‘Basic’: the biggest insult of 2015

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basic-insult-of-2015You know what it means to call someone “basic”, right? You are basic if you pride yourself on possessions or preferences that you consider to be cool or aspirational, but which are in fact commonplace or obvious. Being basic is liking what it is typical to like.

On the evening of Sunday 7 June, an easyJet flight from Bodrum, Turkey landing at Luton airport was met by police who escorted passenger Kate Moss from the plane for disruptive behaviour. The internet discussed little else for days, for this was a story with many talking points.

Kate Moss flies easyJet, for a start. Kate Moss carries vodka in her handbag (allegedly). And controversy: was Moss throwing her weight around on the flight, demanding attention from the crew because of her celebrity? Or did easyJet throw the rulebook at Moss because she was a woman in the public eye who had had a few drinks?

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Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice

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What’s heartbreaking about the trend for destructive speech patterns is that yours is the most transformational generation – you’re disowning your power.

This article is from theguardian.com by Naomi Wolf

vocal-fryPatriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in the form of Internalisation B, making sure they don’t get too far too fast. The latest example: the most empowered generation of women ever – today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain – is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices. Read more →

English is not the lingo of the successful British exporter

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Our reluctance to learn other languages is not just arrogant: it’s holding back the UK’s economic performance.

Hollande-and-CameronThis article is from theguardian.com by Katie Allen.

As François Hollande reshuffled the French cabinet last week, he was handed a report warning of hundreds of thousands more job losses. For a president grappling with political crisis and record unemployment it will have made grim bedtime reading after a day spent revamping his government for the second time this year.

The warning came from Jacques Attali, former special economic adviser to François Mitterrand, who had been asked by Hollande to look into ways the global reach of the French language could help drag the country out of its economic quagmire. Read more →

As forests are cleared and species vanish, there’s one other loss: a world of languages

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A new report shows a direct link between disappearing habitats and the loss of languages. One in four of the world’s 7,000 spoken tongues is now at risk of falling silent for ever as the threat to cultural biodiversity grows.

This article is from theguardian.com by John Vidal.

Nenets-reindeer-herdswoma-014Benny Wenda from the highlands of West Papua speaks only nine languages these days. In his village of Pyramid in the Baliem valley, he converses in Lani, the language of his tribe, as well as Dani, Yali, Mee and Walak. Elsewhere, he speaks Indonesian, Papua New Guinean Pidgin, coastal Bayak and English. Read more →

Be a user, not a consumer: how capitalism has changed our language

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Capitalism is altering our language – and Raymond Williams saw it coming more than 50 years ago.

This article is from theguardian.com by Owen Hatherley.

books-008According to a report by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, English has become a peculiarly capitalist language – though they don’t quite put it like that. They used the somewhat blunt instrument of feeding 1.5m English-language books into Ngram Viewer, a tool that catalogues phrase usage, in order to count the frequency that words were used. The results proved that over the last 200 years there has been an ever-increasing use of particularly acquisitive words: “get”, “unique”, “individual”, “self”, “choose”; while over the same period “give” and “obliged” decreased. The pattern was only broken briefly in the relatively egalitarian years between the 40s and 70s. For the researchers, this shows the results of the English-speaking countries moving from “a predominantly rural, low-tech society to a predominantly urban, hi-tech society”. Read more →