Dr Johnson's Aardvark

It is variously said, including in Blackadder I think, that Samuel Johnson's Dictionary both does and does not include the words 'aardvark' and 'sausage'. Well, having finally got around to doing a little research I can confirm that 'aardvark' is not there but 'sausage' is.

This is perhaps not surprising, since, although the Dutch were in southern African over a hundred years before Dr Johnson published his magnum opus, and had presumably given their own name to the animal by then, the word did not enter the English language until British settlers arrived at the beginning of the 19thC. The earliest quote in the OED is from 1833, and curiously, the second edition of the OED (1989) still considers it to be a non-naturalized word, and hyphenates it (as aard-vark). The taxonomic information it gives is also known now to be highly inaccurate, since it is not a close relative of the anteater at all, but rather it belongs, as confirmed by DNA analysis, to the fascinating superorder Afrotheria, which also, rather surprisingly, includes the elephants, shrews, tenrecs, manatees, dugongs and hiraxes. Lots of rapid change going on there.

'Sausage' is recorded in English from the 15thC (the product is much older, and probably the word as well) and comes from the Latin salsicus-a, via the Vulgar Latin and the Norman French, whence the conversion of the lateral to a close back vowel (something similar happens in some London speech, where 'balls' becomes /bouz/).

I can't find a reliable etymological dictionary of Dutch or Afrikaans, to see how early the word 'aardvark' is, but it is safe to assume that it was coined in the late 17thC. All of which explains why I never get anything done, since a casual mention of a word has got me spending half the afternoon researching all this. The good thing is that, being 'Homo blogens', I don't have to let it go to waste.

The Brussels Press: Not Going Native at all

The EU Observer is always a fascinating read, because of the way everything it says (it doesn't really report anything in the traditional, factual sense) is interpreted in the light of its unshakeable belief that the EU is the most important thing in the world and that its very existence is a matter of unspeakable joy. It (the paper I mean) describes itself, hilariously, as

• Editorially independent, open-minded and balanced.
• The trusted source of EU related news and information across the European Union.

As a taster I offer you the following items from today's edition, if an online medium can be said to have editions.

- New EU laws to target Facebook: people are interacting without rules, they are daring to use new ideas and technologies without waiting for the EU to tell them how to do it; reality must be paused indefintely while Barroso and company have meetings to decide what they must try to stop us all doing in the name of something or other, and when they finally produce a law that no one seems to want or need (how many real governments are bothered about this?) they will be so far out of date that it will not even serve the purpose it was supposed to have.

What of the ninety-two percent of the world's population that does not live in the EU? How can they possibly use Facebook without the laws which the unelected bureaucrats at the commission propose to inflict upon us? What will they do? Just muddle through, one imagines. What a terrible way to have to live. That 92%, of course, includes the founders, owners and operators of Facebook, so if the EU makes it too expensive or complicated to offer Facebook over here, they will just stop, and millions of people will have been deprived of something free and harmless which gave them pleasure, because Barroso and company cannot bear the idea, in fact cannot conceive the idea, that something can exist without their permission, and function without their control.

- Single market needs tax co-ordination: 'unfair' tax competition is an old idea in Brussels, and the fact that it can only exist in the mind of a totalitarian paper-pusher with no understanding of freedom, or even of the real world, doesn't stop it reappearing with the inevitability of an unloved season. We normal people think that tax is a painful business that is necessary, to some degree, in order to pay for certain services which we can't all pay for individually for a variety of reasons. Politicians in democracies think that tax is a way of getting money to bribe the people they expect to vote for them and to punish those who they know aren't going to. Leaders of undemocratic countries think of tax as a means of paying for all their palaces and keeping the army loyal. Bureaucrats in Brussels, who don't have to worry about elections, and have no responsibilty for freedom, general well-being, social stability, civil unrest, economic growth or anything else, because when they took all the power from national governments they made sure that the blame for what went wrong stayed firmly where it was, think of tax as a piece in their little game of trying to make everything and everywhere exactly the same. Peace, prosperity, happiness, liberty, history, identity, creativity, progress, even reality may be sacrificed without a thought, as long as harmony can be achieved, at least on paper. The goal, the obsession of the bureaucrat is the simplicity of the paperwork. As long as they can tick the boxes easily and their pensions are safe, nothing outside of them matters in the slightest.

- EU commission justifies Haiti 'visibility' concerns: such is the arrogance of the commissioners that they are actually prepared to sacrifice efficiency of aid relief in Haiti because they are miffed that the US and some other countries, including Britain, are getting more credit for the effort then they are. They are prepared to reduce the relief and divert money to a publicity campaign until EU workers have their own special, distinctive uniform and the EU flag flies over the area. The article linked to includes the desperate attempts by commissioners, who have realized that public opinion isn't entirely with them on this, to pretend that they are not bothered by 'visibility' at all, attempts which are best described by the phrase 'complete and utter pig's ear.' They really do care much more about their image than the desperate state of over a million people whose lives are in immediate and rapidly increasing danger from lack of food, shelter, sanitation and public order. They are beneath contempt. I really don't care whther Catherine Ashton went to Haiti or not. Far better, in fact, that she didn't. She would only have got in the way, demanded that a fortune be spent on travel and security for herself and her entourage, and insisted on preaching to and being photographed with people who had much more urgent and important things to do.

