So now two sets of people feel free to betray principles that have been
deeply held for centuries. Anglicans are repudiating the fundamental
achievements of the Reformation in eschewing superstition and
authoritarian religion in order to stick to a few doctrines of dubious validity. Roman Catholics are tossing aside the rule that all priests should embrace
celibacy as basic to their vocation, ignoring the suffering the rule has
caused over the years to many priests who have nevertheless put their
trust in the wisdom of the Church, which is instead indulging in the
triumphalism entailed in snagging some Protestants. The future of faith could hardly
look more rocky.

Amid all the noise – literal and figurative – over the World Cup, Jon Stewart and others have been asking, “Why can’t we get the rest of the world to call it ‘soccer’?” The answer in the case of British people is simple: the word is a piece of upper-class English slang that can cause widespread offence.
Alan Jay Lerner’s line is as apt as it was 54 years ago: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Case in point: the game most of the world knows as football.
In the upper reaches of English society inhabited by the late Princess Diana and her kind it has long been popular to use whimsical abbreviations for things: underwear is referred to as “undies,” one asks not are you comfortable but are you “comfy,” champagne is “champers,” those on their way to Twickenham rugby ground will say “We’re off to Twickers.”
Despite the usage of the masses there are people in England who when they say “football” mean rugby. I attended a school in London where “football” was used partly to avoid mention of a rival school. To eliminate ambiguity, standard British English turns to the fact that soccer-football is governed by a body called the Football Association. Rugby in contrast has the Rugby Football Union. So the formal names for the two are “Rugby football” and “Association football.”
These get manipulated by the social upper crust into “rugger” and “soccer.” The average British sports fan would rather die than be heard using these terms.
The difference is complicated by the very visible class difference between the players and supporters of the two games. Professional soccer teams have long attracted huge crowds and huge sums of money, while rugby for a long time was largely amateur, played by clubs and private schools. Rugby, we are told, is a game for ruffians played by gentlemen, and soccer is a game for gentlemen played by ruffians. Curiously, this distinction applies only to England; in the nations on the periphery of the British Isles rugby earns much broader popularity.
Much ink has been spilt, nay many learned treatises written, on how the British language varies with social class. This is often dismissed as snobbery or inverted snobbery, but it is in fact a genuine divergence of discourse. If an Englishman suggests meeting for dinner, you have to know his social class in order to now whether he is thinking of the evening or the middle of the day.
I remember well the look of bafflement on the face of a school caretaker in north London when a woman visitor (who happened to be a secretary in the Prime Minister’s office) told him, “There’s no loo paper!” She repeated it several times, until recognition dawned.
“Oh, toilet paper!” he exclaimed, and headed for the supplies closet.
In the 1950s Prof. Alan Ross invented the terms “U” and “non-U” to distinguish between upper-class and non-upper-class speech. His thesis was that in modern times it is only by their speech that the British aristocracy can be distinguished from everyone else – they are neither richer nor better educated nor better dressed than the rest of society.
The attitude of upper class speakers is often assumed to be one of distaste towards coarseness, but in fact it is quite different. What bothers a U-speaker is not lack of refinement but genteelness and pretension. So, a non-U-speaker will say “perspiration;” a U-speaker will say “sweat.” “Wealthy” is non-U; “rich” is U. “Toilet” is probably the most reviled genteelism.
There are gaps in the languages. For example, what Americans call “dessert” working-class English people call “sweet.” There is no word for this in U-speech. All one can say is “What will you have now?”
While there are linguistic class differences in the US, they are far less common. Philip Roth does tell us how much it irritated him when his preppy girlfriend called vomit “barf.”
So it is amusing to think that egalitarian Americans who say “soccer” should be so influenced by the English aristocracy. While countless Americanisms have been pouring eastwards for a century and more, it is true that some Briticisms are becoming established here. Many Americans now know what a queue is, a useful unambiguous word. “Gentrification” of neighborhoods must be an import, because the word “gentry” has never been in common usage in the US.
The bottom line is I fear there is no solution to the problem of what to call the game with the round ball. But maybe it does not matter until the United States attains some prominence in world soccer. When do you suppose that will be?

Guy Raz on All Things Considered, Dec. 6 2009: “Next time you hit a pothole and find yourself cursing your local mayor, you might want to reconsider, because those potholes could eventually save you money at the gas pump.”

What!!! An amazing new source of energy? We’ve got to start digging holes everywhere. But oh dear. It turns out this is a story about how to reduce the energy lost in running over potholes.

It’s mind-boggling that a man who presumably graduated from grade school could think that potholes could be beneficial in terms of energy.

Texting and Twitter have spawned a new language (Textese?) full of LOL and OMG to save on characters… This brings to mind an earlier language, Cablese, which sought to minimize the number of words in a message, when telegrams were charged by the word. So my Dad during WWII would get messages from BBC headquarters along the lines of

GRATEFULLEST YOU DESPATCH URGENTEST INTERVIEWS BRITISH TANK CREWS DESERTWARDS INTERESTINGEST HOME AND EUROPEAN STOP

There’s an challenging exercise in this, rewriting The Rubaiyat:

A book of verses underneath the bough                        VERSEPRINT SUBBOUGH (2 words)

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine,                                         EUCHARISTWISE (1 word)

And thou beside me, singing in the wilderness.        CUMSONGSTRESS DESERTWARDS (2)

Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!                            OKAYS WILDERNESS (total 7 words)

Then there’s the story of the foreign correspondent who received a missive from his office:

WHY UNNEWS?

He replied

UNNEWS GOOD NEWS

Came the sinister rejoinder

UNNEWS UNJOB

Back he came with

UPSHOVE JOB ARSEWARDS

Years ago a British journalist is supposed to have sent a telegram to a Hollywood agent asking

HOW OLD CARY GRANT?

to which the man himself replied

OLD CARY GRANT FINE HOW YOU?

I wonder whether the obsequies for Ted Kennedy were the most elaborate military funeral ever for a former PFC?

Recent fracas about the whole slew of errors in a New York Times appreciation of Walter Cronkite raised the question of who edited the piece. It transpires that the author, a film critic, at one point had her own copy editor to fact-check for her. I’ve never understood the concept of a fact checker. Surely checking facts is what a journalist is supposed to do? Whatever, all copy needs to be read by somebody else before it is published (this blog withstanding). Peter Jay, the British financial journalist who was a for a time ambassador to the United States had a column in the London Times. One day a copy editor came to him with his latest piece and said, “I don’t understand this.”

Jay is reputed to have replied, “There are three people in this country who are able to understand this column, and you are not one of them.”

I hope, I hope, if I had been that copy editor, I would have had the guts to say, “Why don’t you just send them a letter? Here’s a stamp.”

In the century that has passed since Freud set out to establish a “physiological psychology”, most of the big questions he was trying to answer remain. What is the self? What is consciousness? What is actually going on when we think?
In recent years techniques for scanning the brain to detect electrical activity and blood flow have become very powerful, but there is still a huge gap between the actions of individual neurons and significant operations of the brain such as remembering, reasoning and making decisions, which must involve millions of neurons working in ways that are still a mystery.
But recently neuroscientists have discovered a fruitful new approach, looking not at single cells but at beliefs. We all have beliefs – assumptions about the state of ourselves and our surroundings that are essential to filling in gaps in the data our senses give us and formulating plans for everything we do. By their nature, beliefs can be wrong. And it is extreme cases of beliefs gone wrong that constitute much mental illness. Continue reading “When Seeing is Not Believing”