Down the tubes.

Yesterday I was brought up short whilst reading a review of a book about Prato, a city near Florence which we'd stayed in three years ago. Once again I was reading something which seemed to make no sense:

Dei Professori Nesi scrive che «usano il telescopio e non il cannocchiale e così non vedono le persone» [Nesi writes that because academics use a telescope rather than a telescope they don't see individuals.]

I was familiar with the word 'cannocchiale', meaning 'telescope', and its similarity to the English word seemed to suggest that 'telescopio' was a synonym. But then the sentence would be meaningless. Perhaps 'telescopio' was a false friend, analogous to 'libreria' which - contrary to one's natural assumptions - means 'bookshop' not 'library'? So I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary and found that although the word did indeed mean telescope its use was limited to the type used by astronomers rather than the sort Long John Silver carried in his pocket. That was a cannocchiale! So, as in the case of straps, where English makes do with one word, Italian has several.
  Then I recalled the archaic word 'spyglass' used to denote the seafarer's instrument. Perhaps we, too, once had words to discriminate between an optic looking at the stars and one helping you to spot whether the ship bearing down on you was flying the Jolly Roger? Only up to a point. To my surprise, the OED revealed that 'spyglass' didn't enter the language until 1705 and dropped out after 1875. 'Telescope' which I'd assumed to be the more modern coinage entered the language in the early 17th century - in the Italian or the Latin form - and denoted the astronomer's instrument. The Italians on the other hand - according to the Devoto-Oli dictionary - have been using both 'cannocchiale' and 'telescopio' since the 17th century: Lo Zingarelli says the former entered the language in 1608 and the latter in 1611.
  So in the end I'm none the wiser as to why the Italians have different labels for the two types of telescope while we rely on context to distinguish them. Maybe there's some profound psychological reason, but I'm buggered if I know what it is.

Hop off, Johnny Foreigner.

A couple of days ago The Daily Mash pointed out another threat to our British way of life: this time to the way we insult someone with our fingers. Once again our national individuality is being eroded not by the cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel but by Uncle Sam.

Not that the continentals are entirely free from blame when it comes to transforming our culture for the worse. In the Fifties when I accompanied my grandfather, and around 30,000 other folk, to watch Bristol City get regularly thrashed at Ashton Gate, footballers' wages were capped at £10 a week. They were all local lads, many of whom played cricket for Gloucestershire during football's close season. And on the rare occasion when one of them scored a goal his team mates congratulated him with a manly handshake rather than the whole team leaping on each other's back in a gay bacchanalia ripped from the pages of Petronius. Such effete behaviour, characteristic of the continental teams we occasionally saw on Pathé Pictorial, would have been viewed with contempt by the British.

A lost world. It's no longer axiomatic that you support your local team; as the old chestnut has it: 'How do you confuse a Man United fan? Show him a map of Manchester'. In any case the players are no longer local, in the wealthier teams few are even British. Unless your club is financed by a multi-billionaire - again they are usually foreign - your chances of being promoted to the 'Premiership' are slight, and remaining there permanently zero. The FA Cup, far from being the highlight of the footballing year, holds as much interest for a big four manager as the next-door-neighbour's holiday snaps.

Ludicrous displays of 'spontaneous' euphoria when a team mate hits the back of the net arrived here decades ago, eventually spreading to cricket and rugby. The former has tried to make itself interesting by dressing its players in garish baby-grows plastered with advertisements, and introducing one day games for the benefit of those with a chronic attention-span deficit. Although cricket was never interesting, its white-robed officiants enacting their archaic ritual once had a certain æsthetic appeal akin to the now-defunct Latin mass. Somehow I don't think sledging, spot-fixing, and clothes even the late Jimmy Savile would have found a trifle vulgar, have the same cachet. Rugby Union, is no longer the amateur game for oafs played by gentlemen, rather a game for oafs played by cads. As with cricket it desperately matters 'whether you win or lose' for, like Wimbledon, it's become part of a culture which seeks to monetise every human activity.

I'm not writing with any particular sense of nostalgia, other than that of the elderly for a time when they were young. I'm not much interested in sport, and even if I were, I would no longer wish to stand shivering in Ashton Gate's Uncovered End, long since replaced by the Atyeo Stand. Rather, I'm reflecting on the way in which globalised capitalism has fundamentally altered British culture. Most football fans no longer trudge to the nearest stadium to support their local team, whose retired players were often the landlord of the pub you drank in, or ran the nearby bike shop. Rather they slump on the sofa and gawp at the eleven multi-millionaire mercenaries employed by whichever team at the top of the Premiership they've decided to support. The disappearance of the wage-cap decades ago removed any chance of their local team ever joining that elite group.

