used them as rags, saved the buttons for sewing projects.

I'm using my mother as an example, but it's cultural to imbue objects with a sort of dignity. Japanese culture, like any, is not monolithic, but the expectation to respect where you live and work - and therefore other people - is ingrained into many Japanese households that practice Shinto traditions. Treasuring what you have; treating the objects you own as not disposable, but valuable, no matter their actual monetary worth; and creating displays so you can value each individual object are all essentially Shinto ways of living. Even if you don't have the space for shelves of books or can't afford a dresser with enough drawers, make what you have work for you, instead of being unhappy that you don't have more.

It's why some school children in Japan clean their cafeterias. It's why you saw some Japanese people picking up trash after the World Cup. It's not because they are genetically tidier and more respectful. It's because many are culturally taught that people and places and objects have .

So when people online began condemning Kondo and her KonMari method, the disparaging memes and criticism read to me less as a simple sentiment of "eh, not for me" and more as an outright cultural attack. On Facebook and Twitter, otherwise empathetic and culturally sensitive peers made fun of Kondo in starkly xenophobic terms.

White writer Anakana Schofield helped kick off the backlash with a snarly tweet that she expanded into a article, in which she takes umbrage with Kondo's method of tapping on books to wake them up. "Surely the way to wake up any book is to open it up and read it aloud," she writes indignantly, "not tap it with fairy finger motions - but this is the woo-woo nonsense territory we are in."

As online fervor drenched in not-so-subtle racism swelled, blatant misinterpretations of Kondo's method proliferated. I saw a false meme claiming Kondo wanted to limit people to owning only 30 books probably 50 times in a single day. I kept commenting, This is not true. She doesn't care how many books you keep, as long as they're not causing you misery.

In a piece titled, " Keep your tidy, spark-joy hands off my book piles, Marie Kondo," Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote: "And suddenly people have noticed the dark side of Kondo's war on stuff: She hates books."

Again, Kondo does not begrudge anyone piles of books or anything else for that matter, as long as those piles are not causing sweat-filled panic attacks. And if they are causing people to feel that, surely nobody can begrudge them getting Kondo's help in giving the piles away.

Kondo eventually addressed her critics in a statement. "It's not so much what I personally think about books," the best-selling author said. "The question you should be asking is what you think about books. If the image of someone getting rid of books or having only a few books makes you angry, that should tell you how passionate you are about books, what's clearly so important in your life. If that riles you up , that tells you something... That in itself is a very important benefit of this process."

But the vitriol was never just about the books. Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen blamed Kondo, in part, for crushing the spirit of the millennial generation. " The media that surrounds us - both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo's new Netflix show to the lifestyle influencer economy - tells us that our personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one's self and career. The end result isn't just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back," she wrote.

Petersen's analysis failed to recognize that the opposite is true. Kondo teaches that material goods are not a means for attaining happiness and urges people to appreciate what they have, a method she intends to lead to contentment, not burnout.

It's as if Petersen, like so many other detractors, depended on the memes providing shallow and incorrect summaries of Kondo's method rather than cull opinions from actually watching the Netflix show or reading the book upon which the series is based. Either way, the mostly white people who are not professional organizers had no problem telling Kondo, a woman of color and highly recognized person in her field, that her approach is objectively wrong.

I had never seen quite this level of concentrated venom directed toward a self-help/home decor person. Not Martha with her thousand-step craft projects. Not Rachel Hollis telling "girls" to wash their faces and to judge friends based on whether they can keep off weight. Not even Gwyneth when she told everyone to steam their lady parts and wedge a jade egg inside. All received backlash, but none garnered as much misguided indignation as Kondo, long after she managed to sell two million copies of her debut book.

Even though Kondo delivers her dictates in the gentlest ways possible (I watched her show with the subtitles on; they kept saying she ), the message was clear to me: White people are comfortable when a woman of color takes on a stereotypical service role , but they are uncomfortable when a woman of color deigns to upend our unspoken societal rules. Even if she gets a bunch of men, who've left all the emotional labor of managing the daily stuff of living to their wives, to actually pitch in - e ven if people have padded too much into their lives and she helps them enjoy what they have again - i t's not enough. Unconsciously or consciously, Kondo had struck a nerve.

My dad used to say, 'The Japanese do everything backward.' Even when I was little, the phrasing bugged me, though I couldn't articulate why. Now I know. It meant that the Japanese were the wrong ones, the 'other.'

My dad used to say, "The Japanese do everything backward." Even when I was little, the phrasing bugged me, though I couldn't articulate why. Now I know. It meant that the Japanese were the wrong ones, the "other." Westerners were at the center of his universe, just as Western values are at the center of the memes disparaging the KonMari method. In effect, online criticism sounds like my father's: The Japanese are backward. A woman of color could not possibly help white people live better lives, because that might mean is better.

It's OK to say, "Hey, I like my clutter. It causes me no anxiety, so I'll pass on Marie Kondo's suggestions." And it's true that people with compulsive hoarding tendencies may be unable to undertake her style of cleaning without guided help. Her method is not for everyone. But to wholesale dismiss her suggestions with xenophobic language and unadulterated Western hubris is to dismiss an entire ancient cultural tradition that has harmed exactly no one.

After my mother died, my father coped by collecting antiques and vintage objects with a vengeance, plates and glassware and art that he squirreled away into the garage and cabinets. His displays became cramped, never dusted, forgotten. Papers and clothes piled up everywhere and spilled onto the floor. It grew out of control quickly; there was no longer peace.

It was only then that I fully appreciated how hard my mother had been curating our lives - KonMari-ing our house - so we could feel the kami.

Margaret Dilloway is an American Library Association-award winning author of eight novels for adults and children, including Summer of a Thousand Pies, Momotaro: Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters and How To Be an American Housewife. She lives in Southern California.

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What White, Western Audiences Don't Understand About Marie Kondo's 'Tidying Up'

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When I was a child, I often joined my mother in prayer at the shrine in her bedroom. The shrine looked to me like a doll's house, a wood-and-glass scale model of a human-sized sanctum. It housed small bowls of rice, water and salt.

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This is a text over half a century old. It's in print - or written form. What is its message? Is this written, printed form that is now a PDF document part of the message? It's a long read, but ultimately rewarding for those in search of deeper understanding

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The British press has a long and colourful history and is often held up as an example of good journalism. But freedom means power... and power often means very silly mistakes - or simply thinking one can get away with it. Is a totally free press realistic?

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UK newspaper apologises and pays damages to Melania Trump

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The Daily Telegraph said 'The mystery of Melania', the cover story of its January 19 edition of the magazine, it made erroneous claims about her family and career.

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What is objective reportage? And how can our choice of words reveal attitudes? Or are headlines just bait?

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Trashed: how China is forcing small-town America to stop recycling

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New Chinese policies about contaminant levels in the recyclable waste it imports have transformed how small US cities deal with their garbage. Some US cities have halted plastic and glass recycling...

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... but not when it works in the other direction. This article and others about fentanyl tend to focus on how it's all China's fault that Americans are addicted to this deadly drug. How does the language used show this?

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Forget tariffs. Forget all the computers, toys and textiles that the Chinese export to America. China's most consequential export here is fentanyl, the illicit drug killing people in this country at the rate of nearly 80 a day.

Fentanyl use in the USA has surged, pushing its death toll last year to 28,466 - nine times higher than in 2013 and a rise so steep that it has helped drive down the nation's life expectancy.

And where is this illicit fentanyl originating? About 80 percent of the pure fentanyl seized by U.S. authorities last fiscal year arrived from China, often through the mail.

Since the recent summit in Argentina of the Group of 20 industrial and emerging-market nations, President Donald Trump has boasted on Twitter that Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to "criminalize the sale of deadly fentanyl" coming into the United States, a potential "game changer" in the battle against this mass killer.
OTHER VIEWS: Avoid blaming each other on fentanyl
Trump didn't get it quite right. Fentanyl already is an illegal "controlled substance" in China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said last week that it would add " all fentanyl-like substances " to its controlled substance list - a change that could be quite far-reaching. At the same time, China cautioned patience: "The relevant work is yet to be started."

Fentanyl is a particularly insidious killer. It's far more potent than heroin and more profitable for dealers because a kilo can be cut into so many more doses. It is often laced into heroin or pressed into fake pain pills by sellers who care nothing about accuracy, so users don't know what they're getting. Tiny variations in dosages can be fatal.

The drug's structure is also a problem. Unlike heroin, which is made from poppies grown in fields, fentanyl is a synthetic drug manufactured in laboratories. Once China declares one form a "controlled substance," chemists can tweak the core formula by as little as a single molecule and create what's known as a new " analogue " that is not yet illegal. That leaves U.S. law enforcement one step behind the criminal traffickers.

If China declared all fentanyl-like substances illegal, it could deeply cut into exports.

Regardless of China's intentions, there are built-in barriers to curtailing fentanyl exports. Chinese regulators are understaffed and overwhelmed by the nation's enormous chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

And while the national government sets policy, it is carried out locally, where officials could be more interested in boosting the economy than curbing a drug that the Chinese maintain is not abused in their own country.

The history of follow-through on crackdown promises is mixed. In 2015, after a new Chinese drug known on the street as flakka caused dozens of deaths in Florida, U.S. officials were able to quickly get China's cooperation in declaring the drug a "controlled substance." It soon disappeared from Florida.

But even as the United States has waged a long campaign against fentanyl imports,including new postal requirements for international mail, the drug's flow and resulting deaths have surged. In the past 14 months, federal prosecutors have indicted several Chinese nationals for selling fentanyl to Americans over the internet, but neither the Chinese nor the U.S. Justice Department would say whether any have been arrested in China or have had their labs shut down.
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Whether Trump's meeting with Xi results in meaningful progress remains an open question. The only thing certain is that every day this poison continues flowing into American communities, more people will die.

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China's deadliest export to America: fentanyl

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Forget tariffs. Forget all the computers, toys and textiles that the Chinese export to America. China's most consequential export here is fentanyl, the illicit drug killing people in this country at the rate of nearly 80 a day.

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It's apparently payback for the Opium War... read all about the chemical warfare methods being used by China against the US.

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The shocking story of China's strategy to use America's drug addiction as a weapon against itself

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The image of the needle in the previous article reminded me of something.... have a look at this 'needle' - it's a metaphor, of course.

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direct influence via mass media

(in Dutch also known as: 'almacht van de media-theorie', stimulus-response, injectienaald, transportband, lont in het kruidvat theorie).

History and Orientation

The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behavior change.

the fast rise and popularization of radio and television

the emergence of the persuasion industries, such as advertising and propaganda

the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children, and

Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party

Core Assumptions and Statements

Several factors contributed to this "strong effects" theory of communication, including:

The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by 'shooting' or 'injecting' them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

Both images used to express this theory (a bullet and a needle) suggest a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. The bullet theory graphically suggests that the message is a bullet, fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. There is no escape from the effect of the message in these models. The population is seen as a sitting duck. People are seen as passive and are seen as having a lot of media material "shot" at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.

New assessments that the Magic Bullet Theory was not accurate came out of election studies in "The People's Choice," (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet, 1944/1968). The project was conducted during the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 to determine voting patterns and the relationship between the media and political behavior. The majority of people remained untouched by the propaganda; interpersonal outlets brought more influence than the media. The effects of the campaign were not all-powerful to where they persuaded helpless audiences uniformly and directly, which is the very definition of what the magic bullet theory does. As focus group testing, questionnaires, and other methods of marketing effectiveness testing came into widespread use; and as more interactive forms of media (e.g.: internet, radio call-in shows, etc.) became available, the magic bullet theory was replaced by a variety of other, more instrumental models, like the two step of flow theory and diffusion of innovations theory.

Magic bullet theory model
Source: Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955)

The classic example of the application of the Magic Bullet Theory was illustrated on October 30, 1938 when Orson Welles and the newly formed Mercury Theater group broadcasted their radio edition of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds." On the eve of Halloween, radio programming was interrupted with a "news bulletin" for the first time. What the audience heard was that Martians had begun an invasion of Earth in a place called Grover's Mill, New Jersey.

Key publications

Davis, D.K. & Baron, S.J. (1981). A History of Our Understanding of Mass Communication. In: Davis, D.K. & Baron, S.J. (Eds.). Mass Communication and Everyday Life: A Perspective on Theory and Effects (19-52). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.

Golden, L.L. & Alpert, M.I. (1987). Comparative Analysis of the Relative Effectiveness of One- and Two-sided Communication for Contrasting Products. Journal of Advertising, 16(1), 18-25.

Lazarsfeld, P.F., Berelson, B. & Gaudet, H. (1968). The people's choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York: Columbia University Press.

Berger, Arthur Asa Essentials of Mass Communication Theory London: SAGE Publications, 1995.

Casmir, Fred L. Building Communication Theories New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1994.

Croteau, David and William Hoynes Media/Society -- Industries, Images and Audiences London: Pine Forge Press, 1997.

DeFleur, Melvin L. Theories of Mass Communication New York: Longman Inc., 1989

Lowery, Shearon and Melvin L. DeFleur Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects New York: Longman Inc., 1983.

Severin, Werner J. and James W. Tankard, Jr. Communication Theories -- Origins, Methods and Uses New York: Hastings House, 1979.

Watson, James and Anne Hill A Dictionary of Communication and Media Studies New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1997

Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955), Personal Influence, New York: The Free Press.

It became known as the "Panic Broadcast" and changed broadcast history, social psychology, civil defense and set a standard for provocative entertainment. Approximately 12 million people in the United States heard the broadcast and about one million of those actually believed that a serious alien invasion was underway. A wave of mass hysteria disrupted households, interrupted religious services, caused traffic jams and clogged communication systems. People fled their city homes to seek shelter in more rural areas, raided grocery stores and began to ration food. The nation was in a state of chaos, and this broadcast was the cause of it.

Media theorists have classified the "War of the Worlds" broadcast as the archetypal example of the Magic Bullet Theory. This is exactly how the theory worked, by injecting the message directly into the "bloodstream" of the public, attempting to create a uniform thinking. The effects of the broadcast suggested that the media could manipulate a passive and gullible public, leading theorists to believe this was one of the primary ways media authors shaped audience perception.

See also Two-Step Flow Theory
See also Mass Media

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(in Dutch also known as: 'almacht van de media-theorie', stimulus-response, injectienaald, transportband, lont in het kruidvat theorie). History and Orientation The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behavior change.

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If you enjoyed that, here's more from the same source

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If you enjoyed that, here's more from the same source

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Here are more theories from that same university course. You won't need to know all of it for your LL course, but it might give you some idea of why mass communications could even be a university course and whether you might be interested in it.

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This compilation of communication theories has been created in 2003/2004 by members of the

of the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands.

We published the (unchanged list of) theories online for 15 years, until 2019. The website is offline now, but due to a lot of interest in this list of theories we keep the original 2003/2004 collection available for the public in this document. In the past, this theory overview website had 1,5 million (!) visitors a year.

ABOUT THE THEORIES

The theories presented here are related to communication. Students can use these theories as a rich source for a better understanding of the theoretical fieldwork of communication. Choosing a theory for an assignment or report is made easier, since you are able to 'browse' through the different theories. All theories which are selected are used in the courses of communication studies. Stay critical when you use a theory, because theories are subjectively measured. A lot of theories are mentioned below, make your own judgment about which theories are most helpful and think why they are helpful.

