The words we use: ConDem

I'm wrestling with the pedantry demon at the moment - and losing! It's not a pretty sight. However, I might as well let that primal scream of nit picking out while it's gnawing at my innards.

I've been particularly excised recently by the constant use of the phrase 'ConDem' to describe the coalition government. It's on leaflets, placards, blog posts and even painted on faces. My problem is that it reeks of dogma.

The moment I hear someone use the phrase I know with absolute certainty that this is not a 'normal' person but a political activist. I've never heard any member of my family use the phrase, any of my non-activist friends nor come across it in everyday conversation, even when discussing the government.

The *only* time I hear it in use is from committed political activists. Just as the only people I've ever seen raising Greece as a *good* example to us all (as in the picture) are people from some very specific political traditions. Now, while there is a political purpose to talking about Greece and things we can learn from this, the phrase ConDem simply serves to create an internal language for the left that excludes those we're seeking to bring in.

It's effectively the equivalent of the right's Zanu-Nu-Labour that tried to draw similarities between Mugabe's regime and Brown's. It's sole useful function is that it allows you to identify people who are going to be against the government no matter what happens, effectively ruling them out of any rational debate.

For me, ConDem is very much like the phrase FibDem. Whoever came up with it can feel rightly smug about a nice turn of phrase, but the moment it goes into your everyday language it's just lazy and childish. These pieces of jargon seek to deepen the tribalism of the situation at the expense of reasoned analysis.

Don't get me wrong, some people love it. Just as some people like screaming the word 'SCUM' at the top of their lungs on demonstrations. God bless them all I say, but I hope it's worth bearing in mind that while the name calling is an easy way of making one part of the movement feel warm and cuddly it simultaneously makes another part of the movement wince in embarrassment.

Where it's a political point (like Greece) let the debate go unabated and difference flourish - where it's a question of semantics why adopt jargon that adds nothing to your point but creates a barrier to potential allies enthusiastically embracing your ideas? Even if it's only 5% of people who end up labelling you as dogmatic, that's 5% of people that we want, that we've lost.

Obviously there's no neutral way of speaking and we all have dialects and idiosyncrasies that some will like better than others, which is one reason why political and cultural diversity is a good thing when you're trying to build a movement, but I'm not quite sure that's the same thing as using language only a clique relate to. Even if it's a large clique.

It's just a thought. Hopefully I'll win my war with that scoundrel Pendantry soon. I'd hate to become one of those dreary language-police people you find patrolling round the left. In the mean time I hope you'll forgive me.

I see knees

Archeology is an interesting, but ultimately pointless, profession. Grubbing around in the muck and forming hefty theories based on a single pre-Roman bottle cap that should never have been found in a particular part of Suffolk. The very thought of it.

Well, there are academic salaries at stake so its important to keep your profile up. Hence a few years ago, in an ill advised attempt to bully the public into seeing the indispensability of the field they tried to change the way we pronounce Boadicea - she who led the most successful rebellion against the Roman occupation of, what was to become, England.

No more were we to say BOW-DA-SEE-A but rather we were to intone the harsher, more perfunctory, BOO-DICK-A. Sadly they did have some influence among those who are easily swayed by men holding clipboards and you'll now be able to find both pronunciations in common usage. Less forgivably if you use the former there'll always be some insufferable goon on hand to "correct" you.

"No, no, it's pronounced BOO-DICK-A"

Now, in and off itself correcting someone's grammar or pronuncation is an elitist impertinence - the only acceptable instances I can think of for correcting the way some speaks are;

i) if they are learning English and are grateful for the assistance.
ii) when someone asks for advise
iii) where the meaning of what they said is genuinely unclear.
iv) when the person is about to make a public appearance and will look foolish if they say Basra in the odd, personalised fashion they have devised for their own personal use.

But more than simple rudeness it is simply wrong to say the "real" pronunciation is BOO-DICK-A, unless you've taken to addressing your friends and family in a hitherto dead dialect of the ancient Britons. In which case my blessings upon you and my sympathy for your loved ones.

Let me point out that no one with any sense, when addressed in English, would say that the capital of France is PA-REE or that of Russia MOCK-BAR. Where do the Spanish come from? The answer is not España, but Spain. Any attempt to purge Paris, Moscow or Spain from the English language would be met with blank stares and straight jackets. This kind of linguistic idiocy would be given the very shortest of shrifts.

Likewise the accepted way that the warrior queen's name has been pronounced in England is BOW-DA-SEE-A, and we enjoyed it that way. It has a flavoursome lilt to it. This attempt to delve into dead languages to impose their linguistic conventions upon the living is at best misplaced pedantry and at worst a toffy nosed attempt to put those who speak words with the juice still flowing firmly in their place.

Put your text books down. Your rules and authority are unwanted. Get out of it!

For myself I'll be enjoying English as it comes, observing those conventions that smooth the paths to understanding and, discarding those that smack of a rule mongering gaol.

Sticks and stones

On my train journey from hell Saturday night travelling back from the rather good Green Left meeting I had the joyous experience of sharing a carriage with a mob of Nazis. They were horrid. They were drunk. They were "up for it". They were very concerned that everyone present was "Aryan".

