The Queen's Speech

Halley's Comet appears approximately every three-quarters of a century.

Periodical cicadas (commonly known as the seventeen-year locusts) return, well, after seventeen years.

A more recently discovered (by yours truly) cyclical event is QEA (for Queen's English Anxiety), which seems to occur at intervals of a half-dozen years.

The first recorded occurrence of QEA was in the year 2000, upon the publication by J. Harrington, S. Palethorpe, and C. Watson of "Does the Queen Speak the Queen's English" in Nature magazine (the article itself being a popularization of the trio's findings originally published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association in an article entitled "Monophthongal vowel changes in received pronunciations: An acoustic analysis of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts." The following excerpt from the abstract of the Nature article explains what the trio did and what they discovered:

. . . we analyse[d] vowel sounds from the annual Christmas messages broadcast by HRH Queen Elizabeth II during the period between the 1950s and 1980s. Our analysis reveals that the Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy.

And that was the cue for the launching of QEA. Media from London to Los Angeles rose up to the full height of cutesy-sarkiness. A Guardian (UK) editorial:

The Queen's English is modulating.

“My husband and I have had, y'know, a bituva tricky year, one way and annuvva. I mean, what with Chiles getting in all that hot wa'er about GM food and that, and then the flippin' Guardian sticking it to us with its, su'ov, anti-discrimination, Act uv Se'ulment thing. Anyway, bottom line: have a wikkid Christmas - plenty of turkey on the old plates, a few jars with your mates, you know the drill. You should all be well sorted.”. . . we suspect calculation here as well as mere social change. All today's most popular figures . . . speak mockney. The Queen is simply trying to get in on the act. They are nothing if not adaptable, these royals. Ain't that the truth, yer madge?

A story in the Los Angeles Times began:

Ho, ho, ho, Henry Higgins, the queen's [sic] English ain't wot it used to be.

And there basically the matter stood, as QEA tiptoed away to wherever cycles go to rest when they can no longer be observed by human witnesses. Until six years later, when Jonathan Harrington, one of the original trio of researchers, roused the QEA beast to wakefulness with an article entitled “An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts” in the Journal of Phonetics. As Mark Liberman reported at the time (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003859.html):

The papers have been buzzing with news about the Queen's English. These reports vary in tone and content, but many of them bang the drum for the decline of civilization.

Liberman went on to list a number of periodicals from across the globe that contributed to the QEA:

Roger Dobson, “Speaking the Queen’s English: Me ‘ubby and I, innit”, The Independent, 12/3/2006; 

Mark Prissell, “One’s voice ain’t that posh”, The Sun, 12/4/2006; 

Neil Tweedie, “How the Queen’s English has grown more like ours”, Telegraph, 12/5/2006; 

Catherine Jones, “One thinks one has lorst one’s posh voice”, Western Mail, 12/5/2006. 

Sajeda Momin, “How the Queen’s English has changed with the times”, Daily News & Analysis (India), 12/5/2006; 

Justin Lees, “Royal Vowels crossing Jordan”, The Daily Telegraph (Canada), 12/5/2006. 

“My word—the queen’s English is slipping”, UPI (reprinted in the Daily Indian, 12/4/2006);  

“Study: Queen Sounds More Like Subjects”, AP (reprinted in the LA Times, 12/4/2006).  

But as it became yesterday’s news, QEA slipped away to its place of hibernation.

Until 2012, when, six years having passed, it was time for its cyclical return. Not an academic this time, but a thespian aroused it—Helen Mirren. On September 21,The Daily Telegraph, the canary warning of the decline of all things not Tory in the coal mine of British civilization, headlined its report of an interview the actress conducted with the Daily Mail  (the other renowned canary which warns of the decline of all things not Tory in the coal mine of British civilization) as follows:

Queen's English no longer spoken by Queen, says Helen Mirren
The Queen's English has long been deemed the correct way to speak but, according to Dame Helen Mirren, even her majesty is slipping

Now to be fair to Dame Helen (who I admire enormously—see if you can find a copy of the BBC version of As You Like It; she positively glows as Rosalind disguised as Ganymede), she is not quoted in the Daily Mail saying the words that theTelegraph has put into her mouth. But for the Telegraph, Mirren’s actual words were enough to call forth a first rate Queen’s English Alarm:

Her voice has changed, and I can use that –she had a terribly posh voice when she was young. But now even the Queen, while she isn't quite dropping the ends of her lines –though her grandsons do! – there's a tiny bit of estuary [English] creeping in there.