The following theories are described in our document:

Adaptive Structuration Theory

Agenda-Setting Theory

Altercasting

Argumenation Theory

Attraction-Selection-Attrition Framework

Attribution Theory

Classical Rhetoric

Cognitive Dissonance theory

Computer Mediated Communication

Contextual Design

Coordinated Management of Meaning

Cultivation Theory

Dependency Theory

Diffusion of Innovations Theory

Domestication

Elaboration Likelihood Model

Expectancy Value Theory

Framing

Gatekeeping

Health Belief Model

Hypodermic Needle Theory

Information Theories

Knowledge Gap

Language Expectancy Theory

Media Richness Theory

Medium Theory

Mental Models

Minimalism

Model of Text Comprehension

Modernization Theory

Network Theory and Analysis

Priming

Protection Motivation Theory

Psycho-Linguistic Theory

Reduces Social Cues Approach

Semiotic Theories

Social Cognitive Theory

Social Identity Model of Deindivuation Effects

Social Presence Theory

Social Support

Speech Act

Spiral of Silence

System Theory

Theory of Planned Behavior/ Reasoned Action

Transactional Model of Stress and Coping

Two Step Flow Theory

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

Uses and Gratifications Approach

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Communication Studies theories: overview by category | University of Twente

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This compilation of communication theories has been created in 2003/2004 by members of the of the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands. We published the (unchanged list of) theories online for 15 years, until 2019.

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Reading the previous article or study notes might have given cause for you to think that. But here's the Britannica explanation or definition of propaganda.

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When was propaganda first used?

Where is propaganda used?

Who was the minister of propaganda for Hitler?

propaganda, dissemination of information-facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies-to influence public opinion. It is often conveyed through mass media.

Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people's beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth). Deliberateness and a relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas. Propagandists have a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve these, they deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda.

Comparatively deliberate selectivity and manipulation also distinguish propaganda from education. Educators try to present various sides of an issue-the grounds for doubting as well as the grounds for believing the statements they make, and the disadvantages as well as the advantages of every conceivable course of action. Education aims to induce reactors to collect and evaluate evidence for themselves and assists them in learning the techniques for doing so. It must be noted, however, that some propagandists may look upon themselves as educators and may believe that they are uttering the purest truth, that they are emphasizing or distorting certain aspects of the truth only to make a valid message more persuasive, or that the courses of action that they recommend are in fact the best actions that the reactor could take. By the same token, the reactor who regards the propagandist's message as self-evident truth may think of it as educational; this often seems to be the case with "true believers"- dogmatic reactors to dogmatic religious, social, or political propaganda. "Education" for one person may be "propaganda" for another.

Propaganda and related concepts

Connotations of the term propaganda

The word propaganda itself, as used in recent centuries, apparently derives from the title and work of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), an organization of Roman Catholic cardinals founded in 1622 to carry on missionary work. To many Roman Catholics the word may therefore have, at least in missionary or ecclesiastical terms, a highly respectable connotation. But even to these persons, and certainly to many others, the term is often a pejorative one tending to connote such things as the discredited atrocity stories and deceptively stated war aims of World Wars I and II, the operations of the Nazis' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the broken campaign promises of a thousand politicians. Also, it is reminiscent of countless instances of false and misleading advertising (especially in countries using Latin languages, in which propagande commerciale or some equivalent is a common term for commercial advertising).

To informed students of the history of communism, the term propaganda has yet another connotation, associated with the term agitation. The two terms were first used by the Russian theorist of Marxism Georgy Plekhanov and later elaborated upon by Vladimir Ilich Lenin in a pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), in which he defined "propaganda" as the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and enlightened (the attentive and informed publics, in the language of today's social sciences); he defined "agitation" as the use of slogans, parables, and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the uneducated and the unreasonable. Since he regarded both strategies as absolutely essential to political victory, he combined them in the term . Every unit of historical communist parties had an agitprop section, and to the communist the use of propaganda in Lenin's sense was commendable and honest. Thus, a standard Soviet manual for teachers of social sciences was entitled Propagandistu politekonomii ( For the Propagandist of Political Economy), and a pocket-sized booklet issued weekly to suggest timely slogans and brief arguments to be used in speeches and conversations among the masses was called Bloknot agitatora ( The Agitator's Notebook).

Related terms

Related to the general sense of propaganda is the concept of "propaganda of the deed." This denotes taking nonsymbolic action (such as economic or coercive action), not for its direct effects but for its possible propagandistic effects. Examples of propaganda of the deed would include staging an atomic "test" or the public torture of a criminal for its presumable deterrent effect on others, or giving foreign "economic aid" primarily to influence the recipient's opinions or actions and without much intention of building up the recipient's economy.

Distinctions are sometimes made between overt propaganda, in which the propagandists and perhaps their backers are made known to the reactors, and covert propaganda, in which the sources are secret or disguised. Covert propaganda might include such things as political advertisements that are unsigned or signed with false names, clandestine radio stations using false names, and statements by editors, politicians, or others who have been secretly bribed by governments, political backers, or business firms. Sophisticated diplomatic negotiation, legal argument, collective bargaining, commercial advertising, and political campaigns are of course quite likely to include considerable amounts of both overt and covert propaganda, accompanied by propaganda of the deed.

Another term related to propaganda is psychological warfare (sometimes abbreviated to psychwar), which is the prewar or wartime use of propaganda directed primarily at confusing or demoralizing enemy populations or troops, putting them off guard in the face of coming attacks, or inducing them to surrender. The related concept of political warfare encompasses the use of propaganda, among many other techniques, during peacetime to intensify social and political divisions and to sow confusion within the societies of adversary states.

Still another related concept is that of brainwashing. The term usually means intensive political indoctrination. It may involve long political lectures or discussions, long compulsory reading assignments, and so forth, sometimes in conjunction with efforts to reduce the reactor's resistance by exhausting him either physically through torture, overwork, or denial of sleep or psychologically through solitary confinement, threats, emotionally disturbing confrontations with interrogators or defected comrades, humiliation in front of fellow citizens, and the like. The term brainwashing was widely used in sensational journalism to refer to such activities (and to many other activities) as they were allegedly conducted by Maoists in China and elsewhere.

Another related word, advertising, has mainly commercial connotations, though it need not be restricted to this; political candidates, party programs, and positions on political issues may be "packaged" and "marketed" by advertising firms. The words promotion and public relations have wider, vaguer connotations and are often used to avoid the implications of "advertising" or "propaganda." "Publicity" and "publicism" often imply merely making a subject known to a public, without educational, propagandistic, or commercial intent.

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Propaganda | Definition, History, Techniques, Examples, & Facts

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Propaganda, dissemination of information-facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies-to influence public opinion. Deliberateness and a relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas. Learn more about propaganda in this article.

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Is it really just a way to persuade people to spend money they don't have on something they don't need?

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BY SOFO ARCHON

"Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need." ~Will Rogers

Advertising is messing up your life, but are you even aware of it?

Most people aren't.

You see, since the day we were born, advertisements have been constantly bombarding us with their messages, so much so that we have accepted them as a normal part of reality. We've been conditioned to believe that there's nothing wrong with them, so we never stop and and take the time to consider how badly they're influencing us. Yet, as you're going to read in this article, the harmful impact of advertising on our well-being is tremendous and we'd better not overlook it.

So what exactly are the main negative effects of advertising on society?

Let's find out...

Advertising makes us feel that we're not good enough as we are.

We have an economic system in which people have to make money in order to survive, no matter how manipulative techniques they use to achieve that - and this can be clearly seen in the advertising industry.

To sell you stuff, advertisements first make you feel like crap. How do they achieve this? By showing you what the ideal life is supposed to be, and then making you compare your ordinary live to it. This way they slowly lead you to believe that you're not beautiful, intelligent, confident, and so on, until they fully convince you that you basically suck. The reason? To make you feel insecure, so that they can then emotionally manipulate you.

Advertising makes us associate happiness with consumerism.

After they've achieved to ruin our self-esteem, advertisements are trying to fool us into thinking that only products and services can make us feel better. In other words, advertisements create a problem, and then offer us a solution to it. What is it? You guessed right: Shopping.

Once they achieve to make you feel ugly, they sell you beauty products so you can improve on your ugliness. Once they manage to make you believe that you are not important, they sell you expensive clothes so you can attract the attention of others. And so on and so forth.

In short, advertisements promise you happiness, provided that you spend money in return. The result? Consuming stuff you don't even need and supporting the production of unnecessary waste that is polluting our planet.

Advertising makes us think that everything we need is for sale.

Another serious ill effect of advertising is that it feeds us with the wrong impression that everything we need can be bought, and hence that money should be our measure of success and prime goal in life.

Without shopping, advertisements tell you that you can't find contentment. Thus, advertisements are fueling your desire to work like a slave, just so you can spend your hard-earned money on things that will ultimately leave you disappointed and dissatisfied.

* * *

As you can see, the bad or negative effects of advertising on society are enormous. The question is: What can we do about it?

Firstly, we need to realize that possessing more stuff than we need won't make us happier. That's because, although material things are necessary for satisfying our basic physical needs, they can't satisfy our emotional thirst for what we deep down long for - "things" such as friendship, love, play and creativity.

Secondly, we need to alter our economic system so that it renders cyclical consumption and growth obsolete. To achieve that, we'll have to move towards a resource-based economy - that is, an economy based on the sustainable use and management of natural resources.

Then, and only then, will we be able to live in alignment with the natural world, as well as stop foolishly running after things that leave us dissatisfied, and instead pursue what truly helps to bring us joy and fulfillment.

"Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it." ~Stephen Leacock

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The Negative Effects of Advertising on Society

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BY SOFO ARCHON "Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need." ~Will Rogers Advertising is messing up your life, but are you even aware of it? Most people aren't.

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Here's a great one from the Advertising Association itself! It's informative and - well - read it for yourself - does it help repair the damaged image of advertising?

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Paul worked for over 30 years at legendary advertising agency BMP, later part of the DDB network, and became one of London's most highly regarded planning directors. He developed global strategic planning tools and training for DDB and helped to found DDB University. He has been convenor of Judges for the IPA Effectiveness Awards, as well as Chair of the APG and AQR. He has Master's degrees from the University of Bath School of Management and Ashridge Business School. He is well known as a speaker and author on many aspects of advertising and brands, most recently publishing The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising in 2015

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How does advertising work? - Advertising Association

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Paul worked for over 30 years at legendary advertising agency BMP, later part of the DDB network, and became one of London's most highly regarded planning directors. He developed global strategic planning tools and training for DDB and helped to found DDB University.

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A little before your time, but this is an artistic response to how technology changes media and way we consume it.

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The Buggles, Video Killed The Radio Star (With Lyrics)

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Here is an interesting piece about social media involving a spoof of current social media trends using a spoof of a Rolling Stone interview (which was an earlier media trend).

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The Egg tells all: how did he end the Kardashian-Jenner's reign?

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The simplicity of Eugene's nude is a stark departure from the contoured, lip-lined selfies that define the Kardashian era, writes Enrique Menendez

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This is a criticism - not only of the latest Ted Bundy movie - but also of the way the media behaved with him during his trial.

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In both the docuseries and the film, Bundy is painted as an artful, handsome, and exceptionally intelligent man; one whom you would never, ever think was capable of bludgeoning women to death and then having sex with their corpses. In the movie's trailer, Efron's Bundy smirks, winks, seductively takes off his shirt, and passionately rips off a woman's blouse.

Bundy's image in 2019 is not much different than what it has been since he was first arrested in in 1975. News media at the time depicted Bundy as charming and charismatic. ( Here's Dan Rather calling Bundy "intelligent" and "articulate" the day before his execution in 1989.) In Conversations with a Killer, PBS correspondent Ed Hula says "the lurid nature of the case, the depravity of the violence, and the personality of Ted Bundy combined to make this something that the media could not ignore." Marlin Lee Vortman, a friend of Bundy who met him when they both worked on the campaign for a Utah Republican gubernatorial candidate said Bundy was "the kind of guy you want your sister to marry." This perception of Bundy as a bewitching Lothario, who was able to hide his evil double-life so well because he was almost supernatural, has been the inspiration for dozens of TV specials, documentaries, and movies; Buffalo Bill, the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs, was based loosely on Bundy's supposed ability to outsmart law enforcement. Positive descriptors like "good-looking," "clean-cut," and, of course, "charming," are used countless times in reference to Bundy throughout Conversations with a Killer.

He was going to show the world that he was the one to be dealt with and it was a lot of blowhard talk. He tried to fool you and lie to you.

But the Ted Bundy of America's consciousness is a myth. Bundy was not special, he was not smarter than the average person; he did not have a personality so alluring that his female victims could not help but simply go off with him. He did not have a superhuman skill to be one step ahead of the police. What Bundy did have was the power of being a white man in a society that reveres them and has implicit faith in their abilities. This privilege gave Bundy the ability to make even the most heinous of crimes take second place to his personality. Bundy isn't even exceptional when compared to other American serial killers. So why is his legacy treated with fascination and twisted admiration rather than condemnation?

In "Handsome Devil," the first episode of Conversations with a Killer, which is based on taped deathrow interviews of Bundy by journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Bundy paints a rosy picture of his own childhood growing up in Tacoma, WA. "First grade I was a somewhat champion frog-catcher," Bundy said. "I mean, I was a frog man." By Bundy's own words he was a normal kid. But, slipped between the macabre praise of Bundy's personality is his childhood friend Sandi Holt's take on who Ted really was: He didn't fit in, he couldn't do anything right, and at one point he was teased for a speech impediment. "In high school, he wanted to be something he wasn't. He was gonna be president," Holt said. "He was going to show the world that he was the one to be dealt with and it was a lot of blowhard talk. He tried to fool you and lie to you. He wasn't athletic. He wanted to be number-one in class but he wasn't." He was listed as "illegitimate" on his birth certificate and there is reason to believe he was abused as a child. From the beginning, he was creating his own mythology.

The docuseries and coverage of Bundy in general selectively frames his credentials and his crimes. That Bundy went to law school is popular knowledge; that he got mediocre scores on his LSATs and eventually stopped going to class altogether is not. Casting heartthrob Zac Efron to play Bundy would make one believe he was a ladies' man, when in reality he had few girlfriends and was dumped by his affluent and successful college sweetheart because he was directionless and insecure. While the docuseries makes note of these facts, they are overshadowed by non-stop dialogue about Bundy's appearance and his alleged hypnotizing effect on those around him. While on trial in Utah for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch (who escaped), Bundy wore nice suits, had his hair coiffed, and playfully bantered with reporters about finishing law school. The media ate it up, but the brave eyewitness testimony of DaRonch canceled out Bundy's lies and he was convicted and sentenced to prison.

The man's a wimp. I mean, people that sneak up on women and kill them - what else can you say?

Although the overarching theme is that he had a magnetic energy, DaRonch recalls feeling creeped out when Bundy approached her in the mall parking lot impersonating a police officer. The way in which Bundy found his victims is somewhat of a footnote in the series and movie because it's a very inconvenient truth: He did not lure women with his wit, but rather tricked them by pretending to have a broken arm or pretending to be law enforcement. He snuck up behind them at night, when there was no one around. He crept into their rooms under the cover of darkness while they were fast asleep, at their most vulnerable. Bundy was able to evade capture for so long simply because in the 1970s when women began disappearing, police departments did not have the DNA technology nor coordination between different jurisdictions to link the crimes to him.

Even the journalists who somewhat enabled Bundy's false narrative had to admit the truth: "The man's a wimp. I mean, people that sneak up on women and kill them - what else can you say?" Hugh Aynesworth, one of the journalists who interviewed Bundy while he was on death row, said on the day of his execution in 1989.

When Bundy was on trial in 1979 for the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy at Florida State University's Chi Omega sorority house, he was allowed to represent himself. Young, white female admirers of Bundy would flock to court each day and reporters would interview them on camera as they gushed about his good looks. As Bundy paced around the courtroom free from handcuffs or shackles, journalists and attendees would laugh at his jokes and shenanigans as if he hadn't been accused of savagely sexually assaulting and bludgeoning two women to death.

Much as his ill-fated law school tenure foreshadowed, Bundy's stint representing himself proved he was hardly a brilliant legal mind. He self-sabotaged, he rambled, he got angry and belligerent, and was held in contempt. But because Bundy, with the help of the media, was seen as just a young man who may have lost his way, he was allowed shocking levels of leeway that were unlikely to be afforded to men of color, particularly those who are Black. The same year Bundy was executed, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latinx young men ranging in age from 14 to 16 years old, who were accused and convicted of raping a white woman in New York City. The teens, who were called "savages" and compared to animals in the press, were later exonerated by DNA evidence.