Sport is merely one symptom of the all-pervasive influence of globalisation. The 'independent' Britain able to shape its own destiny is a myth. And the sooner the EDL, the BNP, and their more sophisticated fellow travellers in the Tory party wake up to the fact the better.

Straw Dog froths again.

In an article in today's Guardian Jack Straw reveals his latest contribution to making the world safe for democracy: abolishing the European Parliament. You may recall the great man's earlier strenuum pro virili vindicatorem when serving in the Blair junta: proposing to restrict the right to trial by jury; allowing Pinochet to return to Chile; turning down a request for asylum from a man fleeing Sadam Hussein's Iraq on the grounds that "we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven’t done anything wrong"; negotiating a treaty which allows the US to extradite British citizens for offences committed in Britain against US law without the UK having any reciprocal rights. No wonder he earned Thatcher's approval: "I would trust Jack Straw's judgement. He is a very fair man".
   The logical absurdity underlying his latest proposal - let's strike a blow at 'rule by unelected Brussels bureaucrats' by abolishing the one institution which gives the EU's citizens a voice - shouldn't surprise us. To the eurosceptic the word 'European' is, in itself, sufficient to bring on apoplexy.
   The Guardian's article also reveals that, amongst the eurosceptic views harboured by the public at large, only 15% would support the formation of a European army whilst 57% would be opposed. Interestingly the table below, which accompanied an article in yesterday's Corriere della Sera, reveals that Britain's Defence budget is the world's third largest - we spend more than Russia - that between them Britain and France spend virtually the same as China, and, if we include Germany, member states of the EU spend

considerably more. It doesn't take an economic genius to work out that a common European army would provide considerable savings for the beleaguered taxpayer struggling with the consequences of the reckless behaviour of international banking.
   But that would mean ceding some of Britain's mythical independence, relinquishing its 'special relationship' as the US's most supine client state.

Different language, different words.

Here's a question I'm pretty sure you can't answer without the help of a decent dictionary: what is the meaning of 'parallelepiped'? I certainly couldn't.

  Yesterday whilst reading an article about Carthage in the travel section of the Corriere della Sera, I came across the word 'parallelepipedo'. Unable to guess its meaning from the context, I looked it up in an Italian - English dictionary and found the English translation left me none the wiser until I had resorted to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Stumbling across words I've never previously encountered is a fairly common occurrence when I'm reading the Corriere but a pretty rare one when I'm reading the Guardian. And when you think about it this rather odd. Both papers are targeted at the same type of reader: someone with a university or grammar school/liceo classico education, interested in current affairs and high culture. So one would assume that once a Guardian reader had learned Italian reading the Corriere would present few difficulties.

   When Jude Fawley acquires a Latin Grammar to help teach himself Latin and Greek as a necessary step towards fulfilling his ambition of winning a place at Christminster he:

'learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.'

I assume the parenthetical aside Hardy gives his narrator alludes to proto Indo-European, from which Germanic languages such as English and Romance tongues such as Italian are descended. Although English having a common ancestor with a foreign tongue is no aid to understanding, it does seem to reinforce our instinctive belief that foreign languages are simply our mother tongue written in code. Once you've gone through the 'years of plodding' and learned what are the Italian equivalents of English words and how its grammar sticks them together you're home and dry.
   Unfortunately, you discover that you're not: the pesky foreigner uses words whose English equivalents you've never heard of. His language reflects the fact that he experiences the world in a different way from us: rather than liking things, they are pleasing to him; instead of making do with the one word 'strap' like any sensible Englishman he employs half a dozen; he makes do with the same word for nephew and grandson (nipote) but has invented a special one for your child's parent-in-law (consuocero/a). In semiotic terms, when you read the Corriere the problem is often the signified, rather than simply the signifier, being alien.

A faint flicker of hope?

In my salad days I was a fervent supporter of the Labour Party: it employed me as a canvasser when I was an undergraduate and in my late twenties I was treasurer of my local branch. Although I've never contemplated voting for another party, Blairism destroyed my affection for Labour and my belief in it as an agent of social regeneration. Like a betrayed spouse locked in a loveless marriage, I've been hoping that I might one day find something which would rekindle my hope in the future.

   Yesterday, whilst surfing the web, I stumbled across a political party of whose existence I'd previously been totally unaware: the European Federalist Party.