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It doesn’t take more than a few seconds’ thought for any intelligent being to recognize that the idea that the Queen’s (or King’s) English is the gold standard of the tongue is patently absurd. The Queen (or King) of England may be the head of state of the United Kingdom and the head of the Church of England (thanks to Henry VIII), but is not the head of the democracy of the English language. Can anyone argue that German-speaking George I was the determiner of “correct” English? Or the Dutchman William of Orange? And how about those Medieval centuries when first a Norman French clan and then a plain old French mob ruled the land? I suppose we can even toss in the Scotsman James I here. 

It is unfortunate, though, that so many people have been bamboozled by the belief that a catchphrase (the Queen’s English) is a rule of language.

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Note: The Queen's English Society ceased operations earlier this year.

Smelling Salts

Miss Manners, Hints from Heloise, Dear Abby---forget them! The most helpful people in the world are the folks at the Canadian sports website TSN.ca (we looked in at them back on February 4, 2012, “The Life Worth Living"). 

TORONTO - The Toronto Blue Jays and Yunel Escobar will hold a news conference at Yankee Stadium live on TSN.ca at 3:30pm et today to discuss an alleged homophobic slur that was written on the shortstop's eye-black over the weekend.     ... 

Several pictures posted online show Escobar with the message written in Spanish in his eye-black, a type of sticker players wear under their eyes to reduce the sun's glare.

The words under the 29-year-old Cuban's eyes were "TU ERE MARICON" which can be translated as "You are a ------."

Okay, I should have posted a sarcasm alert. 

Here we are in the 21^st century and an arm of the media devoted to all sorts of macho doings (ice hockey, football in all its incarnations, boxing, etc.) is so much like a Victorian maiden aunt that it can’t even give us a letter to work with. Some other newspaper and magazine websites at least let us play charades (First letter—“F”) or fill in the blanks (what comes between “F” and “T”?). But let’s give TSN some credit; they gave all the Latinos north of the border the right dope. So far as I could tell, the mighty Washington Post would only venture as far as “gay slur.”

Report things as they truly are? One would think that the self-styled paper of record, The New York Times would feel that it was its duty to do so. Unfortunately, the NYT is the prissiest of the prissy. Consider the opening lines of a 2008 book review entitled “Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity” (My god! It’s everywhere—and we can’t print it!):

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

The Times couldn’t even allow itself to print the title of the book under review! And in the text itself the paper had to resort to using one-half of the dreaded word as a euphemism for "that single obscenity." Basically what the Times was saying was: “Here is “bull” plus four letters—figure it out in your own dirty mind.” I imagine that other readers of the review reacted as I did when I originally read it over four years ago. They worked it out in their filthy little heads, and, when they got up off the floor, continued reading.

Why in the 21^st century (I’ve just had a glance at the calendar again) can’t these people treat their readers as adults? We know all the curse words and the slanderous ones. If the media would report them, we would look them in the eye on the printed page or computer screen without getting the vapors.

But maybe I am wrong--and media giants such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph (UK), and ESPN are correct in thinking otherwise--in assuming a level of cosmopolitan sophistication on the part of their readers and online viewers.

Perhaps the place where 21^st century adulthood is to be found is on the pages of papers such as the Lethbridge Herald of Alberta, Canada, whose 15,000 readers probably didn’t fall over in a swoon when they read:

Escobar had written under his eyes "TU ERE MARICON," which can be translated as "You are a faggot.”