So that's the EU Observer. Thank God for the freedom of the press. Now, if only they had some idea of what to do with it... Perhaps Barroso should tell them what to do. Then again, that's probably the problem.

RIP JD Salinger

I see that J.D. Salinger has just died. I hadn't realised he was still alive. You know how it is with people who are known for something done long ago. He had long been labelled a recluse, although that seems to be metropolitan shorthand for 'lives in the country and and is not slavishly obsessed with getting his photo in the New York Times', or possibly just 'doesn't take journalists as seriously as they take themselves.'

In any case, he was still alive, and is now dead. Thomas Pynchon and Harper Lee are also still alive, but I had to look them up as well.

His great work, by general consensus, and almost his only work of any consequence, is, pof course, 'The Catcher in the Rye,' that handbook for disaffected adolescents through which they try to live experiences and think thoughts that they don't quite know how to have in real life. I wasn't an adolescent when I read it, and my reaction was not quite so unconditional as that of some critics.

It's hard to get an impression of how it felt to read it in 1951, but it was probably fresher and broader in scope than a lot of what people were reading. But even then, compared to the great American writers of a few years before, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and others, it is stiflingly provincial, stuck in its own little self-referential world, wherever the character goes. By contrast, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', though set entirely in a small country town, has a sense of light and space, of being aware of the world, that 'Catcher in the Rye' simply does not have. It also seems to me to be a far better novel.

While in critical vein, I didn't really understand the insistence on the central metaphor, which is done to death, tediously presented to the reader as something new, over and over again (as in the books of Jose Saramago, where a simple and transparent idea is set before us through a dozen very slightly different narrative images over hundreds of pages). And then that central image is blown up by the explanation of the misunderstanding. Perhaps the point is to show that the vacuity of his existence is even greater than was previously apparent.

I didn't intend to be quite so negative when I sat down to write this, but I realize that my imporession of the book was rather poor. I shall now reread it, and write about it again, if I find I can be a little more upbeat.

Self-Defence and the Law

In the Times, and doubtless other places, there is much talk about how the Conservatives are planning to allow people more freedom to defend themselves, their familes and their property from intruders. It seems to reflect an appeal to populism in the light of some recent cases, and other not so recent ones which have excercised editorial writers for years. The comments are fascinating, as they reveal that people approach this from several completely different directions, and are incapable of understanding another point of view. Nothing new there, but it is surprising that some people don't seem able to imagine themselves as a householder faced with an intruder of unknown intention.

Anyone entering your house without permission is and will be perceived as a threat. It's the way we are. Any overtly threatening behaviour including the carrying of weapons will produce an overwhelming urge to react. If the owner and his family are at any time subject to the will of the intruder they will experience great fear and impotence. If one of them manages to gain control of the situation for a moment they will not calmly carry out a risk assessment, weighing this against that, running the letter of the law over in their minds and reevaluating it after each blow they land and each action they take. They will not do this because they are human, they are in a situation for which nothing has prepared them, their heartrate is over 200 and their body is awash with adrenalin. What they will do is beat the living s*** out of the intruder until they are absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, that he has ceased to be a threat.

That's what people do, and the law must adapt to human nature. None of this has to do with vigilantism or revenge attacks, but with defence against a present threat. If the law expects people to conform to it in these situations, rather than the other way around, then it will be seen to be an ass and will achieve nothing but to send people to jail who do not deserve to be there.

And if the local low-life have a more difficult and dangerous time making ends meet because of it, so much the better.

One of the cases mentioned recently was that of Myleene Klaas, who I had never heard of but apparently she appears on TV, who was cautioned by police after waving a knife at a gang who tried to enter her house. I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but I wonder how the police even knew what she had done. Did the thugs have the cheek to report it themselves? How did that conversation go?

"There we was, officer, me and the mates, going about our business, trying to break into this house where there's this woman alone with her baby, in accordance with our basic human right to live by nicking other people's stuff 'cos we can, and she waves a knife at us. I mean it's not on, is it, someone could've got hurt. Bloody scandalous it is, officer, didn't ought to be allowed. I mean start letting law-abiding people slice cubumber in their own kitchens and where'll you be? I mean that knife was bigger than all but three of the ones I had in my pocket. Bloody disgrace. You'll be talking to her? Thanks for your time, officer, glad we speak the same language."

Just a thought. It struck me as odd.

Not So Godless in Gower Street

I'm a bit late on this one, but it turns out the chap who tried to blow up his trousers in Detroit had studied at my alma mater, UCL. I was sorry to hear this, not because of the terrorism- he's not the first dodgy character to walk those halls- but because we like to think we're a bit brighter than that.