Judge Edward Cowart, who was presiding over the trial, toured Bundy's cell and ordered he be moved to a different one after a petulant Bundy complained of not having enough light to read. The judge would often refer to Bundy, who was then 33 years old, as "young man" and "partner." To watch footage of the trial is to see in action the infantilization of Bundy in front of America despite his monstrous acts, simply because he was white and conventionally attractive to the dominant culture at the time, while Black men and women accused of crimes are sexualized and made into violent caricatures as a default.

"It's a tragedy to see such a total waste, I think, of humanity that I have experienced in this court. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer," Judge Cowart said as he sentenced Bundy to death by electric chair. "I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't have any animosity to you, I want you to know that."

And therein lies the crux of the Bundy myth: Even when convicted of the most depraved crimes, a white man's supposed potential will supersede reality. From the time he was first arrested, to when he was strapped to the electric chair, to present day when he is being romanticized into some machiavellian Romeo, Ted Bundy was given the benefit of the doubt.

When police bag a serial killer, he is usually a weak man, cowardly, not terribly savvy, and a failure at most everything he's ever done in life.

We don't need Ted Bundy to be reminded of the white male privilege so embedded in American society. We see it when white men are given lenient sentences for rape and manslaughter because they have promising futures or because they were raised with such affluence, people think they shouldn't be held responsible for their actions. We see it when dozens of people are shot dead in churches, schools, and newsrooms and lawmakers take no meaningful action because the perpetrator isn't Brown or from the Middle East. We see it when women are targeted because they left an abusive relationship or turned down a man's advances and it barely makes a blip in the 24/7 news cycle. We see it when Ted Bundy's name is cemented in pop culture but his victims remain supporting acts in his story.

Ted Bundy should not only be left in the past, the story of who he really was needs to be accurately rewritten. Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach wrote in 1991, "The imaginary serial killer is a powerful creature, brilliant at his craft, an implacable death machine. He's like a shark, driven not by mindless hunger but by an elaborate malevolence - evil, if you will."

He continued: "Real life is not so gothic. When police bag a serial killer, he is usually a weak man, cowardly, not terribly savvy, and a failure at most everything he's ever done in life. He's a loser." In 2019, it's time to undo Bundy's delusions of grandeur and remember him as he should be: as a gutless creep who could only feel power by preying on the vulnerable.

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Ted Bundy Wasn't Special Or Smart. He Was Just White.

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In both the docuseries and the film, Bundy is painted as an artful, handsome, and exceptionally intelligent man; one whom you would never, ever think was capable of bludgeoning women to death and then having sex with their corpses. In the movie's trailer, Efron's Bundy smirks, winks, seductively takes off his shirt, and passionately rips off a woman's blouse.

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This is a paper you will write during examinations. It's an 'unseen'. You won't know the text you will be given to analyse. It could be an ad, a photo, a non-fiction text... anything. It's worth 20 marks, but carries a 25% weight. As SL students, you have all of 1 hour and 30 minutes to get it done. Here's an idealised answer (with explanations in blue and key information in red) so you have some idea of what the target looks like.

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Sample response to exercise on Apple ad for The Silent History

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The '1' here can be misleading. It does not indicate which of the many Written Tasks you will be writing. It is a TYPE of Written Task and is based only on Parts 1 and 2 of the course. For SL students, ALL your Written Tasks will be Type 1.

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Written Task 1 How Part 1 and Part 2 rationales might look

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What is a close reading? How close should you get?

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What is a close reading? How close should you get?

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I wrote the attached 'close reading' as an example for Sec 3 students. You may not be able to cram so much into the 10 minutes of an IOC or even have time to write all that in the time given. But the piece tracks what I was thinking as I looked at the poem. See if it helps you in your IOC preparations or your reading of Duffy.

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an afternoon nap by Arthur Yap line by line

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Here is a way you could have dealt with The Veil in the Paper 1 test we had last week. Use it as a guide if you'd like to write an essay for pra

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Here's how you can start thinking about graphic novels!

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Here's how you can start thinking about graphic novels!

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Imagine - you can now read COMICS for exams. This little guide from Penguin introduces you to the basics.

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An Even Shorter Introduction to Graphic Novels

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An Even Shorter Introduction to Graphic Novels

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Right - if you want a really short version, try this.

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Something for the truly advanced reader of comics - sorry - graphic novels

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Something for the truly advanced reader of comics - sorry - graphic novels

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Here is proof that graphic novels are taken seriously! Academics write about them in serious journals! (Examine the two claims I've just made and apply your understanding of text types to them.)

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Exploring Literry Devices in Graphic Novels

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But before we do, we'll need to do a mock and then the actual test itself. Just one chance and Duffy and Othello are in your rear-view mirror. Here are some general pointers for IOC to begin with.

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Soon after I began Primary 1, my mother claimed my English had gone down the toilet. Fer shure, I've become potty-mouthed since but as y'all knows ah still talks good. Read on.

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The 21st century seems to present us with an ever-lengthening list of perils: climate crisis, financial meltdown, cyber-attacks. Should we stock up on canned foods in case the ATMs snap shut? Buy a shedload of bottled water? Hoard prescription medicines? The prospect of everything that makes modern life possible being taken away from us is terrifying. We would be plunged back into the middle ages, but without the skills to cope.

Now imagine that something even more fundamental than electricity or money is at risk: a tool we have relied on since the dawn of human history, enabling the very foundations of civilisation to be laid. I'm talking about our ability to communicate - to put our thoughts into words, and to use those words to forge bonds, to deliver vital information, to learn from our mistakes and build on the work done by others.

The doomsayers admit that this apocalypse may take some time - years, or decades, even - to unfold. But the direction of travel is clear. As things stand, it is left to a few heroic individuals to raise their voices in warning about the dangers of doing nothing to stave off this threat. "There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak. They are using slang words and ignoring grammar," Marie Clair, of the Plain English Campaign, told the Daily Mail. "Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation."

The Queen's English Society, a British organisation, has long been fighting to prevent this decline. Although it is at pains to point out that it does not believe language can be preserved unchanged, it worries that communication is at risk of becoming far less effective. "Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning," the society says on its website.

With a reduced expressive capacity, it seems likely that research, innovation and the quality of public discourse would suffer. The columnist Douglas Rushkoff put it like this in a 2013 New York Times opinion piece: "Without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing."

At the same time, our laziness and imprecision are leading to unnecessary bloating of the language - "language obesity," as the British broadcaster John Humphrys has described it. This is, he said, "the consequence of feeding on junk words. Tautology is the equivalent of having chips with rice. We talk of future plans and past history; of live survivors and safe havens. Children have temper tantrums and politicians announce 'new initiatives'."

It is frightening to think where all this might lead. If English is in such a bad state now, what will things be like in a generation's time? We must surely act before it is too late.

ut there is something perplexing about claims like this. By their nature, they imply that we were smarter and more precise in the past. Seventy-odd years ago, people knew their grammar and knew how to talk clearly. And, if we follow the logic, they must also have been better at organising, finding things out and making things work.

John Humphrys was born in 1943. Since then, the English-speaking world has grown more prosperous, better educated and more efficiently governed, despite an increase in population. Most democratic freedoms have been preserved and intellectual achievement intensified.

Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up. Perhaps this is why, even though the idea that language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing much has been done to mitigate it: it's a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply never materialised. That is because it is unscientific nonsense.

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven't learned about the history of the language, and don't understand the nature of their own complaints - which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to. The erosion of language to the point that "ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts" (Humphrys again) will not, cannot, happen. The clearest evidence for this is that warnings about the deterioration of English have been around for a very long time.

In 1785, a few years after the first volume of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published, things were so bad that the poet and philosopher James Beattie declared: "Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast." Some 70 years before that, Jonathan Swift had issued a similar warning. In a letter to Robert, Earl of Oxford, he complained: "From the Civil War to this present Time, I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions in our Language have not at least equalled the Refinements of it ... most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse?"

Swift would presumably have thought The History of the Decline and Fall, revered as a masterpiece today, was a bit of a mess. He knew when the golden age of English was: "The Period wherein the English Tongue received most Improvement, I take to commence with the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's Reign, and to conclude with the Great Rebellion in [Sixteen] Forty Two."

But the problem is that writers at that time also felt they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue. In The Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, the critic George Puttenham fretted about the importation of new, foreign words - "strange terms of other languages ... and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding, though they be daily spoken in Court." That was halfway through Swift's golden age. Just before it, in the reign of Elizabeth's sister, Mary, the Cambridge professor John Cheke wrote with anxiety that "Our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues."

This concern for purity - and the need to take a stand against a rising tide of corruption - goes back even further. In the 14th century, Ranulf Higden complained about the state English was in. His words, quoted in David Crystal's The Stories of English, were translated from the Latin by a near-contemporary, John Trevisa: "By intermingling and mixing, first with Danes and afterwards with Normans, in many people the language of the land is harmed, and some use strange inarticulate utterance, chattering, snarling, and harsh teeth-gnashing."

That's five writers, across a span of 400 years, all moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet the period also encompasses some of the greatest works of English literature.

It's worth pausing here to take a closer look at Trevisa's translation, for the sentence I've reproduced is a version in modern English. The original is as follows: "By commyxstion and mellyng furst wiþ danes and afterward wiþ Normans in menye þe contray longage ys apeyred, and som vseþ strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harrying and garryng, grisbittyng."

For those who worry about language deteriorating, proper usage is best exemplified by the speech and writing of a generation or so before their own. The logical conclusion is that the generation or two before that would be even better, the one before that even more so. As a result, we should find Trevisa's language vastly more refined, more correct, more clear and more effective. The problem is, we can't even read it.

Hand-wringing about standards is not restricted to English. The fate of every language in the world has been lamented by its speakers at some point or another. In the 13th century, the Arabic lexicographer Ibn Manzur described himself as a linguistic Noah - ushering words into a protective ark in order that they might survive the onslaught of laziness. Elias Muhanna, a professor of comparative literature, describes one of Manzur's modern-day counterparts: "Fi'l Amr, a language-advocacy group [in Lebanon], has launched a campaign to raise awareness about Arabic's critical condition by staging mock crime scenes around Beirut depicting "murdered" Arabic letters, surrounded by yellow police tape that reads: 'Don't kill your language.'"

The linguist Rudi Keller gives similar examples from Germany. "Hardly a week goes by," he writes, "in which some reader of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung doesn't write a letter to the editor expressing fear for the future of the German language." As Keller puts it: "For more than 2,000 years, complaints about the decay of respective languages have been documented in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an example of a 'decayed language'." He has a point.

The hard truth is that English, like all other languages, is constantly evolving. It is the speed of the change, within our own short lives, that creates the illusion of decline. Because change is often generational, older speakers recognise that the norms they grew up with are falling away, replaced with new ones they are not as comfortable using. This cognitive difficulty doesn't feel good, and the bad feelings are translated into criticism and complaint. We tend to find intellectual justifications for our personal preferences, whatever their motivation. If we lived for hundreds of years, we would be able to see the bigger picture. Because when you zoom out, you can appreciate that language change is not just a question of slovenliness: it happens at every level, from the superficial to the structural.

Any given language is significantly reconfigured over the centuries, to the extent that it becomes totally unrecognisable. But, as with complex systems in the natural world, there is often a kind of homeostasis: simplification in one area can lead to greater complexity in another. What stays the same is the expressive capacity of the language. You can always say what needs to be said.

requently, these changes are unexpected and revealing. They shed light on the workings of our minds, mouths and culture. One common driver of linguistic change is a process called reanalysis. This can happen when a language is learned for the first time, when babies begin to talk and construe what they hear slightly differently from their parents. In the abstract, it sounds complex but, in fact, it is straightforward: when a word or sentence has a structural ambiguity, what we hear could be an instance of A, but it could also be an instance of B. For years, A has held sway, but suddenly B catches on - and changes flow from that new understanding.

Take the words adder, apron and umpire. They were originally "nadder", "napron" and "numpire". Numpire was a borrowing from the French non per - "not even" - and described someone who decided on tie-breaks in games. Given that numpire and those other words were nouns, they often found themselves next to an indefinite article - a or an - or the first-person possessive pronoun, mine. Phrases such as "a numpire" and "mine napron" were relatively common, and at some point - perhaps at the interface between two generations - the first letter came to be seen as part of the preceding word. The prerequisite for reanalysis is that communication is not seriously impaired: the reinterpretation takes place at the level of the underlying structure. A young person would be able to say "where's mine apron?" and be understood, but they would then go on to produce phrases such as "her apron" rather than "her napron", which older folk presumably regarded as idiotic.

Another form that linguistic change often takes is grammaticalisation: a process in which a common phrase is bleached of its independent meaning and made into a word with a solely grammatical function. One instance of this is the verb "to go", when used for an action in the near future or an intention. There is a clue to its special status in the way we have started saying it. We all inherit an evolutionarily sensible tendency to expend only the minimum effort needed to complete a task. For that reason, once a word has become a grammatical marker, rather than something that carries a concrete meaning, you do not need it to be fully fleshed out. It becomes phonetically reduced - or, as some would have it, pronounced lazily. That is why "I'm going to" becomes "I'm gonna", or even, in some dialects, "Imma". But this change in pronunciation is only evident when "going to" is grammatical, not when it is a verb describing real movement. That is why you can say "I'm gonna study history" but not "I'm gonna the shops". In the first sentence, all "I'm going to"/"I'm gonna" tells you is that the action (study history) is something you intend to do. In the second one, the same verb is not simply a marker of intention, it indicates movement. You cannot therefore swap it for another tense ("I will study history" v "I will the shops").
Inside the OED: can the world's biggest dictionary survive the internet?
"Will", the standard future tense in English, has its own history of grammaticalisation. It once indicated desire and intention. "I will" meant "I want". We can still detect this original English meaning in phrases such as "If you will" (if you want/desire). Since desires are hopes for the future, this very common verb gradually came to be seen simply as a future marker. It lost its full meaning, becoming merely a grammatical particle. As a result, it also gets phonetically reduced, as in "I'll", "she'll" and so on.

Human anatomy makes some changes to language more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound (m or n) to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in between. Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see the same process happening now with words such as "hamster", which is often pronounced with an intruding "p". Linguists call this epenthesis. It may sound like a disease, but it is definitely not pathological laziness - it's the laws of physics at work. If you stop channelling air through the nose before opening your lips for the "s", they will burst apart with a characteristic pop, giving us our "p".

The way our brain divides up words also drives change. We split them into phonemes (building blocks of sound that have special perceptual significance) and syllables (groups of phonemes). Sometimes these jump out of place, a bit like the tightly packed lines in a Bridget Riley painting. Occasionally, such cognitive hiccups become the norm. Wasp used to be "waps"; bird used to be "brid" and horse "hros". Remember this the next time you hear someone "aks" for their "perscription". What's going on there is metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.

Sound changes can come about as a result of social pressures: certain ways of saying things are seen as having prestige, while others are stigmatised. We gravitate towards the prestigious, and make efforts to avoid saying things in a way that is associated with undesirable qualities - often just below the level of consciousness. Some forms that become wildly popular, such as Kim Kardashian's vocal fry, although prestigious for some, are derided by others. One study found that "young adult female voices exhibiting vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive and less hireable".

All this is merely a glimpse of the richness of language change. It is universal, it is constant, and it throws up extraordinary quirks and idiosyncrasies, despite being governed by a range of more-or-less regular processes. Anyone who wants to preserve some aspect of language that appears to be changing is fighting a losing battle. Anyone who wishes people would just speak according to the norms they had drummed into them when they were growing up may as well forget about it. But what about those, such as the Queen's English Society, who say they merely want to ensure that clear and effective communication is preserved; to encourage good change, where they find it, and discourage bad change?