   A year or so ago I'd made a deliberate attempt to find a party which shared my belief in a united Europe. To my chagrin the only one I discovered was European Socialist Action, a Mosleyite group which shares its interpretation of 'socialism' with the German NSDAP.

   Fortunately, as far as I can tell, the Federalist Party's policies are perfectly acceptable. They claim to be 'free-thinking' and 'radical' rather than socialist, but I can live with that. Given the threat to their future which faces Europe's nations, political union is the priority. If that were achieved one could then campaign for a socialist government. In any case, we all know what a multitude of sins the word 'socialism' can cover: Stalin's perversion, and Hitler's misappropriation, of the term are simply the most egregious. In an article in today's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland reveals that both Shaw and Beveridge shared the nazis' belief in eugenics. I don't think this invalidates socialism any more than Darwin's belief that the traits which lead to pauperism are hereditary undermines the truth of evolution. But it does suggest that divorced from a belief in the sanctity of all human life, and an acknowledgement that moral values are ultimately grounded in faith rather than reason, socialism can become as dangerous as conservatism.

   I'm not so naive as to believe that the Federalist Party is Europe's saviour. Googling them fails to produce any results other than those related to their own website. Their membership may well consist of two men and a dog. Nevertheless I've signed up as a member - given my beliefs I feel it would be an act of moral turpitude to do otherwise.

1812 reprised

Back in the late forties, the teachers at my infant school in Somerset used a series of books called the Beacon Readers to teach us to read. Appropriately for a rural community, the books were about the various animals living on a farm, and for years I had fond memories of those vividly written texts which introduced me to the magical world of fiction.
   When I was in my mid-twenties I went to visit some relatives in Frome. To  my astonished delight I saw the distinctive covers of a Beacon Reader on their bookshelves: their son was at primary school and, getting on for twenty years after I'd left infant school, Somerset County Council was still using the same reading scheme. I eagerly opened the book to reacquaint myself with those characters from my childhood - Orwell's Boxer and Napoleon were mere cardboard cut-outs in comparison. And I read:

'Mr Grumps is a goat. Mr Grumps ate an apple. Mr Grumps has a pain.' 

It was then that I realised the truth of Iser and the Reader-Response theorists' fundamental tenet: a text is a transaction between author and reader. Such is the power of a small child's imagination that he can transmute the base metal of the lamest words into narrative gold, scatter fairy-dust on plodding pedagogical prose, make

… plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Alas, as we get older our imaginations wither and we need detailed descriptions of places and people to make a story come alive. And maybe the gods have decided that at my advanced age even more help is required. As predicted in a previous post I have at last got round to reading War and Peace, and am thoroughly enjoying it. I only wish I still had the imagination of a five year old: I'd have been spared Steve Jobs - newly arrived in Valhalla - persuading the gods to turn Tolstoy's novel into an Enhanced Reality app. For the past fortnight - apart from one day - it has snowed continuously; we are running dangerously low on oil to heat water; when the electricity fails, as it did yesterday evening, the pump doesn't work so we have no central heating and we have to stumble around the freezing house by candlelight; and, worst of all, our attempt to retreat from Moscow Montefalcone to our native land for Quinn's birthday is not just hampered by General Winter but has been made impossible.

  If only I'd decided to read Our Man in Havana instead!

Not the only weirdo in the village.

A couple of years ago in one of my posts I announced the groundbreaking discovery that inanimate objects may have a mind of their own.
 An article in today's Observer reveals that I'm not alone in my lunacy. In his latest book, The Science Delusion, the erstwhile Cambridge Biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, 'take[s] some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make[s] them into questions: .... "Is matter unconscious?" '
   Sadly, although Sheldrake is a former fellow of Clare College, his views have zero credibility in the scientific community, so scuppering my chances of international recognition as a pioneer of the greatest revolution in our understanding of the world since Darwin published The Origin of Species.

Placating the plebs.

It's placate the plebs time for the posh-boys' government. First Stephen Hester was pressurised into foregoing his bonus of a little under a million pounds, and then Fred Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood. So all we ordinary folk can rest assured that although our nominal incomes may be frozen and our real incomes are shrinking we are all in it together. The Establishment is dealing firmly with the greedy or the dishonourable. Jeffrey Archer is no doubt penning a speech to the Lords celebrating the fact.
  Hester now has to scrape by on his basic salary of £1.2 million. Thank heavens, as the This is Money website points out, Fred still has his taxpayer-funded pension of £342,500 a year to help him cope with his humiliation.