They were true vulgarians, which of course was guaranteed to annoy a sensitive soul like myself. I shalln't go into some of the choicer terms they found for my fellow passengers but let's just say they are yet to begin their Gender Studies BA (Hons) at Middlesex University. Now this kind of swearing is effective in the sense that they achieved what they wanted to achieve - intimidating people, making black and Asian passengers feel particularly unwelcome, and raising their own morale as they geared themselves up for the inevitable "ruck".

However, what these kinds of insults are particularly ineffective at doing is hurting someone's feelings. Just as the best suits are made to measure, so the most hurtful insults fit the recipient just right. I'm sure that George W. Bush doesn't care at all when people compare him to Hitler. In the Bush paradigm Hitler wears a black hat and Bush a white Stetson, he has no fear of evil because he is cloaked in his impenetrable certainty that God is on his side.

Anyway, all the things you might be calling Bush Hitler-lite for - military might, unswerving faith in his historic task and the destruction of his enemies are things Bush would admire. It would cut far more deeply to call him *weak* or a *hippy* or historically *irrelevant*, just as his father was so stung by commentators that regarded him as a push over before the first Iraq War. Although Republican Ann Richards probably got closest to the bone with "Poor George, he can't help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth."

Cyrano de Bergerac (in the play at least) was scathing about insults that don't have the power to wound. When a theatre go-er describes his nose as "very big" Cyrano is filled with disgust at the man's lack of creativity and thunders a dozen inventive insults that he could have used highlighting just how feeble an intellect the man possessed.

My personal favourites being "How you must love the little birds to give them such a perch" and "When you smoke a pipe do the neighbours shriek out 'the chimney's on fire!'?" The irony being that Cyrano genuinely is wounded by the slight, all the more so because any bore in town, no matter how lacking in merit could turn *their* noses up at him.

I was told once by a friend that the worst possible insult one could call someone was "boy". I was utterly bemused, but later realised that he felt this was the worst thing that *he* could be called. It fitted exactly to his personality as a violent braggart - constantly determined to prove himself a man. Calling him boy would hurt, call me boy and I'll give you a puzzled shrug.

And then there's the Big Brother contestant who was thrown out of the house last night for calling another contestant a nigger. Perhaps she missed that day at charm school, or more probably the drama student just knew how to create a fuss. What's interesting here is that not only was no offence intended (genuinely, rather than in the "can't you take a joke?" sense of arseholes everywhere), none was taken either, quite different from the racist bullying earlier in the year, on the celebrity version, which often contained no naughty words.

Which brings me on to the reason why I brought this all up. Whilst my fellow passengers were treated to down the line abuse (apart from one blue eyed, blond haired woman who was feted with praise) I was accosted by one of them with the shout "Oi! Wrinkle!" Wrinkle! What the hell?

Now I've no doubt I must have the odd wrinkle here and there but I don't think this is my defining feature, not by a long shot. Perhaps it's a football thing? Or a piece of cockney rhyming slang that I'm unacquainted with? It's been troubling me for days - what the hell did he mean? Maybe he was being "nice" or perhaps I was frowning particularly hard...

If you've any suggestions as to what he may have meant (without hurting my feelings of course) please do let me know as I neglected to exchange phone numbers with the gentleman, and may not get the chance to ask him in person.

Revolutionary Spanish

Hola compañeros, well it looks like it finally may actually happen - the Cambridge Revolutionary Spanish Group may soon become a reality for all those keen on learning Spanish in order to aid the overthrow of the oligarchy, Yankee imperialism and racismo.

My previous attempts at learning Spanish have been hampered by my nascent laziness and skinflintitude. But this time will be different and I've already covered my part of the barracks in little post-it notes informing me that the door is a puerta that soldados are not to be trusted because they are homicidas and the like.

One of the difficulties I had at school with learning languages, apart from the fact I was simply *at school*, was we never learned to say anything I could remotely imagine myself ever *wanting* to say.

M. B may be the pater, his wife the mater, his son the garçon and Toto est la chien but apart from reinforcing an inherently unequal patriarchal nuclear family, where the son is only one step up from the dog, who cares? I also did Latin (I know) where Caecilius est pater, Metella's the Mum, Quintus the son followed in quick succession by Cerberus. Perhaps they both ate their dinner off the floor, who knows.

I gave up French when I was 14 (although, surprisingly, I remembered a fair bit of it the last time I was in France being able to order sausage and wine and ask for the way to the social center) and I achieved a memorable "Grade U" at Latin, which apparently means I got less than 5%. I mean how did that happen? I knew I was crap at it, but less than 5%!?! I mean, I came out of the exam and told my mate Neil "I think I did alright at that." Anyway, I digress.

So the theory is that we get hold of a job lot of the Venezuelan Constitution and similar documents to learn Spanish through investigating and talking about things we are actually interested in. The theory holds true for others too I guess. It would be great to see the local hairdressers set up "The Latin Fringe", and the neighbourhood polyamorist enclave launch "Spanish for Lovers" but that will be their responsibility to make that happen, not mine.

We've yet to firm up all the details but we already have willing students, potential tutors and a copy of "Viva La Quince Brigada" to start us off. Any Spanish dictionaries, textbooks or just Spanish language papers and novels would be gratefully accepted to help kick start the group.