The problem arises when deciding what might be good or bad. There are, despite what many people feel, no objective criteria by which to judge what is better or worse in communication. Take the loss of so-called major distinctions in meaning bemoaned by the Queen's English Society. The word "disinterested", which can be glossed "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage", is a good example. Whenever I hear it nowadays, it is being used instead to mean "uninterested, lacking in interest". That's a shame, you could argue: disinterest is a useful concept, a way (hopefully) to talk about public servants and judges. If the distinction is being lost, won't that harm our ability to communicate? Except that, of course, there are many other ways to say disinterested: unbiased, impartial, neutral, having no skin in the game, without an axe to grind. If this word disappeared tomorrow, we would be no less able to describe probity and even-handedness in public life. Not only that, but if most people don't use it properly, then the word itself has become ineffective. Words cannot really be said to have an existence beyond their common use. There is no perfect dictionary in the sky with meanings that are consistent and clearly defined: real-world dictionaries are constantly trying to catch up with the "common definition" of a word.

But here's the clincher: disinterested, as in "not interested", has actually been around for a long time. The blogger Jonathon Owen cites the Oxford English dictionary as providing evidence that "both meanings have existed side by side from the 1600s. So there's not so much a present confusion of the two words as a continuing, three-and-a-half-century-long confusion."

o what is it that drives the language conservationists? Younger people tend to be the ones who innovate in all aspects of life: fashion, music, art. Language is no different. Children are often the agents of reanalysis, reinterpreting ambiguous structures as they learn the language. Young people move about more, taking innovations with them into new communities. Their social networks are larger and more dynamic. They are more likely to be early adopters of new technology, becoming familiar with the terms used to describe them. At school, on campus or in clubs and pubs, groups develop habits, individuals move between them, and language change is the result.

What this means, crucially, is that older people experience greater linguistic disorientation. Though we are all capable of adaptation, many aspects of the way we use language, including stylistic preferences, have solidified by our 20s. If you are in your 50s, you may identify with many aspects of the way people spoke 30-45 years ago.

This is what the author Douglas Adams had to say about technology. Adapted slightly, it could apply to language, too:

- Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary.
- Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.

Based on that timescale, formal, standard language is about 25 years behind the cutting edge. But if change is constant, why do we end up with a standard language at all? Well, think about the institutions that define standard language: universities, newspapers, broadcasters, the literary establishment. They are mostly controlled by middle-aged people. Their dialect is the dialect of power - and it means that everything else gets assigned a lower status. Deviations might be labelled cool, or creative, but because people generally fear or feel threatened by changes they do not understand, they are more likely to be called bad, lazy or even dangerous. This is where the "standards are slipping" narrative moves into more unpleasant territory. It's probably OK to deviate from the norm if you are young - as long as you are also white and middle-class. If you are from a group with fewer social advantages, even the forms that your parents use are likely to be stigmatised. Your innovations will be doubly condemned.

The irony is, of course, that the pedants are the ones making the mistakes. To people who know how language works, pundits such as Douglas Rushkoff only end up sounding ignorant, having failed to really interrogate their views. What they are expressing are stylistic preferences - and that's fine. I have my own, and can easily say "I hate the way this is written", or even "this is badly written". But that is shorthand: what is left off is "in my view" or "according to my stylistic preferences and prejudices, based on what I have been exposed to up to now, and particularly between the ages of five and 25".
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
Mostly, pedants do not admit this. I know, because I have had plenty of arguments with them. They like to maintain that their prejudices are somehow objective - that there are clear instances of language getting "less good" in a way that can be independently verified. But, as we have seen, that is what pedants have said throughout history. George Orwell, a towering figure in politics, journalism and literature, was clearly wrong when he imagined that language would become decadent and "share in the general collapse" of civilisation unless hard work was done to repair it. Maybe it was only conscious and deliberate effort to arrest language change that was responsible for all the great poetry and rhetoric in the generation that followed him - the speeches " I have a dream " and "We choose to go to the moon", the poetry of Seamus Heaney or Sylvia Plath, the novels of William Golding, Iris Murdoch, John Updike and Toni Morrison. More likely, Orwell was just mistaken.

The same is true of James Beattie, Jonathan Swift, George Puttenham, John Cheke and Ranulf Higden. The difference is that they didn't have the benefit of evidence about the way language changes over time, unearthed by linguists from the 19th century onwards. Modern pedants don't have that excuse. If they are so concerned about language, you have to wonder, why haven't they bothered to get to know it a little better?

* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Adapted from Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language by David Shariatmadari, published by W&N on 22 August and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk. Also available as an unabridged audio edition from Orion Audio Topics

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Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

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The 21st century seems to present us with an ever-lengthening list of perils: climate crisis, financial meltdown, cyber-attacks. Should we stock up on canned foods in case the ATMs snap shut? Buy a shedload of bottled water? Hoard prescription medicines? The prospect of everything that makes modern life possible being taken away from us is terrifying.

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The World's Wife: Crash Course on the Myths, History and Pop Culture

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The World's Wife: Crash Course on the Myths, History and Pop Culture

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Here's a quick recap of all the links to stories past just in case you have not been a model student.

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Here is a list of military slang terms specific to US services. What you want to note is how POETIC some of these phrases are. There's rhyme, assonance, alliteration, metaphor... Enjoy.

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Every region of the US has its own unique phrases, but they have nothing on the complex lexicon shared by people in the military.

Our service members already set themselves apart by speaking in acronyms like, "I was on the FOB when the IDF hit, so I radioed the TOC." Aside from their acronyms, members of the military also have their own special phrases that caught our attention.
"15 minutes prior to 15 minutes prior"
Military people learn to show up to everything (especially an official formation) at least 15 minutes early.

The phrase "15 minutes prior to 15 minutes prior" comes from the expectation that you arrive 15 minutes earlier than the person in the next rank. The captain wants everyone to meet at 0600, so the master sergeant wants folks to arrive at 0545, and when it finally hits the corporal, people are told to show up at midnight.
"A good piece of gear" (in reference to people)
Only in the service is it acceptable to refer to one of your coworkers or (more frequently) a person working for you as "a good piece of gear."
"Back on the block"
This refers to the time before service, when a servicemember was a "nasty" civilian. (Nasty in the military generally means unkempt.)

Often used in reference to meeting old friends while on leave, as in a military member is "back on the block," or acting like a civilian.
"Birth Control Glasses"
Military-issued eyeglasses known for their lack of aesthetic appeal. "Birth control glasses" are considered ugly enough to function as contraceptives.
"Blues buddies"
Blues are the name for the dress uniform for the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and occasionally the Navy dress and Winter Blue uniforms. Two personnel who frequently leave base together while dressed in their blues as known as "blues buddies."
"Blue falcon"
Slang for "Buddy F--."

A Blue Falcon is someone who blatantly throws another Marine/soldier/sailor/airman under the bus.
"Breaking it down Barney-style"
Refers to the kid show "Barney and Friends." When something is broken down "Barney-style," it's being explained as if to a child.
"Chair Force"
An Air Force-specific term for personnel who never fly planes, but instead spend their time "flying a desk." Those in the "Chair Force" do office work.
"Check six"
An Air Force term for "watch out behind you" based on looking for enemy aircraft or missiles to the rear at the 6 0-clock position. "Check six" is also used in bars or other crowded areas to discretely tell a friend to check out someone behind them.
"Civvies"
Any off-duty military clothes a normal civilian would wear on the street.
"Days and a wake-up"
A "wake-up" refers to the last day you will be some place (generally while deployed). So, if a servicemember is getting ready for bed on a Sunday, and flying out on a Friday, he'll say "four days and a wake-up."
"Double digit midget"
"Double digit midgets" are service members with fewer than 100, but more than nine, days until their enlistment ends. A "double digit midget" could also refer to someone who is close to rotating out of a combat area.
A "drug deal"
When personnel or materiel are obtained through unofficial channels.

Military service isn't all fun. In fact, it mostly sucks.

For every five seconds of hanging out of a helicopter, there are countless eternities of safety briefs and mundane tasks (picking up cigarette butts, buffing floors, toilets, etc.). And then there is the unpleasantness of the ever-present rank structure.

Troops are encouraged to embrace this sad reality.
"Field strip"
Literally refers to taking apart weapons to the extent authorised for routine cleaning, lubrication, and minor repairs while in "the field."

Field stripping can also be used informally to describe taking apart anything.

If a Humvee becomes stuck or broken outside of base, troops will field strip it of anything classified or of value before leaving it behind.

If you park your car in a bad part of town, it may be on cinder blocks by the next morning, completely field stripped.
"Fobbit"
A "Fobbit" is a slightly derogatory term for a soldier who never patrols outside of the relative safety of a forward operating base (FOB). The term is a combination of the words FOB and Hobbit.
"Full battle-rattle"
This phrase refers to the gear servicemen and women must carry outside the wire. Generally: flak jacket with protective plates, Kevlar, 180 rounds of ammunition, water, rations, rifle.

It's called "battle rattle" because - unless we're talking about Navy SEALs - walking with all this stuff usually makes noise.
"Gear adrift, is a gift"
It's your own fault if you left something unattended and it went missing.

Conversely, someone who takes unattended gear has not stolen it; they have "tactically acquired" it. Needless to say, if they get caught, it's still larceny under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Tactical acquisition is taught in boot camp, where recruits from one platoon will prey on another possibly less-aware platoon in order to get supplies and bragging rights.
"Good initiative, bad judgement"
This phrase applies when somebody steps up to solve a problem but doesn't use the best solution.

Generally, this action shows "good initiative" because the problem might have been above the pay grade of person trying to solve it.
"Grunt by association"
A compliment: Someone who has worked on a daily basis with the infantry but isn't officially a grunt. Often said of artillerymen or drivers.
"High speed, low drag"
Literally a reference to aerodynamics, but often used figuratively to describe pairs of sunglasses, cars, or just about any piece of "gear."
"Lance corporal underground"
Another Marine Corps-specific phrase. Refers to the somewhat ill-informed, ubiquitous network of junior Marines. Word seems to spread around this network like viral content and largely reflects junior personnel's real feelings about a subject, course of action, or senior leader.
"Make a hole"
"Make a hole" is the preferred method to tell a group of people to get out of your way.
"Mandatory Fun" or "Mandofun"
Mandatory office dinner parties or get-togethers.
"No impact, no idea"
This phrase is used if a shooter on the range is so far off target that spotters don't see an impact. Used loosely to mean the speaker doesn't understand an idea, or that someone is totally clueless.

Similar to "high and off to the right," which is the military equivalent of "out of left field" - a personality type gone crazy, or an idea that no one saw coming.
"Nut to Butt"
Very literally, put your nuts on the butt in front of you - said specifically when space is tight or when a situation dictates close proximity of many bodies.
"Police call"
A police call is when an entire unit lines up and walks across a certain area looking for trash.

"Policing," on the other hand, is when a unit internally checks the behaviour of its members, or when people are ordered to take care of their own outward deficiencies (i.e. " Police that mustache! ")
"Pop smoke"
Refers directly to when troops use smoke to signal an incoming helicopter.

In vernacular, it means to "leave in a hurry."
"PowerPoint Ranger"
Like a member of the Chair Force, a "PowerPoint ranger" is a service member tasked primarily with creating PowerPoints for briefings. "PowerPoint rangers" can also be notorious for creating overly complicated briefs that feature too many animations or sound effects.
"Pucker factor"
Refers to the anus and a frightening situation.
"Rainbow PT gear"
Rainbow means the unit wears whatever sporty gear they want to wear to do "physical training."
"Secret squirrel"
Intelligence personnel, secret communications, classified ops, or someone with higher classification.
"Semper I, (F- the other guy)"
Marine Corps-specific terminology. Adapted from the phrase Semper Fidelis, the service's motto, which means Always Faithful.

"Semper I" is generally evoked when a Marine is perceived to have taken a course of action that adversely affects a fellow Marine while benefiting the original Marine.
"S- Hot"
Something that is really awesome, hardcore, or tactically skilled. For example, you can be "s- hot" at your job. An operation that was carried out well would also be "s- hot."
"Smoking and joking"
Being unproductive, horsing around, or literally smoking and joking.
"Sniper check"
Giving a salute to an officer in the field. Salutes given to an officer are normally prohibited in the field since they would identify an officer to an enemy, making the officer the possible target of a sniper.
"Soup sandwich" or a "S- sandwich"
A person or situation that is incredibly screwed up. If it's a situation, often "everyone has to take a bite" of said soup sandwich.
"Standby to standby" and "hurry up and wait"
Believe it or not, the military is government, and government isn't always efficient.

"Standby" is a "preparatory command." Usually the order to standby alerts a unit that it will receive some kind of marching orders - "standby to launch."

Unofficially, it's used to tell junior members to be ready and wait. Often, troops find themselves waiting for long periods of time due to logistics or command indecisiveness.

Said sarcastically, "standby to standby" means that a unit is waiting to wait some more.

"Hurry up and wait," also said sarcastically, pokes fun at the military's propensity to perform tasks quickly, and then sit idly for long periods of time.
"Squared away" (or "locked on" or "a hard charger")
When service people say someone is squared away, it's generally a compliment that indicates exemplary, above-average service.

On the flip side, when someone is "unsat," they have performed some action or are themselves well below the required standards.
"Voluntarily Told, Voluntold"
There are two different kinds of voluntold:

A. The gunny walks into the office and says, "Man, wouldn't the floor look nice if somebody buffed it?" Which means,"Buff the floor."

B. "I need two volunteers to stand out in front of Best Buy this Saturday collecting Toys for Tots."

" ... "

"Jones, Smith, you're collecting Toys for Tots this weekend."
"Zero Dark Thirty"
Until the movie came around people largely didn't know what "Zero Dark Thirty" meant. Specifically, it refers to the 24-hour time 0030, or 12:30 a.m.

At times it's used loosely to mean "really early."

"Zero Stupid Thirty" is used to deride formations deemed unnecessarily early.
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41 Phrases Only People In The Military Will Understand

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Every region of the US has its own unique phrases, but they have nothing on the complex lexicon shared by people in the military. Our service members already set themselves apart by speaking in acronyms like, "I was on the FOB when the IDF hit, so I radioed the TOC."

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A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. If you can, watch the movie starring Marlon Brando - heart-throb of your grandmas.

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Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman. Hey - it scored 86% on Rotten Tomatoes as a movie. Have a look at that if you can. Here's an early (1993) review of a performance.

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DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Freud said that an unfinished task is never forgotten. And if that task is justice, it can't be: there's no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity. Yet whenever democracy replaces despotism, as it has in Spain, Argentina, and South Africa, good souls invariably argue the need to forget, to put the past behind them--to forgive rather than seek vengeance, and offer amnesty to those corrupted by too much power.

But such forgiveness assumes a moral eminence verging on arrogance. Who, besides God and the silenced victims, can forgive the horrors of the Holocaust? Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman asks a similar question: Who can pardon the Pinochet junta, a dictatorship that from 1973 to 1990 inflicted torture and worse on thousands of innocents? And whether the patriotic assassins are pardoned or punished, how can we ensure that their evil won't infect the future?

In his 1991 play Death and the Maiden Dorfman attempts to dramatize the dilemma that faces Chile--or any country that wants to bury a murderous past without forgetting the unforgivable. As he asks, not at all rhetorically, in the play's afterword, "How can those who tortured and those who were tortured co-exist in the same land?" And Dorfman suggests that an implacable hatred may be as terrible as any pragmatic, guilt-ridden forgiveness.

Death and the Maiden depicts one woman's personal quest for justice. It's set in the home of Gerardo Escobar, a rising official in Chile's newly restored democracy, and his wife Paulina Salas, a former political prisoner and the victim of rape and torture during the recent dictatorship. A liberal crusader and well-intentioned social engineer, Gerardo has been named to a commission to investigate the abuses of the previous regime; he hopes that the commission will mete out some kind of "moral sanction"--without, of course, triggering a backlash from the ever-lethal army. But in this microcosm of a divided nation Paulina is living proof that serious abuses happened, and in her unhealed heart they continue to happen.

Late one night Paulina overhears her husband talking to someone whose voice she has not forgotten--Dr. Roberto Miranda, the creature who raped and tortured her while playing, as an indication of his culture, Schubert's sweet quartet "Death and the Maiden." Like the rape victim in William Mastrosimone's Extremities, she takes a calculated revenge, assaulting the man and tying him up on a chair, in the same position in which she was interrogated 18 years before.