The Islamic Society has released a note on the subject by the way, which is worth reading. In my time I knew quite a few members of it, and I also had dealings with the Society as an organization, and found it to be an open, respectable and rationally peace-loving group. This was over twenty years ago and I wondered if things might have changed. The tenor of their communication, which is direct, clear and open with no attempt at obfuscation or implied qualification, suggests that things haven't, and I'm glad to hear it.

They make the point that no one, staff, Union or the Society itself, noticed anything worrying about him. This is consonant with what has been said about other such terrorists, including one of the London bombers who was a much respected primary school teacher (as I recall).

There has been criticism of the staff and the Union officers for not noticing a propensity for setting fire to his underwear, but how is a 50-year-old Professor of engineering supposed to know when a student is weird in a different or more dangeous way from the general eclectic weirdness that you find in a group of intelligent young people from all over the world? And the Union has other fish to fry.

In my day the political life of the Union was run by a rather nasty clique of Trotskyist homosexuals (it was the Trotting I objected to; I liked the Gaysoc, they had the best parties), who tried to stifle debate outside the claustrophobic limits of their own ideology, and as a result Union politics was not taken seriously by any but them. The sabbatical officers were the ones who ran the social manifestations of the Union, including (I think) the student health centre. They liked a bit of political posturing, but the ones I knew were fairly normal, and in any case their real function was to get enough money out of the University to keep the beer cheap and the sports grounds functioning. They are called sabbatical because they are just students who are elected to the position for a year and are allowed to interrupt their studies while they do the job. They have neither the responsibilty nor the training nor the experience to evaluate what someone might later turn into.

On balance I'm prepared to exonerate the Islamic Society too. But that's a personal, and perhaps partisan, judgement. Oh, and I should probably keep this quiet, but he's not the first we've had.

Are The Cracks Getting Bigger?

David Cameron thinks that the Edlington case is a sympton of 'our broken society'. I realize politicians have to spout profound-sounding vacuities on cue without frightening the horses- a difficult skill- but you would have thought he would have been better prepared to talk about a case which is currently the subject of much emotive coverage in the press. He probably meant what he said, which is pretty depressing.

Terrible as this case is, it cannot be called a symptom of anything, other than of the diseased minds of the boys who carried out the attack. We do not even know their background, as they haven't been identified, so we can't say if anything about their families or their upbringing has influenced their actions. (It is, of course, a fair bet that it has. You don't do something like that unless you have come to think of it as somehow normal or you simply don't care what happens to you; either way suggests a thoroughly miserable home life.)

But why does he think British society is 'broken?' In fact, what does he imagine British society is? Does he think it is a single homogeneous mass, responding as one to identical stimuli? Does he imagine that the entire country becomes hysterical when someone gets kicked off Big Brother or Manchester United lose or whoever is Chancellor at the moment makes a negative comment about the economy? Does he think that because unemployment has risen nobody has a job, or money, or is capable of looking after their family and being happy while they do it? Does he believe, above all, that the entire country is hanging on his every word, their lives and emotions governed by his lightest nuance?

People like Cameron, politicians, journalists and liberal arts types in general can never understand that the great majority of people do not take them seriously, do not care what they have to say even if they should happen to hear it, and have opionions and feelings based on experiences and ideas quite unrelated to Cameron and his kind.

British society is made up of many, many units, with connections within and between them, of a thousand different characteristics, the vast majority of which are not broken at all, they work perfectly well. The Edlington case is not in any way part of a trend, and is not an example of anything other than itself. There is nothing Cameron and his kind can do to change it or to prevent some child of the future from experimenting with the suffering of someone younger.*

I wonder what pointless, repressive law will result from Cameron's failure to recognise that sometimes thing shappen because people are bad and there is nothing he can do about it.

*Child murderers seem to act in pairs. That seems to be the only thing they have in common. Maybe Cameron can start by forbidding friendship.

Education is for Children; Is it hard to Understand?

A few remarks about schools, mostly things I have said before, but a bit more succinctly, and inspired by this, and this, as well as my general daily experience of idiots who think they know how education should work.

Education is supposed to benefit the children. The fact that teachers make a living from it is great for them, but it-s not the point of it.

Education should not be compulsory. Offer it to those who want it. If this causes other problems then so be it; they are better addressed outside of the schools.

Education is a fairly simple process at its most basic. It consists of instilling a number of skills and a certain amount of essential knowledge. There-sª a lot more if time and circumstance allows, but that-s more than most people get.

Education is not well-entrusted to left-wing pseudo-intellectuals who neither know nor care about the reality of teaching nor the value of education.

I also offer you this, in which Natasha Walter is astounded to discover that teenaged boys are interested in sex; a brilliant example of how to build a thesis from a couple of anecdotes about something which has nothing to do with the point of the story, and a few ideas cobbled together from what people are saying down at the wine bar.

This is great: I can see why some are arguing that the way forward really rests on creating more opportunities for women in pornography.

I-m almost tempted to agree with her, but I don-t think that was the idea.

ªMy keyboard has just changed all the symbols around and I can-t find the apostrophe. I have no idea how this can happen.