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And Now . . . Homage to Welles

“Joe, the turtle boy . . . He walks and eats and sleeps just like a turtle but talks the English language as well as you and I. And shaves himself with a safety razor. And as an added attraction, folks, Joe plays the zither” 

Carnival barker’s spiel in I’m No Angel (1933)

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How many American moviegoers in 1933 knew what a zither was is uncertain. But just over a decade-and-a-half later probably most people (and not just moviegoers) in the United States and Great Britain did know. For the theme from the movie The Third Man  (1949), played by Anton Karas on that instrument, became a smash hit in both countries, including a spell of eleven weeks as the number one recording in the US. Set in an ally-occupied Vienna that is still hung over from the war, the movie itself, directed by Carol Reed and adapted by Graham Greene from his novel of the same name, is one of the great noir mystery/thrillers of all time.

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Title characters of films and plays come in all varieties; they can even not come at all (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot) or be dead the whole way through (Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry). It takes about an hour before moviegoers catch a glimpse of the title character of The Third Man, and even then the first things they see are his highly-polished winged-tip shoes; the rest of him is cloaked in darkness. When a sudden circle of light penetrates the recess in which he is hidden, his face is seen in semi-profile. The cheeks are puffy, the texture soft and smooth, and there is the look of an incipient doubleness to the chin. The title character is Harry Lime; the actor, Orson Welles.

All Welles’ physical features that were so wrong for the itinerant Irish seaman in his own film The Lady From Shanghai (see my previous blog entry) are absolutely perfect for the black- marketeer Harry Lime. A black-marketeer—but not a criminal at the scuffling end of the game. He is an entrepreneur, dressed in a comfortable overcoat, a fashionable hat, and soft gloves (as well as those highly-polished wing-tips). And he has the physical complaint of successful businessman—dyspepsia (he regrets that his favorite tablets are no longer available in Europe).

Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotten), a naïf lured to Vienna by his old pal Lime, knows Harry to be something of a rogue, and he can’t understand why Major Calloway of the British Army (Trevor Howard) is so keen to nab him. After all, what’s a little hustling of stolen tires and such like? Except it’s stolen penicillin, which is then watered down to ineffectualness. The results to patients, especially the children, are disastrous.

When Holly does get to meet Harry in the Prater amusement park, they ride the famous Ferris Wheel to the top, and Harry, looking down to the ground, speaks of those Holly has called “his victims”:

“Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.”

Harry Lime is the type of role that Welles was born to play—no phony accent, no pretense of a past murder with his own hands. No, his voice displaying a jauntiness touched with an edge of menace, the soft-featured and well-tailored Harry Lime is Welles at his white-collared best--an entrepreneurial criminal whose reading of history* is the most famous set piece in the film:

“Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.“ 

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*Supposedly written by Welles himself.

Only 65 Years Late: A Review

The 1947 film The Lady From Shanghai, written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles is rightly celebrated for the startling inventiveness of its Hall of Mirrors dénouement, most especially striking when Everett Sloane, playing a crippled lawyer, Arthur Bannister, multiply appears supported by his two canes, stiffleggedly lurching forward like a wooden soldier. However, despite those advocates who proclaim the movie’s status as a masterpiece of film noir, the truth is that it is no better than dull gray.

Welles had his role as director left off the credits list, probably miffed because the studio excised about an hour from the original running time. But the problem with the film is not what was cut out, but what was left in. And that begins with Welles himself, who took on the hero’s role (Michael O’Hara, also known as “Black Irish”) and provided a sporadic voiceover for the Hibernian merchant sailor, delivered not in a vaudeville Oyrish, but in an aren’t-we-all-poets-at-heart-we-folks-from the-land-of-the-little-people voice, which might have been conjured up by Eugene O’Neill only in the throes of a bad spell of insomnia. And then there’s Welles’ countenance--the smoothness of his jawline, the softness of his cheeks. O’Hara is a man who has lived a life on the open seas, has killed a man in Spain, and done time in prisons in several countries, while his portrayer doesn’t look as if he spent even one hour in after-class detention in grade school.

The movie gets going with O’Hara spotting Bannister’s wife, Elsa, (Rita Hayworth) riding in a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park. “Once I’d seen her—but once I’d seen her—I was not in my right mind for quite some time.” If that was the case, he was the mildest romantic madman in history. He backs away when he very quickly learns she is married, and rather reluctantly allows himself to become a crewman on Bannister’s yacht after the lawyer hunts him down at the seaman’s hiring hall.