If at first we don't know whether Paulina's suspicions are correct, it's because criminals against humanity, unlike their victims, don't wear identifying brands. Paulina at first seems the classic paranoiac, then a modern Fury. She can cleanse her world only by eliminating the man who sought to destroy it; repudiating amnesty for him, she demands not just confession but repentance. To get it she'll conduct her own trial. But she'll give Roberto more due process than she got: Gerardo will serve as Roberto's defense counsel.

Caught between them, Gerardo fears that Paulina has sunk to the level of her enemy, that her vigilantism (or, as he puts it belittlingly, her "therapy") may destroy his chance to remedy the abuses, and that her example will stir the fascists to a counterrevolution. For him reason is paramount, a private revenge cannot serve the public good, and his wife's absolutist passion is--well, unseemly. In one pungent (if characteristically misogynistic) remark, trying to excuse Paulina as a "silly girl," Gerardo unwittingly indicts an entire nation's acceptance of tyranny: "When crazy people have power you have to indulge them."

Throughout the play Roberto's guilt remains a tantalizing mystery--which means that it's the audience, not Paulina, who must convict him. Artfully Dorfman makes us wonder how much of what Roberto confesses is the result of coaching by Gerardo (who heard about the events from Paulina). But in the end his guilt doesn't matter: the innocence of everyone who lived during the tyranny is conditional. And when Roberto says his worst punishment is his conscience, you have to wonder if that's enough: the 20th century has been one long saga of moral malleability.

Given the combustibility of the crisis Dorfman depicts, it's amazing how often he manages to avoid the conflicts we anticipate. Rare moments of genuine confrontation, as when Paulina mocks her enemy's misogynist curses, are more than balanced by exchanges that dilute rather than feed tension, as when Paulina gets angry at Gerardo's infidelity when she was a prisoner.

But then Death and the Maiden is a schematic, careful work, a sort of illustrated lecture. For all its gun-wielding sensationalism and gallows humor, the playwright's intention is to talk an ugly, intractable subject into seeming submission. Typically evasive is the cynical ending, which suggests that Paulina's vigilantism has damaged neither her husband's career nor Roberto's reputation. There are even moments when Death seems a surreal sitcom, as it spoofs Paulina's crazy-lady excesses as if she were Lucille Ball toting some magnum force.

A similar unevenness hobbles Randall Arney's staging, a Steppenwolf Theatre Company midwest premiere. Like the script, it never quite ignites. John Mahoney plays Roberto as yet another example of the banality of evil, a beaten man whose protestations of innocence seem one more shameless ruse; his resignation siphons off tension from the play's few clashes. Gary Cole gives the mediator Gerardo dignity and even desperation. Still, the character hardly seems crucial--he's supposed to put out fires but none have been kindled.

Rondi Reed suffers most from the combination of an unfocused play and a less than urgent production. Her Paulina seems to have put the pain behind her just a bit too soon--her revenge has the flavor of business as usual, as if she's somehow gotten used to it. Paulina must show us something more contagious, like a gleeful triumph at turning the tables or at righting an old wrong. Reed's vengeance seems steeped in abstraction, unsettled in its intent--it's too easy to see her actions as an actor's exercise.

In this dutiful revival of a decent but inert script Steppenwolf once again offers a production that seems far more radical at first sight than it really is.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.

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DEATH AND THE MAIDEN Steppenwolf Theatre Company Freud said that an unfinished task is never forgotten. And if that task is justice, it can't be: there's no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.

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There are many interesting questions the play raises - and here, the reviewer helps you by listing them.

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Death And The Maiden movie review (1995) | Roger Ebert

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It is a dark and stormy night. In an isolated house on a deserted landscape, a woman waits alone. The opening moments of "Death and the Maiden" are so intriguing that almost any continuation would be a disappointment - but movies have to be about something, and so slowly the purity of the situation settles down into the business of the plot.

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News photographers continued shooting as Hong Kong protestors beat up a driver for demanding that they to let him through the cross harbour tunnel that they had blocked. They continued shooting as the protestors smashed up their victim's van - even though he begged them not to as it was his livelihood. Were they ethically bound to avoid interfering or ethically bound to help the victim? And did their presence encourage the violence?

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'Conventions' - this simply means stuff that are the norm in an activity - in this case, the usual theatrical methods in Elizabethan theatre (that's Shakespeare's time).

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But what if it is not Elizabethan? Here are some common norms you should be aware of especially if watching plays is your thing!

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Here's an article that looks at the serious side of being an Instagram Husband or Boyfriend. Note also the reference to the humour video that went viral a couple of years back.

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The men behind the camera are ready to step into the spotlight.

Shutterstock

Earlier this week, Chrissy Teigen posted a video on Instagram of herself posing artfully on the beach while her husband captured an endless stream of photos, including multiple angles and poses.

"Thank u for always supporting my Instagram dreams," she wrote. "This train only moves because of you(r phone) ... you are the tracks that lay the foundation ... creating a direct path to hope and possibilities of likes and curated content. what u do is important. I will never take u for granted, my king."

Like Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lopez, Meghan Markle, Beyoncé, and many influencers, in order to capture the perfect 'gram-worthy shot, Teigen relies on the help of her "Instagram husband." When you start looking, you'll see Instagram husbands everywhere you go. Over the Christmas holiday, a friend of mine posted a photo of an exotic beach littered with beautiful women. Standing about 10 feet away from almost all of them was a man holding a camera snapping photographs. "Instagram husbands working hard out here," he wrote.

An Instagram husband can be any gender and sexual orientation, and he doesn't have to be your actual husband. " Instagram boyfriend, or husband, is a loose term for whoever is the invisible person behind the camera of all of your Instagram photos," Kaitlyn Tiffany recently explained on Why'd You Push That Button?, a podcast about technology. It's the person who will stop traffic to get the perfect shot, or stand endlessly in the rain while you pose for photos.

In 2016, the editor Meredith Haggerty enlisted an Instagram husband, really just a woman she had hired through an app, to follow her around a fashion show and snap pics. "In this progressive age, love isn't about gender, it's about finding that special someone who can take flattering pictures of you," she wrote. A Taco Bell ad released last fall parodies this concept. "I am an Instagram boyfriend," a man says while hanging off a carousel to get the perfect shot of his girlfriend. "Wing murals, candids, staged candids, I get them all."

Though people have almost always relied on other people to take photos of themselves, Instagram and influencer culture has transformed that duty into a near-full-time job. In 2015, a fake PSA produced by Jeff Houghton solidified the term and went massively viral. With nearly 7 million views, the video profiles the men "behind every cute girl on Instagram." They bemoan having to delete all the apps on their phone to make room for more photos and transforming into "a human selfie stick."

In the three years since that video was shot, however, the term has evolved. The joke of the Instagram-husband video was that these men are miserable. You're meant to sympathize with the men, who are presented as begrudging participants, and laugh or scoff at the women for forcing them to do something as "trivial" as taking endless photos. But Instagram and the digital landscape it created have shifted massively since the video was released. Those women people laughed at for taking endless photos in front of a brick wall are now influencers-people who leverage a social-media following to influence others and make money-and are worth millions. And while men used to be seen as begrudging participants, more so-called Instagram husbands are embracing the term and becoming an integral part of their partner's business.
Read: Rising Instagram stars are posting fake sponsored content
One man on the front lines of this movement is Jordan Ramirez. When Ramirez, a tech entrepreneur, married Dani Austin, a lifestyle influencer with a quarter of a million followers, in 2018, the influencer world was still new to him. While Austin was jetting around the world shooting photos, picking outfits, scouting locations, producing YouTube videos, and growing her audience, Ramirez had a separate and unrelated career in the tech-start-up world.

But when they got married, their lives began to blend and Ramirez started to reassess his own career goals in light of his wife's success. Though he had snapped photos and helped her on some projects previously, it wasn't until they got married that he embraced the role of Instagram husband.

Because of the grueling, 24/7 nature of most influencers' job, being an Instagram husband in 2019 doesn't just entail taking a few iPhone photos while you're out. Ramirez, like many other spouses who work in a full-time Instagram-husband capacity, has taken on operational and business aspects of his wife's influencer business and taught himself photo editing to help with production.

Ramirez said the decision to pivot his career into a full-time Instagram husband was not an easy one. "A lot of the husbands [of influencers] are in the same spot as I was," he said. "You're faced with a choice. You can have your own thing, but typically her business is thriving and you don't want to be that distant from your wife as she's traveling." He also worried about devoting his life to a new and unstable industry. "I was raised in a generation like, Here's what the atomic household looks like. You're supposed to go out and be a banker, doctor," he said. However, as Austin's career has flourished, so too has Ramirez's.

In September, Ramirez launched The Instagram Husband Podcast, which is focused on telling the stories of the men behind the camera and redefining what it means to be an Instagram husband. Despite the fact that more partners are taking on this role, Ramirez worried that no one was examining the people who play the more behind-the-scenes role in an influencer's life.

Ramirez hopes the podcast can break down misconceptions and critique stereotypes. He admitted that when Austin first began to achieve mainstream success, he felt jealous and even inferior. He said it can be hard for some men when their wife finds fame. Just going out shopping with Austin can sometimes lead to him spending an hour taking photos of her with fans. But Ramirez said that once he learned to embrace her success and fame, rather than resent it, things shifted. "I know there's a ton of other Insta husbands, and many also come from business backgrounds. Their wives are probably successful too, and maybe they're feeling the things I felt," he said. But, he added, being an Instagram husband "isn't demeaning yourself; it's about building something with your wife." Ramirez said he's purchased instagramhusband.org and plans to potentially launch a Facebook group where Instagram husbands can connect.

As more public figures open up about the critical part their Instagram husband plays in their success, even if it's tongue-in-cheek, the role becomes more normalized. The lifestyle and travel influencer Lindsay Silberman's husband, Matthew Stevens, even went so far as to change his Instagram handle to @InstaHusband. "I started by helping her take great pics, helping to edit them, then come up with captions, then come up with places to take the pics-helping her build what is now her business," he said. "I've become completely immersed in not only the photos but also the business side of Lindsay's work. I've taken on a role that encompasses not just taking pics, but reviewing contracts, reaching out to brands, going to events. We've become a tag team."

Like Ramirez, Stevens said his goal is to challenge the perception of what an Instagram husband is. "People will look at a husband or boyfriend taking photos of his girlfriend like, 'Oh, look what he has to do for his girl who isn't even a model,'" he said. Stevens said he uses his Instagram account to play on that and parody it. "We're changing that whole conception of the Insta husband as someone who just follows his wife around and takes pics. It's actually someone supporting a business and his wife along the way," he said.

Silberman said she's shocked by how many men are getting involved in the influencer space through their wife. "So many of the women I follow who are super successful in this business have hired their husbands," she said. "The workload gets to a point where you just can't do it alone, and who do you trust more to be a part of your business than your husband?" Silberman said having an Instagram husband is also valuable because he knows you better than anyone else. He's with you in the hotel room, you're comfortable with him behind the camera, and he spends enough time with you that he knows your perfect shots and angles.

"Matt understands what I do; he understands the nuances of it. When I travel and I need to bring a lot of clothes or wake up in the morning to get the right light, he understands," she said. A vacation doesn't mean "laying on a beach drinking piña coladas. That's not how you get the great photos. It is work."
Read: Instagram's wannabe stars are driving luxury hotels crazy
Having an Instagram husband is also a smart financial move. Influencers who don't have a dedicated or supportive partner usually have to hire professional photographers, some of whom charge exorbitant day rates. Things get even more complicated when traveling to places where it's not easy to find a local photographer who understands your style or needs, or who you'd want to double up with in a hotel room. Some influencers are one another's Instagram husbands, traveling in duos and taking endless shots for one another. Others rely on a tripod or strangers. Silberman said life without her husband around would be markedly harder. "A lot of the girls who I follow are single or their husbands aren't as involved. I give them so much credit. It is so hard. It's hard in general, but it's doubly as hard if you don't have a right-hand person with you at all times," Silberman said.

As more Instagram husbands step out from behind the camera, they're also gaining a following of their own. Thomas Berolzheimer co-runs the business of his wife, Julia Engel; she's a lifestyle influencer with 1.2 million followers. Berolzheimer has 64,000 Instagram followers of his own, debatably making him an influencer in his own right. Many fans are quick to follow an influencer's Instagram husband for a behind-the-scenes peek at their life. Ted Raad, the husband of Dede Raad, a lifestyle influencer with nearly half a million followers, changed his bio to read "Professional IG husband" and often posts unfiltered shots of his wife. He also curated an Instagram Story dedicated to documenting fellow Instagram husbands in the wild.

Stevens said he has lurked on the #InstagramHusband hashtag on Instagram and connected with other men that way after interacting with their photos. "It's almost this silent brotherhood right now," he said. "It hasn't become a full community yet, but it's on the verge of breaking out ... And I think it's gonna be huge."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Taylor Lorenz is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.

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The men behind the camera are ready to step into the spotlight. Earlier this week, Chrissy Teigen posted a video on Instagram of herself posing artfully on the beach while her husband captured an endless stream of photos, including multiple angles and poses. "Thank u for always supporting my Instagram dreams," she wrote.

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Here's how you could have done it.

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Remember the joke I made about how an IOC can basically sound like a wife taking her husband to task over making jokes about her mum and saying inappropriate things in front of the kids? You could do the same... check this out.

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Form - all the features, word choices and devices. Intention - what effect was intended? Sense - how do F and I change meaning from literal to figurative etc? How do F-I-S give you an idea of Tone? How do FIST add up to give you effect? A good poem, like a FIST, should make an impact.

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IOC for students who panic when facing a teacher alone

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Remember the IOC parody of how you can use IOC skills to take your husband to task over how he talks about your mother? Well, here's a parody of a TOK essay. It actually hits all the rubric points - but turns on a misinterpretation of a key term in the prescribed title. It also does not make reference to two AOK in any depth.

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In TOK, we are told that Language is a WOK. But it's also a very large and distinct Area of Knowledge as we all know from our seeming inability to cover everything we need to know in time for exams.

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Rugby: A hooligan's sport for gentlemen?

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Rugby: A hooligan's sport for gentlemen?

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Rugby has often been described as a hooligan's sport played by gentlemen (and soccer the other way around). But here's proof that hooligans abound in rugby too - but maybe it's just spectators, not real athletes?

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Details of sexist verbal abuse shouted at a female rugby referee have been revealed in a leaked report.

Coleraine RFC has been fined £5,000 by the Irish Rugby Football Union's Ulster Branch over the incident.

The six-page document, seen by BBC News NI, was written by referee Grainne Crabtree about the match at Coleraine Rugby Club in March.

Coleraine's 1st XV Senior Men's team were hosting Dromore RFC in a Kukri Ulster Rugby Championship game.
Warning: This article contains language that some readers may find offensive

Rugby club fined £5,000 over abuse

Refs boycott rugby club over sexist abuse

Club fined for abuse of female referee

The report, which was submitted to the IRFU's Ulster Branch, outlines the "sustained, vile, sexist abuse" to which Ms Crabtree says she was subjected during the game by four men.

In it, she describes how a small number of spectators shouted a "tirade of profanities and sexual remarks" at her during the 80-minute game.

'I could hear them laughing'

As the match progressed, Ms Crabtree wrote that she overheard the men yelling at her in sexually degrading language, using the words "slag" and "ho" when she made a decision to award a yellow card.

"The game continued and I could hear men laughing at how funny they found themselves," she said.

"I noticed that the crowd was splitting, which left four men standing on their own.

"As I approached, they jeered and told me I was a 'fucking joke'."

Her statement said the men told her to "take off your shorts so we get a better look at your arse".

Ms Crabtree said the abuse made her feel "anxious and unsettled".

The report states the "jeering and sexual comments" continued into the second half.

It said the men shouted comments such as: "Yo, you slag, you're a fucking disgrace, you slag."

