{"id":658,"date":"2011-03-22T16:08:58","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T15:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=658"},"modified":"2011-03-23T18:29:47","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T17:29:47","slug":"war-on-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"War on language? Or cooking the books?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 2px;\"><figure id=\"attachment_676\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-676\" style=\"width: 102px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Gove.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Gove.png\" alt=\"Michael Gove\" title=\"Michael Gove\" width=\"102\" height=\"200\" class=\"size-full wp-image-676\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-676\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mr Gove - or...<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\n<figure id=\"attachment_677\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-677\" style=\"width: 87px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/cookery.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/cookery.png\" alt=\"Cookery books\" title=\"Cookery books\" width=\"87\" height=\"200\" class=\"size-full wp-image-677\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-677\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">...cookery books? See below....<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<p>Steve Bell in <a href='http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/cartoon\/2011\/mar\/22\/steve-bell-gaddafi-target-cartoon'>today&#8217;s Guardian<\/a> comments on the confusion about whether Gaddafi is a  &#8216;target&#8217; in the current action over Libya. I&#8217;ll leave that to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidewords.org\/turnsofphrase\/tp-com3.htm\">commentariat<\/a> and offer instead a few minor skirmishes on the fringes of the linguistic battlefield:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>A new quango limps into life<\/strong> Yesterday, the recruitment site for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.standardsandtestingrecruitment.com\/\">Standards and Testing Agency Executive<\/a> had &#8216;Lorem Ipsum&#8230; Find out more&#8217; on its home page; sadly, they&#8217;ve now corrected this charming touch, thereby removing what, I have been fascinated to discover, is a (kind of) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lipsum.com\/\">quotation from Cicero<\/a>: &#8216;Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself&#8217;. (Rhetoric again: there seem at present to be plenty of people anxious to pursue pain &#8211; oh, wait a minute, it&#8217;s the <em>poor<\/em> what get the pain.) This quango is, after all, supposed to be about <em>standards<\/em>&#8230;.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Labeling and gaming<\/strong> Yesterday&#8217;s print edition of the <em>Media Guardian<\/em> had an advertisement from the <a href=\"http:\/\/marketingagencies.org.uk\/\">Marketing Agencies Association<\/a> headed &#8216;Life&#8217;s a game that marketers need to start playing&#8217;. The call-out quotation spelt <em>labeled<\/em> the American way: is that what marketers do, or this part of the war on language? Of course, the marketing people haven&#8217;t found anything new; as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.literaryconnections.co.uk\/resources\/lit.html#local\">Ludwig Wittgenstein<\/a> said many years ago, language is a game of two halves. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Brave marketeers<\/strong> Talking of alternative spellings, marketers are sometimes called <em>marketeers<\/em>, which makes them sound rather brave, dashing and &#8211; by association with <em>buccaneers<\/em> and <em>privateers<\/em> &#8211; also cavalier, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Thanks, as ever, to the OED, I learn that <em>marketeer<\/em> goes back to least 1665. It also helpfully tells me that &#8216;in many of the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implication, as in <em>crotcheteer, garreteer, pamphleteer, pulpiteer, sonneteer<\/em>.&#8217;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Pure Kant?<\/strong> In Sunday&#8217;s <em>Observer<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2011\/mar\/20\/thinking-impossible-philosopy-gary-gutting?INTCMP=SRCH\">Christopher Bray<\/a> provides an upmarket example of the put-down rhetorical question:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Kant isn&#8217;t much fun either, of course, but which of us would deny the certainty-subverting genius of the &#8220;first critique&#8221;?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Come on, hands up: which of us?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cooking the books?<\/strong> One from the literature front: today&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/education\/educationnews\/8396823\/Michael-Gove-pupils-should-read-50-books-a-year.html\">Telegraph<\/a> reports Michael Gove&#8217;s latest wheeze: &#8216;pupils should read 50 books a year&#8217;. Splendid! But why did the paper choose to illustrate this with an image of old cookery books, one ironically titled <em>Modern Cookery<\/em>? Is Mikey <a href=\"http:\/\/dfe.gov.uk\/inthenews\/pressnotices\/a0075687\/gibb-admissions-statistics-show-there-are-too-few-good-schools\">cooking the books<\/a> again? Does he want a generation of cooks and scullery maids? The Secretary of State himself appears on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/education\/educationnews\/8395784\/Children-should-read-50-books-a-year-says-Gove.html\">second version<\/a> of this same story on the <em>Telegraph<\/em> website, pulling that face of his (&#8216;Yes, this is a bit of joke, but what larks!&#8217;). He&#8217;s not actually holding any books either, just a clutch of files &#8211; probably containing cunning plans to take us forward to the age of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&#038;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26keywords%3Dmolesworth%26index%3Dblended&#038;tag=literaryconne-21&#038;linkCode=ur2&#038;camp=1634&#038;creative=19450\">Nigel Molesworth<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.co.uk\/e\/ir?t=literaryconne-21&#038;l=ur2&#038;o=2\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/>. It seems the Telegraph marketeers are intent on gaming with their content. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some minor skirmishes and broken shins on the field of language: Cicero, Wittgenstein, Kant and marketeers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8,3],"tags":[82,86,106,107,91],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-education","category-words","tag-gove","tag-language","tag-libya","tag-marketing","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}