Hayworth, herself, is, well, not really herself in the movie. Her famous long red hair has been cropped and dyed a standard Hollywood blondish. She’s pretty, but Hollywood-standardish pretty. The movie offers a few shots of her in a bathing suit, but no sex appeal oozes from her. Supposedly,  Elsa Bannister has a past filled with hard knocks and hard living (out in the Far East; apparently that’s why she’s the Lady from Shanghai), but as with Welles, there’s no sign that grit and abrasion have had any effect on Hayworth’s features. And her voice has that dead affectlessness you hear in middling dubbing jobs. 

As the yacht makes its leisurely way from New York City to San Francisco Bay via the Panama Canal and a longish sequence in Acapulco, there’s not very much noir or tension but lots of sunlight and water. Except for Sloane, the rest of the actors read off their lines in the typical Hollywood character part manner: a fake Brooklyn accent here, a curl of the lip and a snarl there. There’s a courtroom scene late in the day, which offers second-rate Three Stooges decorum, and a few crowd scenes that Welles directs with the aplomb of a bullock organizing events at Pamplona.    

In sum, in this hash of a film there’s no real sense of danger lurking in the meeting (there’s no mating) of Elsa and O’Hara. You’d think with a good-looking wife, an inadequate husband, and a rootless stranger you’d have the makings of a great film noir—and you do: it’s called The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was made the year before.

Two Steps Back

I had a dream last night. I was at my parents’ house, went into the bathroom, reached out with my right hand for the light switch, and ended up pushing against a plastic rectangle where the switch should have been. Responding to my darns and drats, my father poked first his head, then his arm around the door, and with a finger pushed a small lever at the top of the plastic disc—and then there was light!

I mention this dream, though it had no basis in reality, because it seems to perfectly reflect my recent discovery about myself: that I am some kind of semi-Luddite. I say “semi-Luddite” because I am not against new technology, only against upgrades to existing technology.

Take the automobile, for example. I have been leasing the same make of car (and mostly the same model) for many years now. Every three years or so the dealer and/or manufacturer presents me with an offer that provides me with a more expensive car with more horsepower and more features than the one I am driving and all at a lower leasing price (how they manage that, I don’t know, but I remember the punchline of an old joke: “We juggle the books”). When I took possession of the latest incarnation (no pun intended), one of the first things I did was to carry six CDs to the car to load the audio system as I had the previous model. After placing the first disc into the slot and watching it load, I waited for the signal to load the second. No signal. I examined the dashboard carefully for a secret button that would allow me to load the other discs, only to discover that the six-disc changer was gone, its space occupied by the GPS system and an on-board computer that I have no idea how to use. OK, I’ll put my hand up for GPS responsibility. I opted for it, for a few bucks more—even though I never go anywhere. I have programmed it exactly once, and even then I knew where I was going; I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss my turn-off, the sign for which is a only slightly bigger than a dishrag. Mission accomplished, I hopped into the car for the return journey, and got only as far as the traffic light at the end of the street, when the GPS female told me to turn around and go back to the address I had just left. I ignored her, but since I had no idea how to throttle her throat, for the rest of the trip home she nagged and nagged, telling me at every highway exit to make a right turn and circle back in the opposite direction. (My mistake was to think that the program would be canceled once I got to my original destination and shut off the engine.)

When I finally got home, I pulled out the War and Peace tome that passes for an owner’s manual and tried to figure out how to turn the shrew off. First, I had to pass something of a Miller Analogies Test, trying to discover which of the half-dozen or so drawings of steering wheel configurations matched mine. Was it the one with the crescent-shaped buttons above the square ones? The round ones alongside the rectangles? It took me twenty minutes—the same time as my return trip—to find the right voodoo curse to banish the disembodied voice.

If the automobile is the prime example of technology offering vast amounts of dead trees to explain to new users how it’s all supposed to work, the opposite is the computer. I recently bought a new laptop, and the only two instructions on the napkin-sized accordion set-up folder depicted (a) how to put the battery in and (b) how to attach the AC cord. DUH! But if new computers do not arrive with massive instruction books, they, like new cars, bear gifts that one should beware of. For every advance, something else goes missing. Of course, one only finds out what’s not there any more once one tries to place all one’s defaults on the new computer. Where’s my favorite typeface (Byington)? Gone, even though I’ve used the same Office 2000 software installation disc as on previous computers. Why can’t I print back to front, although I’ve made that my default in three different places? And why can’t I email directly from Word or Open Office, as I could before?