'Shock, confusion and fear'

Ms Crabtree said she approached the men after the game to ask their names for her official report, and asking if they felt their behaviour had been appropriate.

She said one of the men dismissed her using a graphic sexual swear word.

Ms Crabtree described feeling "shock, confusion and fear" at the comments, adding that, as she made her way into the referee changing room, she felt "physically sick".

In the days following the initial report to Ulster Branch, a £2,000 suspended fine was handed down to Coleraine RFC.

At the time, the Ulster Society of Rugby Football Referees (USRFR) said that Ulster rugby officials had investigated the abuse and upheld the charges.

However, in her report, Ms Crabtree described that initial fine as a "non-sanction" adding that she felt it added "insult to injury".

"I endured continued sexist abuse and Coleraine have had no immediate punishment and these men were not held accountable for their actions," she said.

She added that she felt let down by both the club and the Ulster Branch over how the situation was handled.

£5,000 fine

The initial response was not welcomed by the USRFR either, which refused to officiate at any Coleraine RFC home matches in protest as Ms Crabtree had not yet received an apology, and the club had not held anyone to account.

That prompted a second investigation in September, when the Ulster Branch received Ms Crabtree's report.

It has since been revealed that the club has been fined £5,000 by Ulster rugby officials in relation to the incident.

It is understood that £2,000 of that fine will be returned to Coleraine RFC in two years if there are no further incidents.

In a statement issued earlier this week, a Coleraine RFC spokesperson said the club was "pleased" the issue had been resolved and had accepted the outcome of the investigation.

"We are now looking forward to giving a warm welcome to all referees and teams visiting our club for matches this week and in the future," said the spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Ulster Branch said: "Following a recommendation by the review panel, the IRFU Ulster Branch has imposed a fine on Coleraine RFC.

"This sanction has been accepted by the club.

"While the Coleraine RFC issue is now closed, the IRFU Ulster Branch is actively considering how to promote respect for referees."

On Tuesday the IRFU released a strategic plan outlining the organisation's goals for both the men's and women's game over the next five years.

One of the key objectives is to increase the female participation in rugby to 20% - including players, coaches, referees, volunteers and committees.

There are currently 12 women refereeing rugby matches in Ireland; the IRFU hope this will increase to 80 by 2023.

Ms Crabtree is one of only three female rugby referees in Ulster.

A former City of Derry and Ulster Rugby player, Ms Crabtree has been volunteering as a rugby referee since her playing career was cut short through injury.

She has now completed a Level 4 course, qualifying her to referee All Ireland League matches.

No-one identified

As a result of the incident, it is understood that officials have now launched a second review, focusing on educating referees on how to deal with abusive behaviour during matches.

None of the men responsible for the abuse have been identified or disciplined.

The USRFR has now ended its boycott and will referee Coleraine's first home game since the incident - on Saturday when the 1st XV will again play host to Dromore RFC.

"Our interest is the protection of our volunteer members and we are assured by the branch that they are actively reviewing measures to ensure their future well-being," said a USRFR spokesperson.

In a statement on Thursday, Coleraine RFC said it had "apologised to the referee for the abuse she was subjected to by spectators at the club".

"A plan is now in place at the club to ensure that Coleraine remains a safe place for spectators, players and officials and we look forward to welcoming visiting teams, their supporters and of course our match officials," it continued.

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Sexist abuse of female rugby ref revealed

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Details of sexist verbal abuse shouted at a female rugby referee have been revealed in a leaked report. Coleraine RFC has been fined £5,000 by the Irish Rugby Football Union's Ulster Branch over the incident. The six-page document, seen by BBC News NI, was written by referee Grainne Crabtree about the match at Coleraine Rugby Club in March.

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Uniqlo's 'Controversial' Reference to World War 2 comfort women

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Uniqlo's 'Controversial' Reference to World War 2 comfort women

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When you are angry with someone, anything they say can be twisted into something you can claim offends you. Here's a little controversy set against the backdrop of the current Japan vs Korea quarrel. Watch the Korean parody too. Which is of the two 'ads' is arguably more malicious?

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Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo pulled an ad in South Korea after it sparked boycotts and protests. South Koreans say the commercial takes a jab at Koreans forced to work as laborers during World War II.

In the original, English-language commercial, 97-year-old American style icon Iris Apfel speaks with 12-year-old American fashion designer Kheris Rogers. Rogers asks Apfel how she dressed as a teenager. Apfel responds, "I can't remember that far back."

In South Korea, however, the commercial ran with translated subtitles that changed the line to: "Gosh! How can I remember something that goes back 80 years?"

Read more: Japanese companies plan to build moon colonies

South Korea and Japan have a bitter, longstanding feud regarding Japan's brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. During World War II, many Koreans were forced laborers for the Japanese, working in factories or, many of the women, as " comfort women" in wartime brothels for Japanese soldiers.

South Koreans still look on the period with deep resentment towards Japan.
'We remember!'
Uniqlo sales have taken a hit in South Korea as customers boycott the chain and demand an apology. At a protest, one sign read, "Colonial rule 80 years ago - we remember!"

A parody video of the ad has gone viral. In the video, South Korean student Youn Dong-hyeun speaks with 90-year-old Yang Geum-deok, a former forced laborer at Japan's Mitsubishi factory during the war. He asks her how hard it was when she was young.

"It is impossible to ever forget that awfully painful memory," says Yang.

Uniqlo pulled its ad in South Korea on Saturday and said it was never the company's intention to reference "the issue of comfort women or the South Korea-Japan dispute." The translation of the ad took place in South Korea, a Uniqlo spokesperson said.

Tensions between the two countries have intensified over the last year. In 2018, South Korea's top court ordered Japanese industrial companies to compensate wartime forced laborers. Japan then started limiting exports of high-tech materials to South Korea, which responded in kind by boycotting many Japanese products.

South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are due to meet this Thursday.

Japan's revered war criminals

Shigenori Togo

Togo was an expert on Germany. He spoke German, studied German philology, married a German and was appointed Japan's ambassador to Germany in 1937. He was appointed foreign minister in 1941 and again in 1945, when he advised the Japanese government to surrender. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and died in 1950 while in jail.

Author: Hao Gui / gd

kp/rt (AFP, Reuters)
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Uniqlo pulls controversial clothing ad in South Korea | DW | 22.10.2019

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Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo pulled an ad in South Korea after it sparked boycotts and protests. South Koreans say the commercial takes a jab at Koreans forced to work as laborers during World War II. In the original, English-language commercial, 97-year-old American style icon Iris Apfel speaks with 12-year-old American fashion designer Kheris Rogers.

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How Language is Used to Revile Donald Trump

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How Language is Used to Revile Donald Trump

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Is Donald Trump is bad as the US media makes him sound? Or has objective journalism gone out the window, replaced with inflammatory language?

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Since Donald Trump's election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission - the pursuit of the truth - and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, "Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America," out Tuesday, KIMBERLEY STRASSEL examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade . . .
Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous "whistleblower" testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing "distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower's credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans."

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias. How did journalism get here?

I've never engaged much in media criticism, because it's almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal and biased. But at least in the past, that bias was largely a function of insularity. Most reporters weren't even fully aware they were prejudiced politically; everyone they worked and socialized with held the same left-of-center views.

That's changed in the age of Trump. The press has embraced its bias, joined the Resistance and declared its allegiance to one side of a partisan war. It now openly declares those who offer any fair defense of this administration as Trump "enablers." It writes off those who question the FBI or Department of Justice actions in 2016 as "conspiracy" theorists. It acts as willing scribes for Democrats and former Obama officials; peddles evidence-free accusations; sources stories from people with clear political axes to grind; and closes its eyes to clear evidence of government abuse.

This media war is extraordinary, overt and increasingly damaging to the country.

The latest installment of this Democratic-media tie-up is the Ukraine story. Just a few weeks ago, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff explained that the intelligence community inspector general wanted to transmit an anonymous "whistleblower" complaint to him but had been stopped by the Trump administration. Schiff has for 10 months been obsessing over how to impeach Trump, so his claim merited great skepticism.

Instead, the media ran with it. Even as it acknowledged that it did not know the subject of the complaint, or the background of the accuser, it began running stories postulating that the Trump administration had engaged in a cover-up. It later accepted whole-cloth the whistleblower's hearsay accusation that Trump had demanded a Ukrainian investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden as a condition of military aid - before even seeing a transcript of the Trump call. The New York Times was so eager to push the impeachment narrative forward (and give it credibility) that it divulged the sensitive detail that the whistleblower was a CIA officer detailed to the White House.

Sadly, the press behavior of the past few weeks is nothing new. The election of Donald Trump has led to the greatest disintegration of press standards in modern history. For those wondering if they are getting the "real story" in the Ukraine impeachment drama, it's worth taking a walk back through the past few years of what we now know was the Russia-collusion hoax.

One particularly bad decision helped drive all the rest of that false narrative: The press became willing advocates for government actors (at least the ones they liked). This is the reverse of the role the press is supposed to play. The media exists to be a government watchdog.

Sure, when it comes to the Trump administration, the press rides herd on every issue. But when it has come to former Obama officials (Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan), the media has swallowed everything it is told. It's hard to explain just how big a dereliction of duty this is. The FBI's Trump-Russia investigation fell clearly into a government-abuse-of-power story, of the kind the press exists to expose. It came laden with red flags - opposition research from the rival campaign, backdoor channels to the IRS, surveillance of American citizens. And yet anything the former people of power told the press to write, the press wrote.

Willingness to cast aside facts in favor of theory is what has fed years of hysterical collusion conspiracy theories.

The best example is that infamous New York Times story about the "origin" of the FBI probe. In late 2017, when former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes finally came close to winning his battle with the DOJ to see documents about the infamous Steele dossier, FBI protectors panicked. They knew how terrible it would look that they had used opposition research from a rival campaign to get surveillance warrants on at least one Trump campaign official. So someone called The New York Times for help in getting ahead of the story. On Dec. 30, 2017, it published: "How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt."

The story was, of course, all about how George Papadopoulos had inspired the FBI's probe, and it flat-out narrated what would become the FBI line about its origins. It also flatly dismissed the dossier. The Papadopoulos take "answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election? It was not, as Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign," opined the Times. The story cited nobody in its story other than anonymous "American and foreign officials."

In May 2018, the paper ran another "blockbuster" story about the FBI's Trump investigation, which was code-named Crossfire Hurricane. The Times reported that "Only in mid-September, congressional investigators say, did [the dossier] reach the Crossfire Hurricane team." This is false. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr has testified under oath that he briefed a lot of people about the dossier - and its political provenance - not long after it was handed to him in late July. As of the writing of this book, the Times has never updated or corrected that piece.

The willingness to be spoon-fed is what drove so many big press bloopers. Were there a Collusion Press-Error Hall of Fame, CNN would be the first inductee. There was CNN's decision in 2017 to run a story, based on one unnamed source, claiming a presidential adviser, Anthony Scaramucci, was under investigation for his ties to a Russian investment fund. CNN had to retract the story, and three of its journalists resigned.

In December 2017, CNN announced a scoop for the ages. It claimed it had evidence that Donald Trump Jr. had been offered by advance access to hacked Democratic emails. MSNBC and CBS also claimed to have "confirmed" this evidence that the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks had been colluding. It later came out that the outlets had gotten the date on their evidence wrong. Donald Trump Jr. had been sent an email directing him to look at the WikiLeaks dump - after WikiLeaks had made it public.

Also don't forget BuzzFeed's epic "news" in January 2019 that President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow. Politicians seized on the news, and Schiff promised to do what was "necessary" to find out if the president had committed "perjury." Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro said that if the allegations were true, Trump "must resign." The problem? They weren't. This one was such an invention that special counsel Bob Mueller's team made a rare statement, denying the BuzzFeed report.

There are plenty more. The Washington Post claimed Russians had accessed the US electrical grid through a Vermont utility. Not true. Slate claimed a Trump server had been communicating with Russia. Not true. The Guardian claimed that Paul Manafort had visited Julian Assange in his hideout at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London - three times. If so, Mueller missed it. The press gets furious when Trump talks about "fake news." But what else would you call this?

Another low of the past few years - which we are seeing again now - has been the media's willingness to run fact-free accusations. Case in point: claims from the Steele dossier. The specific charges in that document have never been proven. Opposition-research firm Fusion GPS was incredibly clever in its decision to feed that document to the FBI to give it more credibility. But the fact that the FBI had it or, that Schiff was irresponsible to quote from it during a hearing, didn't release the press from a basic obligation: to either verify the truth or treat the document for what it was - slander. Instead, the media repeated the dossier's claims ad nauseum, rarely bothering to note the partisan motivations behind its creation.

This willingness to cast aside facts in favor of theory is what has fed years of hysterical collusion conspiracy theories. By embracing hypothetics (rather than tracking down facts), the press indulged in endless "connect the dots" exercises.

In April 2018, two reporters from McClatchy cited "sources" who said, "Mueller has evidence [Michael] Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of the dossier." The story claimed Cohen had secretly snuck into the Czech Republic, through Germany, presumably for a clandestine meeting with Kremlin officials. It again quoted only "sources familiar with the matter." Yet Cohen had vehemently insisted that he'd never been there. And the Mueller report would later flatly say he had not. McClatchy, as of the writing of this book, still hasn't retracted the story. Why? It claims that what it was reporting was that Mueller had "received evidence," and it noted that Mueller never said he didn't receive evidence. See?

Liberal opinion writers were even worse. One of the standout headlines from 2018 came from Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine. It read: "Prump-Tutin: Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart - Or His Handler?" Chait asked: "What if Trump has been a Russian asset from 1987?" Then followed thousands of words that purported to tie together Trump, obscure Russians, Stormy Daniels, Assange and so much more. The story, suffice it to say, did not age well.

All reporters sometimes bend a rule, or go out on a limb or get something wrong. But the important thing is that they usually do this in aid of getting truth to the public. What has defined the media breakdown that started in 2016 was the press' abandonment of standards in aid of peddling a narrative - rather than reality. This abandonment has had terrible consequences for the industry and for the country. A Monmouth University poll in early 2018 found that a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe traditional TV and newspaper outlets report "fake news." And 42 percent of respondents said they believed outlets did this specifically to promote a political agenda. These kinds of numbers are alarming for civil society. The more Americans are turned off from traditional news, the more they turn to dubious sources and read and listen only to things with which they agree. For those worried about our increasingly polarized society, the media is feeding that divide.
Excerpted from "Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters Are Breaking America" by Kimberley Strassel, Copyright © 2019. Available from Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Inside the media's relentless crusade to destroy President Trump

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Since Donald Trump's election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission - the pursuit of the truth - and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, "Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America," out Tuesday, Kimberley Strassel examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade.

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Do Immigrants Get the Worst of Trump's vocabulary?

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Do Immigrants Get the Worst of Trump's vocabulary?

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The US media claims Trump has the harshest words for immigrants.

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President Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Santa Ana Star Center in Rio Rancho, N.M. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Since launching his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump's words have raised eyebrows for their characterizations of those he views negatively. The objects of his verbal attacks range from the media, to liberals and even to conservatives who have not embraced his political ideology rooted in hard-line stances on immigration and nationalism. But no group has been the subject of his ire as have immigrants, especially those who have entered the country illegally.

And despite the old and mostly now dispatched with suggestion that his words should often be taken seriously and not literally, President Trump's comments both publicly and behind the scenes about illegal immigrants make one thing clear: They have no place in the president's ideas of a "great" America.

In an excerpt for a forthcoming book, two New York Times reporters deta il that in a March meeting with his political aides, Trump's frustration about illegal immigration led him to suggest violent solutions to the problem. They reported:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That's not allowed either, they told him.

Trump tweeted Wednesday denying that he called for a reptile-filled moat: "I may be tough on Border Security, but not that tough. The press has gone Crazy. Fake News!!" The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, however, confirmed that Trump wanted migrants attempting to illegally cross the border shot.

And that he wanted migrants to be targeted is not as much of a stretch as defenders of Trump might argue given his track record of supporting violent actions toward those who dare challenge his plan to make American "great" in the eyes of his supporters. This could be, in part, why some of his supporters have taken his words about undocumented immigrants literally and acted violently.

