Wednesday, October 26, 2022

What Liz Truss Didn't Say

Records, it is said, are made to be broken.

Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after a mere 44 days in office, thereby setting a new record for the shortest tenure in that office. Announcing her departure, Truss spoke, according to The New York Times

almost wistfully about how the collapse of her economic plans meant she would never achieve her goal of creating a “low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”(1)

More important than what Truss said was what she didn’t say—what she didn’t have as goals for the United Kingdom and its people.


Britain, Derek Thompson, notes

is pretty poor for a rich place. U.K. living standards and wages have fallen significantly behind those of Western Europe. By some measures, in fact, real wages in the U.K. are lower than they were 15 years ago, and will likely be even lower next year.(2)

Britons are suffering not only from meager wages but from a breakdown in those services that make for a decent life. There are crises in the delivery of vocational, education, medical, dental, and ambulance services throughout the UK. Here are just two headlines from today’s Guardian:

‘I’m not very well and I need heat’: at the warm bank in Wolverhampton


Seven in 10 NHS trusts in England failing to hit cancer referrals target(3)


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But instead of mentioning concern for those concrete essences known as human beings, Liz Truss could only be wistful about an abstraction: the economy. 


In the countdown to her departure as Prime Minister, Truss was outlasted by a head of lettuce.(4) Depending on what definition you wish to employ (“a time of inexperience or indiscretion” or “a heyday, when a person is/was at the peak of their abilities, while not necessarily a youth”) Truss’ tenure as PM was—or was not—her salad days. 


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Rishi Sunak has become Truss’ successor at 10 Downing Street. And what did he proclaim when he threw his hat into the ring to succeed her?

I want to fix our economy.(5)


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(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/world/europe/uk-brexit-conservatives.html 

(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/

(3) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news

(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/why-liz-truss-resigned-britain-political-instability/671805/


(5) https://fortune.com/2022/10/23/rishi-sunak-uk-prime-minister-bid-fix-economy/

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Language Follies

We dedicate this blog post to some examples of strangeness, goofiness, and just plain language craziness.


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Dear Lipton Tea:




Thank you for giving me a reason not to buy your product. Since water is as good as your tea for hydrating, I can just drink the water and save money by not buying the tea.


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Wegmans sets a new standard for a product:




Imagine: Cheese made from cheese!


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From Newspapers:




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Rock Bottom Translation: 


When Joseph Papp decided in 1976 to produce a revival of The Threepenny Opera, he ditched the Marc Blitzstein translation that was used in the very successful 1950s Theatre de Lys production, which ran for almost seven years.


In the new translation we get




instead of


There was a time

And now it’s all gone by

When we two lived together

She and I.


It should be elementary that the first priority of a translator is to render the original text into the idiomatic speech of the second language. So how could an abomination like “I and she” be any way acceptable? Brendan Gill, in his New Yorker review, says that the translation was made by “scholars.” 


Scholars who obviously don't speak English!


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The Classic:


I once saw a sign in a barbershop window which read:


We specialize in all kinds of haircuts.




 

Friday, October 7, 2022

I'm a Good Guy

Recently The Guardian posted the number 486 million dollars.* That is how much the famous smiley face figure earned the Smiley Company last year from products blazoned with the yellow face. 



The company has 458 licensees in 158 countries for its trademarked version of the face. The company, needless to say, is celebrating its fiftieth year in business happily.

According to The Guardian, the smiley has been around in one form or another since the 1950s. 

A yellow and black one first showed its face in 1961, when it was printed on a promotional sweatshirt by the New York radio station WMCA to promote the news-talk show Good Guys.

I can’t speak to that origin of the WMCA sweatshirt, as I wasn’t tuned into that station until later in the decade, when WMCA and WABC-AM were the two biggest rock-and-roll stations in the Big Apple. They competed mightily against each other, attempting to be the first station to broadcast the newest recording by the Beatles and other mega-rock groups. 


I mainly listened to Cousin Brucie and his colleagues at WABC. However, I did defect to WMCA for its overnight show hosted by DJ Dean Anthony. Anthony’s shtick was to play a game called Actors and Actresses, the object of which was for listeners to call in to the station and try to identify a thespian by his or her initials. Was CC Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chase, Charles Coburn, or someone else? Anthony worked from a list that was submitted by a listener—who, for his or her efforts, was awarded a WMCA Good Guy Sweatshirt.


In the fall of 1967, I submitted a list that was selected by Anthony, and I duly received a Good Guy sweatshirt—which, 55 years later, I still have (although it has shrunk a great deal and now comes down barely to waist level).



Now, the interesting thing is this: On the night that Anthony featured my list, my brother, who had been gallivanting around town until the early hours of the morning, called into WMCA and, without knowing it was my list, was able to name a lesser-known British actor, whose identity had stumped many other callers. 


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And what has a half-century of change brought us?


WMCA now features “a Christian radio format consisting of teaching and talk programs.”


WABC has a daily show hosted by Rudy Giuliani.


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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/25/fifty-years-and-500m-dollars-the-happy-business-of-the-smiley-symbol