Ah, but the new computer offered one goody: I received with my new purchase a certificate that will allow me, for only fifteen dollars, to upgrade from the Windows 7 operating system to Windows 8 when the latter is introduced this fall.

Like hell!

Face Up To It

I used to be a news junkie. Whenever the news came on TV, I was planted in front of the tube. That is, until the day a reporter for Eyewitness News went to Grand Central Station and started sticking his microphone under the noses of commuters rushing to their trains. He asked them their opinions about something or other that was at issue in the New York State legislature (I have no memory of what the issue was, whether it was ever resolved, or whether—probably the more likely situation— decades later the legislature is still trying to resolve it). As each succeeding opiner mouthed his foolishness into the mic, I got more and more infuriated. “You moron!” I yelled at the TV. “You idiot!” . . . But then I stopped. Who’s the bigger idiot, I suddenly thought, them or me—for sitting there listening to them? I jumped up, clicked off the TV, and have seldom watched a news broadcast since.

I now get most of my news on-line, one of my favorite sites being that of the Guardian over in the UK. I have been moved many times over the past few years to add an on-line comment to one of the paper’s blogs or articles. However, while many of the other readers had cool avatars to append to their user names, I was stuck with a generic.

 Eventually, I decided to get my own avatar and use it on the Guardian’s site. I thought of a few good ones, but I was foiled every time I tried to upload an image into my profile. So, I just shrugged and contented myself with genericism. Until I recently re-discovered a card that I had received years ago. The image on the card would be my avatar. And this time, I vowed, I would not be foiled. I fought my way through the imaging and uploading process, and finally launched my own avatar.

The caricature is of Al “Jazzbeaux” (or, earlier, “Jazzbo”) Collins (who sent me the card), a disc jockey on WNEW (New York) during the 1950s. The words on the card, which became one of Collins’ catchphrases, were his adaptation of some classic dialogue in the film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: “I Don’t Got To Show You No Stinkin Badges.”

Collins had a late-night spot on WNEW, claiming to be broadcasting not from a regular studio but from the “Purple Grotto” many stories below ground. He was accompanied in the purple aura by several strange denizens, including Harrison, a Tasmanian owl, and in a small lake a purple octopus, whose name, if it had one, I don’t remember. One night, when Jazzbeaux was doing the overnight show, he played a recording by a new female vocal quartet, The Chordettes. After the first spin of “Mr Sandman” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDXT7wC9jrc ) he said something like, “That’s nice; I think I’ll play it again.” And he did—for a total of 55 times during the wee morning hours.

The recording became the number one hit in the country.

He was fired. 

   

It's a Fair Cop

A Brief Guide to British TV Detective Shows

The detective will be moody, irascible, and/or conflicted over family issues.

The detective’s boss will be a paper-pushing dolt.

At some point the paper-pushing dolt will take the moody, irascible, and/or conflicted-over-family-issues detective off the case.

All houses and flats in Britain seem to be furnished with a mail flap in the front door whose purpose is not to receive mail (the victims never get any) but (a) to allow villains to pour petrol through it and set fire to the house or flat or (b) to allow some nosy person to peer into the dwelling and discover a body in the hallway.

If the house or flat is not burned down or has no body inside but needs to be investigated, a spare key will be found (for a house) underneath a flowerpot to the left of the door or (for a flat) on the lintel above the door. Amazingly, no thief ever has figured this out.

If the detective decides that the key to the case is locked in someone’s computer, the detective will secretly access the machine and on the fifth try will successfully guess the owner’s password.

If the location of the action is either Scotland or Yorkshire, no subtitles will be available.

Note: None of the above holds true for Agatha Christie stories. Instead, substitute lots of drinking of tea (for the Miss Marples) or tisanes (for the Hercule Poirots).  

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Bonus Mini-Guide to Danish TV Detective Stories:

At some point everybody will have been thrown into jail.