But this is not the first time Trump's words toward immigrants have been dehumanizing. Looking back to the earliest days of his campaign, Trump has reserved some of his most violent and dehumanizing language toward immigrants. In his campaign announcement, Trump accused immigrants from Mexico of being criminals.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

And in July 2017, during a speech largely focused on MS-13, a violent gang started in the United States that recruits and preys upon immigrants, Trump encouraged police to be more violent in their handling of those suspected of crime.

"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, 'Please don't be too nice,'" he said.

"When you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]," Trump added mimicking a cop arresting a suspect. "Like, 'Don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody, don't hit their head.' I said, 'You can take the hand away, okay?'

And in January 2018, Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers who came to the Oval Office to finds a way to protect immigrants from developing nations with large black populations.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" the president asked, according to those in the meeting.

"Why do we need more Haitians?" Trump added. "Take them out."

And days before the 2018 midterm election, the president characterized individuals crossing the border and seeking asylum as violent criminals terrorizing law enforcement and others on their way to wreak havoc in the United States.

"Some people call it an 'invasion,'" he said. "It's like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border."

"They've overrun the Mexican police, and they've overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers," Trump added. "So this isn't an innocent group of people. It's a large number of people that are tough. They've injured, they've attacked, and the Mexican police and military has actually suffered."

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Analysis | Trump's most insulting - and violent - language is often reserved for immigrants

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Since launching his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump's words have raised eyebrows for their characterizations of those he views negatively. The objects of his verbal attacks range from the media, to liberals and even to conservatives who have not embraced his political ideology rooted in hard-line stances on immigration and nationalism.

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Does using the word 'invasion' mean support for a genocide?

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The Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs has tried to ease tensions with Cambodia and Vietnam after Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's Facebook post referred to Vietnam's 1978 "invasion" and "occupation" of its neighbour.
Lee made similar comments at a security forum in Singapore last weekend, noting how Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia had posed a serious threat to non-communist Asean.

Singapore's ministry said, "Singapore highly values its relations with Cambodia and Vietnam" and had "no sympathy" for Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.

It said Lee's controversial Facebook post aimed to "explain how statesmanship and foresight helped to end the tragic wars that caused great suffering to the people of Indochina, and to bring about the peace and cooperation that the region enjoys today".

Singapore's foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan has also made phone calls to Hanoi and Phnom Penh to end any ill feeling over Lee's post.

Both Cambodia and Vietnam use the term "liberation" from one of the 20th century's most brutal regimes.

Lee was expressing his condolences over the death last month of former Thai prime minister, General Prem Tinsulanonda, who backed the Khmer Rouge's jungle insurgency against the Vietnamese forces.

"His time as PM coincided with the [original five pro-western] Asean members coming together to oppose Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and the Cambodian government that replaced the Khmer Rouge," Lee posted.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen accused Lee of expressing "support of the genocidal regime and the wish for its return to Cambodia".

"His statement reveals to the Singaporean people and the world that leader of Singapore had indeed contributed to the massacre of Cambodian people," Hun Sen posted on Facebook.

A former Khmer Rouge cadre, Hun Sen, 66, fled Cambodia in 1977 and returned with the Vietnamese military during the war against the savage regime in December 1978. He was first appointed foreign minister and named prime minister in the Vietnamese-supported government in 1985.

It is odd that Lee chose to refer to the morally bankrupt period of Asean history when the west supplied arms to what remained of the deposed Khmer Rouge to weaken Vietnam and its Soviet supporters.

Pol Pot's fanatics battled Vietnamese forces in Cambodia from sanctuaries on the Thai border.

China, a rival of Moscow and Hanoi, invaded Vietnam briefly in 1979 in a botched attempt to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia, suffering a military humiliation in the process.

A decade of fighting, economic sanctions, the unravelling of the Soviet Union and the international isolation of Vietnam pressed Vietnam to finally withdraw its troops from Cambodia and sign the October 1991 Paris Peace Accord.

Vietnam joined Asean in 1995 followed by Cambodia in 1999.
The west and its Asean allies should avoid highlighting their alliance with the Khmer Rouge. Picture credit: Wikimedia

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Singapore tries to ease Lee's Pol Pot blunder - Asean Economist

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The Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs has tried to ease tensions with Cambodia and Vietnam after Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's Facebook post referred to Vietnam's 1978 "invasion" and "occupation" of its neighbour. Lee made similar comments at a security forum in Singapore last weekend, noting how Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia had posed a [...]

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Is the language of the law discriminatory?

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Is the language of the law discriminatory?

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Given that many of our laws were drafted and approved a long, long time ago, might they have been 'tainted' with the sexist attitudes of our wicked past?

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Read this case and decide for yourself.

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A council employee has won his claims of racial harassment after an incident where his supervisor made racist remarks towards him as they drove to a job.

The Leeds employment tribunal (ET) found that Mr A Leader, an environmental action operative employed by Leeds City Council, suffered "clearly unwanted" comments about his own race, the colour of his skin and the nationality of others that amounted to racial harassment.

In what lawyers described as an 'unusual' move, the ET dismissed claims against the council itself after ruling that the employer had shown it had taken all reasonable steps to prevent the supervisor from making racist comments to fellow employees. The case proceeded instead against the individual supervisor who made the remarks.

Leader, who described himself to the tribunal as a black Afro-Caribbean man, was working with supervisor and assistant chargehand Andrew Hossack on 9 February 2018. The tribunal heard Leader was a passenger that day in a works vehicle driven by Hossack.

As the vehicle was pulling into Kirkstall waste management site in Leeds at 9am, Leader and Hossack were listening to the news on the radio when the broadcaster announced that the temperature was -11°C at the Winter Olympics.

Leader then told the tribunal Hossack said: "If you think it's cold here, you should take your black arse over there."

The tribunal heard that Leader looked at Hossack "with astonishment" before Hossack responded: "Your arse is black isn't it?" Leader answered that it was "the last time I looked".

The vehicle then pulled up behind a lorry with a Polish registration plate. Leader said the lorry was taking a long time, and told the tribunal Hossack said "these f***ing foreigners", to which Leader responded that Hossack sounded "like a racist".

Leader then informed Hossack he was not feeling well and asked to be dropped off at the nearest point to his home. As he was leaving the vehicle, Hossack asked what he should tell their line manager about Leader going home, and Leader said he could tell her "what you f***ing like".

Hossack did not attend the ET and no evidence was provided in his defence, but the judge decided Leader's evidence was "coherent, credible and convincing" and accepted it as fact.

Leader said after the incident he received a call from the line manager asking him to return to work, but he described himself as being unable to do so because he was not in the right frame of mind. He told the manager what had happened

He returned to work as normal on his next shift. He said he was very upset about what had happened and considered Hossack to be a racist who he was not happy to work with again.

Leeds City Council spoke with Leader about the incident twice, once on 12 February and again on 22 February. The council confirmed that the incident was being dealt with under its disciplinary policy, and Leader would not be required to work with Hossack.

However, Hossack was not suspended or relocated. Leader did not receive any further communication from the council and subsequently submitted a grievance on 12 April.

Leader told the tribunal he had been concerned that Hossack might be successful in applying for a vacant chargehand position, as it would mean Leader would have to ring him every morning for instructions. The tribunal heard that the prospect of talking to Hossack made Leader feel anxious.

He added that he felt worried and isolated from his colleagues, and his anger reactivated when he saw Hossack at work "all the time".

Leader initially brought complaints of racial discrimination and harassment against both Hossack and Leeds City Council. But the claims against the council were dismissed as Leader, at a prior preliminary ET hearing, accepted that it had shown it had taken all reasonable steps to prevent Hossack from making racist comments.

The tribunal heard evidence that Leeds City Council had investigated Leader's allegations relating to the racist comments, and the matter was referred to a disciplinary hearing to consider a charge of gross misconduct. However, Hossack resigned before any disciplinary hearing.

The Leeds ET did, however, rule that Leader had been subjected to racial discrimination from Hossack, and ordered Hossack to pay him £2,769 for injury to feelings plus interest.

Glenn Hayes, partner at Irwin Mitchell, told People Management the case was unusual as complaints against the employer had been dismissed very early on.

He added that it was, in his opinion, "quite refreshing" to see an employer not have to go through an ET when it had followed the correct procedure.

"It seems like at the preliminary hearing the tribunal determined there was no case against the council, and there was enough proof to show they had taken all reasonable steps to show what they did do," Hayes said.

"What this usually involves is showing that employers have a good equal opportunities policy, provide training on that policy to staff, and keep staff up to date on this training and policy, as well as proof they take action when complaints are brought to their attention - which it looks like they did."

Kate Palmer, associate director of advisory for Peninsula UK, agreed that it was rare for the employer to be discounted from proceedings.

But Palmer added that the removal of the employer from the ET proceedings did not take away from the fact that an employee was still subject to unlawful harassment: "It simply allows for a determination of who is really at fault."

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Employee wins harassment case after supervisor made racist remarks in works vehicle

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A council employee has won his claims of racial harassment after an incident where his supervisor made racist remarks towards him as they drove to a job. The Leeds employment tribunal (ET) found that Mr A Leader, an environmental action operative employed by Leeds City Council, suffered "clearly unwanted" comments about his own race, the colour of his skin and the nationality of others that amounted to racial harassment.

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Every generation has its slang to keep nosy outsiders - like parents - out of the loop. Every special field does pretty much the same. Hong Kong's young protestors have come up with their own slang.

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Hong Kong's protestors communicate in a jargon that reveals much about how they see each other, the authorities, and their actions.

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This was a problem raised in 2015.

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The Hong Kong government's language barrier

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The Hong Kong government's language barrier

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There's a lot that's been said about Hollywood's 'whitewashing'. But it's not just there - it's everywhere. Why this obsession for fair skin?

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In the world of professional photography, "finding the light" or positioning the subject to align with the light source is one of the most important aspects of taking a photo.

Simply put, proper lighting can accentuate the subject. Without the use of light, it can be difficult to properly see what has been photographed.

Most of Generation-Y is all too familiar with this concept. We have honed our iPhone photography skills and become experts at finding " good selfie lighting." Knowing exactly which filter to throw on has essentially become second nature.

We have mastered the art of "finding the light." We know our angles, and we have a strong understanding of just how to accentuate and highlight our favorite features.

This brings up the issue of finding good lighting to accentuate the subject versus deliberately adding too much lighting to lighten the skin.

So, what exactly is going on, and why is it happening?

There are the logistics of utilizing light.

Your standard lighting techniques are used to find the proper balance between shadows and highlights. This is generally important in being able to see the model.

When an excessive amount of light is added with the use of flash or reflectors, the image then becomes over-exposed, which causes the subject's skin to appear lighter than it actually is.

Lighting can be beneficial.

When utilized in just the right way, using bright, blown-out lights can help the skin appear more flawless than it is.

Blemishes and wrinkles are less apparent, therefore minimizing the amount of retouching needed to create clearer, more flawless-looking skin.

The editing process can also play a significant role.

Your standard lighting equipment can only do so much.

A great deal of photo manipulation occurs in post-processing. This is similar to brightness and contrast settings found on photo editing apps like Instagram.

Whitewashing has become prevalent.

Whether they realize it not, many professional photographers from around the world tend to accentuate and focus on the "whiteness" of a model.

Much of this trend has been seen in commercial photography, and it is accomplished through lighting as well as Photoshop.

Why whitewash?

Various cultures from around the world base their standards of what is considered beautiful on a "Western ideal of beauty." In some Asian cultures, skin bleaching and Westernization of the eyes are not uncommon cosmetic procedures.

Perhaps, the desire to obtain porcelain skin stems from the metaphorical value of being "pure." This ultimately results in a heavy amount of touchups in the post-production of photos in order to appeal to the "Western ideal."

I can fully attest to society making you feel as though lighter skin is desirable. Growing up (even to this day), I have been told not to tan outside.

It wasn't because of the obvious risk of skin cancer, but because I was told I "don't look good dark." It always seemed bizarre to me I should avoid sunlight to keep my skin from naturally becoming a darker shade.

My personal experience in modeling is the perfect example:

As a model, I have had firsthand experiences when it comes to lighting and retouching. For the most part, I have been fortunate not to have had my image overly retouched to the point where I felt as though it was not my face.

There have been several instances, though, in which the photographer used a combination of strong lighting and retouching to lighten my skin.

To be completely honest, this frustrated me. I felt as though the photographer captured a gorgeous image before he manipulated my skin color and diminished my naturally tan skin.

I understand there was a certain creative edge the photographer was trying to achieve, but I noticed a pattern emerging with this specific photographer's work: Models with blue eyes and lighter skin often served as greater inspiration for the photos.

In my opinion, I think a great photographer truly understands how to capture the beauty of each individual person.

Photographer Paul Jung does an excellent job of photographing women of various races.

He understands how to utilize lighting to reveal the details in a subject's body and wardrobe without overexposing the image. It is almost as if the purpose of the photo is to display how beautiful the model's natural skin color is, regardless of how dark or light he or she may be.

Beauty standards are ever-changing.

It would be ignorant to say there is only one beauty ideal.

Photography has the power to influence society's perspective on what is considered "beautiful," and as an artist, I feel that we need to broaden the current definition of beauty.

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What To Know About The 'Whitewashing' Trend And Its Implications

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In the world of professional photography, "finding the light" or positioning the subject to align with the light source is one of the most important aspects of taking a photo. Simply put, proper lighting can accentuate the subject. Without the use...

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Things happen, new words come up or change their meanings

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Things happen, new words come up or change their meanings

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Here's the 2019 list of words that have been invented, become cool or changed their meanings!

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The year 2019 might still have some surprises in store for us - Donald Trump is yet to ask the Queen if she has any dirt on Joe Biden - but we know the general shape of it: global chaos, lies and Love Island. We also know many of its words. We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times, following on from last year's "toxic" (Oxford English Dictionary), "justice" (Merriam Webster) "single use" (Collins) and "me too" (Macquarie). The words might not have been coined in 2019, but will have acquired new meaning, risen to prominence, or somehow distil our preoccupations. In advance of the lexicographers' big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates.

People

A pretty ordinary word - and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of "the people" has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. Supporters of Brexit constantly invoke the "will" of the people, likening the nation to an individual with desires and motives. Their opponents agitate for a "people's vote". Trump makes it a proper noun: "I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People." Back in Britain we nervously await a "people versus parliament" election, with Boris Johnson eager to paint MPs who oppose his strategy as anti-democrats at odds with the popular mood.

Prorogue

Like one of the aged vellum documents stowed in parliament's Victoria tower, this word was unfurled in August to widespread incomprehension. But it is an important part of the creaking apparatus of the British constitution and refers to the act of ending a parliamentary session. It comes from the Latin verb to extend and contains the element rogare (to ask). As it turned out, there wasn't much asking involved - Johnson's government, in the vampiric form of Jacob Rees-Mogg, told the Queen that parliament needed to be suspended and she complied. But, as the supreme court concluded, this instruction was unlawful. As MPs re-entered the chamber on 25 September, the only trace of the prorogation was the imprint of its lugubrious syllables in our minds.

Femtech

Startup culture hasn't always seemed like the most welcoming place for women, so the idea of femtech might seem like a breath of fresh air. Investment in digital technology designed to improve women's health and wellbeing - like Bluetooth enabled pelvic-floor training devices or fertility apps - has been steadily building. In the first quarter of 2019, $241m (£190m) was ploughed into femtech companies, leading some to predict the sector's first billion-dollar year. But the term isn't without controversy. "When it's about men and men's health, it's not mentech, right?" one analyst recently told the BBC. "Welcome to the world of 21st-century technological advancements, where brand new innovations give us the chance to ... create exactly the same stupid sexist divides all over again," wrote Quartz's Olivia Goldhill. It's a good question: why are products aimed at half the population deemed niche?

