Morocco teaser and some reading to distract you
I managed to sort through my Morocco photos, but I need some more time to write narrative. I’m also waiting for my traveling companions to post photos they took so I can supplement my meager collection of 82 photos (not all of which will be described in the narrative, rest assured).
In the meantime, here’s a shot of me on a camel:
I’ve recently come across a few articles dealing with the ways Americans and Britons use language that have solidified some things I’ve been thinking about:
- “My American Friends” from the New York Times Sunday Book Review is spot on and even touches on that which distinguishes Americans (and often Canadians) from most Europeans: namely, chattiness with strangers in social and customer service situations. That and clothing that’s not black.
- “Hi there” from the Economist a history of the loss of formality in contemporary language and argues that this decreases our ability to express intimacy. Lots of food for thought here. Especially interesting to read the claim that
Britons are more informal than Americans in their use of languageuse of first names was a British innovation, not an American one as I assumed. I have to say that while they cite as an example Gordon Brown referring to Obama as “Barack”, I think this can be entirely blamed on George W. Bush’s habit of referring to foreign leaders by their first name. He made it look normal for eight years, so why would Brown act otherwise? I also have to say that I had never realized that use of “sir” to address a stranger was an Americanism. I used to think contemporary Russian was deficient in not having a word for addressing a stranger (compared with French or American English), but now I see that Britons also suffer from this!
While I’m sharing articles, here’s another from the Economist: a fun, short introduction to linguistics (a faster read than the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which belongs on every coffee table). The Economist confuses different types of verb aspect (perfective/imperfective versus progressive/nonprogressive), but I’ll forgive them.