Sadfishing

One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece - in Metro in January. "Sadfishing," wrote Rebecca Reid, "is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet". She was attacking an Instagram post by Kris Jenner that teased followers with the promise of a confession by her daughter Kendall about some personal trauma: in fact, it was a marketing campaign for a skincare range. Sadfishing roared back into the news in September after a report commissioned by British headteachers suggested children who posted about their problems on social media were having the word thrown at them by bullies. It takes its place next to a series of terms relating to online behaviour that uses the suffix "fishing", including blackfishing and catfishing.

Opioid

Synthetic molecules that mimic the effects of natural opiates - chemicals derived from the opium poppy - are called opioids and they include now-familiar names such as oxycodone and fentanyl. They can be 100 times stronger than morphine and have rarely been out of the news in 2019 because of an explosion in the number of people killed by them, particularly in the US. Fatal overdoses now occur at a rate of 130 a day, making the "opioid crisis" or "opioid epidemic" America's great contemporary public health crisis. It has also led to the fall of one of its richest families - the Sacklers, whose company Purdue Pharma produced OxyContin. Use of the search term "opioid" spiked in August, when Purdue agreed to settle lawsuits against it to the tune of $10-$12bn.

Pronoun

Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun - a grammatical device used to refer back to a noun you have already mentioned - is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note "pronouns: he/him" or "she/her" alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles. In September, the singer Sam Smith told their Instagram followers "My pronouns are they/them", adding: "After a lifetime of being at war with my gender, I've decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out." The use of "they" to refer to a singular noun, although it has a long history, has traditionally been discouraged by grammarians. The most recent edition of the famed Chicago Manual of Style, however, says: "When referring specifically to a person who does not identify with a gender-specific pronoun ... they and its forms are often preferred."

Woke

Woke, meaning "well-informed", first appeared in print in a glossary of "words you might hear in Harlem" in 1962. It finally entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice". So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders made a plea "to put woke to sleep". He argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials - so-called "wokewashing" - and ultimately to a backlash. A new ironic use of woke has exploded and two books published this year exemplify the boomerang effect: Woke by comedian Andrew Doyle, writing as the PC parody Titania McGrath and Anti-Woke by professional contrarian Brendan O'Neill. Woke is dead; "woke" is alive and kicking.

Nanoinfluencer

Over the past few years a new economy has sprung up, its workers "relatable" personalities who are ostensibly letting you peek into their private lives, its products whatever they pose with on Instagram. It has proved fertile ground for new words, including "influencer" for the people involved and "sponcon", for sponsored content they post (a label seen more frequently since watchdogs cracked down on stealth ads in 2017). Subcategories of influencer have been delineated: the " unfluencer", the " outfluencer" the " microinfluencer". The latest is nanoinfluencer - someone who may have only a thousand or so followers. They are supposed to be like you and me (and their endorsements come cheap for the brands that target them). As the digital economy penetrates deeper, some people you know might already fall into this category: maybe next year, you will too.

Cancelled

The fear that most preoccupies modern-day public figures is that of cancellation: being dumped in the basket of deplorables after a trial by a jury of millions of strangers. Notable cancellees this year included the beauty YouTuber James Charles, whose followers turned against him for reasons too arcane for most outsiders to understand, and Justin Trudeau, whose offences in blackface are a bit easier to discern. Redemption can only be achieved through (ideally multiple rounds of) rehab, as satirised by Lolly Adefope in this year's BBC comedy short Sorry, in which an imperious actress on the brink of superstardom is felled by a 12-year-old tweet. If you are concerned about your own status, a new website, Am I Cancelled?, uses an algorithm to determine whether you are still fit to show your face on social media.

Crisis

Every age has predicted that the end of the world is nigh. But it increasingly feels as though inhabitants of early-21st century Earth may be on to something. From the environmental to the political and the economic, our times are defined by a worsening of conditions to the point of emergency. This year Britain and the US's serial constitutional crises have dominated the news, but a far bigger catastrophe, the climate crisis, has begun to seem more and more real, too. In May, the Guardian changed the language it uses to describe the situation, preferring climate crisis or breakdown to the less-urgent seeming climate change. In some of its earliest-recorded uses, the word referred to a "turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death". It remains to be seen what course our own crisis will take.
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language Topics

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Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019

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The year 2019 might still have some surprises in store for us - Donald Trump is yet to ask the Queen if she has any dirt on Joe Biden - but we know the general shape of it: global chaos, lies and Love Island. We also know many of its words.

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Nope - not an Apple ad. Is political correctness an improvement for social relations - or just a new way to bash people who are not as aware and sensitive as we are?

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The study involved nearly 5,000 participants across nine experiments, which found that both liberals and conservatives viewed politically incorrect speakers as more authentic.

The results also suggest that political incorrectness can offend liberals and conservatives - it just depends on the issue.

About 80 percent of Americans believe political correctness is a problem in the U.S., according to a 2018 study.

Speaking in a politically correct manner might help you to avoid offending people. It might lower your chances of making waves at work. But one thing political correctness won't help you with, according to new research, is appearing authentic to others, on both sides of the aisle.

The findings - which come from researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and are set to be published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - suggest that using politically incorrect language like "illegal" versus "undocumented" immigrants makes a speaker come off as more authentic and less persuadable by others.

"The cost of political incorrectness is that the speaker seems less warm, but they also appear less strategic and more 'real,'" Juliana Schroeder, co-author of the paper, told Haas Newsroom. "The result may be that people may feel less hesitant in following politically incorrect leaders because they appear more committed to their beliefs."

The forthcoming study involves some 5,000 participants across nine studies, in which political correctness is defined as "using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others' feelings, especially those others who seem socially disadvantaged." In addition to other tasks in the experiments, all participants were asked about their ideological backgrounds.

The results suggest that liberals and conservatives are about equally likely to get offended by political incorrectness. But it varies by subject matter: Calling poor white people "white trash," for example, is more likely to offend conservatives than liberals.

"Political incorrectness is frequently applied toward groups that liberals tend to feel more sympathy toward, such as immigrants or LGBTQ individuals, so liberals tend to view it negatively and conservatives tend to think it's authentic," Michael Rosenblum, the lead author of the paper, told Haas Newsroom. "But we found that the opposite can be true when such language is applied to groups that conservatives feel sympathy for - like using words such as 'Bible thumper' or 'redneck.'"

But the perception that politically-incorrect people are relatively hard to persuade didn't seem to hold up. In one experiment, the researchers asked 500 pairs of people to have an online debate about funding for historically black churches, a topic that had about a 50-50 split among the participants, with no significant support along racial, ideological or religious lines. The researchers instructed one of the participants to use either politically correct or politically incorrect language with their debate partner.

After, participants were more likely to say they were effectively persuasive in the debate when their partners were politically correct. However, the results showed no significant difference in which group was more easily persuaded, suggesting it's a good idea to be skeptical about initial perceptions about the persuadability of people based on political correctness.

The study also revealed two other findings:

Participants tended to think they could better predict the opinions of politically incorrect speakers, because they believed in the speaker's convictions.

Though ditching the morally coded language of political correctness seems to help people appear more authentic, the results also indicated that people tend to think that speakers who use politically incorrect language are older.

Most Americans think political correctness is problem

A 2018 study found that 80 percent of the American general population believe that "political correctness is a problem" in the U.S. The responses varied by group, with devoted conservatives reporting the highest level of agreement (97 percent) and progressive activists the lowest (30 percent). But in general, the majority of people in nearly every group - moderates, liberals and conservatives, and a majority of people in every racial group - agreed that political correctness is a problem.

As one 40-year-old American Indian in Oklahoma told the researchers:

"It seems like every day you wake up something has changed. . . Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? ... You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary."

Related Articles Around the Web

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Want to seem more authentic? Use politically incorrect language.

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Speaking in a politically correct manner might help you to avoid offending people. It might lower your chances of making waves at work. But one thing political correctness won't help you with, according to new research, is appearing authentic to others, on both sides of the aisle. The findings - whi...

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Yes - a little flap here over the British Army calling sewing kits 'housewife kits'. But you know, that's exactly what we call them too in the Singapore Armed Forces. At least when I was in the army...

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The army has been accused sexism after regiments referred to sewing sets carried by soldiers as "housewife kits".

Acknowledging the term was "outdated", the Ministry of Defence said that it no longer has a place in the armed forces.

Sewing kits are not issued to Army personnel who are expected to assembled their own.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

"While it's easy to dismiss what may seem to some as an innocuous phrase, the armed forces and society in general must take a gendered lens to all its institutions," said Jacqui Hunt, a director at Equality Now, a non government organisation which aims to promote the rights of women and girls.

"In order to identify and eliminate casual sexism, which negatively impacts both organisational culture and individual careers. Unless we challenge gender bias in all its guises, policies and initiatives aimed at promoting gender equality and inclusivity are not going to deliver the change that is needed.

"Institutions such as the armed forces need to prioritise eradicating casual sexism in order to create a welcoming environment that all members of society can participate and thrive in."

Joe Levenson, of the Young Women's Trust, said he was pleased the Ministry of Defence conceded such language was problematic.

"Sexism continues to be found in too many workplaces, with outdated stereotypes sadly all too prevalent. Women have just as much to offer as men, and need to feel that they will be supported and valued as employees," he said.

He added that the organisation which helps young women on low or no pay was "pleased that the Ministry of Defence has recognised this language is unacceptable, and hope they step up their efforts to ensure anyone who is competent is welcomed, regardless of their sex."

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said: "While the term is not unique to the military, this type of terminology is outdated and no longer has a place in the armed forces. The military is an open and modern employer and welcomes people from all backgrounds."

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Army accused of sexism over 'housewife kits'

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The army has been accused sexism after regiments referred to sewing sets carried by soldiers as "housewife kits". Acknowledging the term was "outdated", the Ministry of Defence said that it no longer has a place in the armed forces. Sewing kits are not issued to Army personnel who are expected to assembled their own.

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Early days, early days... you've not even read both texts completely yet. But there's enough to talk about in just the two opening Acts or Scenes.

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Discuss the roles of opening acts or chapters in the two works you have studied

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20 years on, the places may have changed, but the problem remains the same.

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It happened yesterday but it could well be today. A woman awaits the return of her husband as the sun goes down. The dictatorship that plagued her land has just fallen, and everything is uncertain. The woman is full of fear, gripped by a secret terror that she only shares with the man she loves. During the night and the day that follows she will have to confront that fear, she will bring to justice in her living room the doctor she believes is responsible for having tortured and raped her years ago. Her husband, a lawyer in charge of a commission investigating the deaths of thousands of dissidents under the previous regime, must defend the accused man because without the rule of law the transition to democracy will be compromised; if his wife kills that doctor, the husband will not be able to help heal a sick and wounded land.

Twenty years ago, when Death and the Maiden, the play that tells this story, opened in London at the Royal Court Upstairs, the country where that woman, Paulina, awaited a constantly delayed justice, was my own Chile or the Argentina where I was born. Or South Africa. Or Hungary. Or China. So many societies that back then were being torn by the question of what you do with the trauma of the past, how to live side by side with your enemies, how to judge those who had abused power without destroying the fabric of a reconciliation necessary to move forward.

Today, as the same play is revived in London's West End, its main drama is echoed in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Thailand, Zimbabwe and now Libya. In fact, because torture became widespread after the criminal attacks on New York on 9/11, because the most powerful nations in the world, and particularly the US, justified or were complicit in egregious abuses of human rights in order to make themselves feel safe, because they unleashed terror to fight and avenge terror, it could be ventured that the core dilemmas of Death and the Maiden are more relevant today than they ever were.

It was not something I had anticipated, this planetary weight and import, when I wrote the play in Santiago. My goals were far more modest. Returning to my country after 17 years in exile, I saw this work as my gift to its turbulent transition. The dictator was no longer in power, but his influence, his disciples, his corrupting shadow invaded every aspect of political life. Just as today in Egypt (or Russia, for that matter), those who had benefitted from decades of privileges and oppression continued to occupy enclaves from where they controlled the economy, the judiciary, the military, and threatened to return and murder and plunder and banish.

It seemed to me the obligation of a writer was to force the country to look at itself, at what all those years of mendacity and dread had wrought. Death and the Maiden plunged its finger into the wound of Chile by showing that the executioners were among us, smiling on the streets but also interrogated the democratic elite, wondering what ideals they had forced themselves to sacrifice. Neither did I let the victims off the hook. Paulina, the woman who had been raped and tortured and betrayed, was the most violent person on that stage, so the question for her was not any easier: are you going to perpetuate the cycle of terror, how can you forgive if the price they are demanding is that you forget? But one does not create such a transgressive play in a country still reeling from many years of pain without suffering the consequences oneself. The elite of Chile hated what I had done, reviled it.

But what my compatriots did not want for themselves was celebrated by the world. And now I have come back to London, and my characters have returned to the city that embraced them when they were as homeless as I was.

I'm thrilled that Death and the Maiden has not aged over these 20 years, that it still moves people to tears, confronts them with a tragedy that has no clear solution, that it speaks to our world today with the same passion it embodied yesterday. I'm thrilled that the relations between men and women that I explored, the intricacies of memory and madness, the aftermath of violence, the uncertainty of truth and narrative, continue to capture the imagination of so many. Thrilled, yes, but it is also sobering to realise that humanity has not managed to learn from the past, that torture has not been abolished, that justice is so rarely served, that censorship prevails, that the hopes of a democratic revolution can be gutted and distorted and warped.

I can't help but ask if 20 years from now I will be writing this phrase all over again: this story happened yesterday, but it could well be today.
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Death and the Maiden's haunting relevance | Ariel Dorfman

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It happened yesterday but it could well be today. A woman awaits the return of her husband as the sun goes down. The dictatorship that plagued her land has just fallen, and everything is uncertain. The woman is full of fear, gripped by a secret terror that she only shares with the man she loves.

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It's one thing to have a score composed specially for a play or film. But what if there is already a piece that chillingly and hauntingly echoes the themes of the play - composed over a century before?

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Jane Jones choses a featured work that unites two of Schubert's extraordinary talents.

Schubert's String Quartet No.14 in D minor brings together two of the composer's extraordinary talents. Schubert had a natural instinct for melody and song. His 600 Lieder (songs) and his song cycles are among the most expressive works in all music, connecting with human emotions in a deeply profound way. It's impossible to separate Schubert's music from his own experience and, for me, this work always seems to capture his essence.

First, there's the man. The quartet was written in 1824 when his health was a cause for concern. He wrote to a friend, 'Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who, in sheer despair over this, even makes things worse instead of better. Imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished...'

This music, then, is a reflection of Schubert's state of mind. It's filled with that resignation he spoke off, as well as an all-pervading anguish and yearning. Not only was his body sick - so was his soul.

Then there's the song. The title 'Death and the Maiden' comes from one of Schubert's earlier pieces in which a terror-stricken maiden begs death to pass her by. But death consoles her saying 'I am not rough, you shall sleep gently in my arms'. It's impossible to listen to all four movements of the quartet without an awareness of death's shadow stalking Schubert and emerging in the most funereal passages.

Musically, this is a masterwork among quartets. Using the theme from his original song and building variations upon it, Schubert creates a pattern where the dark and powerful opening is met by the soft lyrical reply of the maiden. Or is it the defiance and terror of the maiden, met by the gentle subverting caress of death? It's a dialogue which continues throughout the quartet, and there's little escape from the fear and the fury in the overall sombre tone of the music.

Can this possibly be music you'd want to listen to? Well, on this website I have read that sad music can make you happy. Certainly this is a deeply melancholic work - but never underestimate the power of even the saddest music to enrich our own emotional make-up.

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Schubert - String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, 'Death and the Maiden'

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Jane Jones choses a featured work that unites two of Schubert's extraordinary talents. Schubert's String Quartet No.14 in D minor brings together two of the composer's extraordinary talents. Schubert had a natural instinct for melody and song. His 600 Lieder (songs) and his song cycles are among the most expressive works in all music, connecting with human emotions in a deeply profound way.

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Hear the music. Better still, watch a recording of the play and maybe watch the movie...

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Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 "Death and The Maiden"