Quite possibly the government is right. Perhaps it is impossible to win a case against the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners must be given the vote. Perhaps it was impossible last week to prevent an increase in the EU budget. Perhaps one can never get what one wants from the European institutions. But if so, isn’t it — I speak in the mild tone of one schooled not to ‘bang on about Europe’ — a bit of a problem?
Television reports of the service of blessing for a tourist couple in the Maldives, which was actually, unknown to the couple, a stream of insults, deliberately avoided the nub of the story. Channel 4 News, for example, referred to the incident as a ‘prank’, the word also used by those who wished to play down the obscene messages left on Andrew Sachs’s answering machine by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. The point was that the service was supposed to be an ‘Islamic blessing’. The hotel staff, speaking in their own language, which the couple could not understand, abused them for being pork-eating ‘infidels’ and therefore ‘haraam’ (unclean). Muslims were being horrible to a couple who had naively sought Muslim goodwill for their relationship. Imagine it the other way round — Christian staff putting on a ceremony for Muslims and then mocking them. There would have been no end of talk about Islamophobia, and no use of the word ‘prank’.
A comparable evasion came in the BBC’s reporting of Barack Obama’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The reporter was at pains to emphasise how well the President was received by his liberal audience, how it was not a disaster and so on. Yet the essence of the story was that Mr Obama was in difficulty — as the mid-terms have just proved — and that when asked whether his most famous slogan still survived, he had said ‘Yes We Can, but…’. Again, imagine something similar with a right-wing president. Imagine if George W. Bush had appeared on a chat show and said, ‘Axis of Evil, but…’ We should never have heard the end of it.
A friend has recently returned from North Korea. Like a lot of nasty countries, it benefits from its own incompetence in that foreign philanthropists step in where the state has failed. My friend was giving money for a national TB reference library so that the disease can be properly monitored. He has been quite often before, and he says the place is suddenly changing. The young health officials he deals with are highly intelligent and remarkably good at English. Last year, there were reported to be 100,000 cell phones in the country. Now the figure is said to be 300,000. In the street, people are still not permitted to approach foreigners, but lots of them now have digital cameras, and they snap visitors. There are many more cars, and you can even see young people rollerblading. Primitive street markets are now tolerated, with women over 50 — a category not considered dangerous to the state — allowed to trade more freely. Kim Jong-un, introduced to a public which had never seen him before as ‘the Brilliant Comrade’, is being touted as the successor to his father, Kim Jong-il. But in an interview with the Chinese media, Kim Jong-Nam, his eldest and presumably disappointed brother, who lives in Macao, has said that he disapproves of hereditary succession. It is thought that he would never have given the interview unless the Chinese had encouraged it. Recently, 15 provincial party secretaries were ‘invited’ to go to China to learn how to adopt the Chinese model of a developing economy. Is China now taking North Korea out of its isolation? If so, is this part of a new geopolitical understanding with the United States? My friend says that the giant annual Arirang Grand Mass Gymnastics, in which 25,000 people make a human pixel screen to relate the myths of Communist North Korea, now play down hatred of America while hymning China as fervently as ever.
But why did Harriet Harman call Danny Alexander a ‘ginger rodent’? As so often in stories of colour prejudice, a clue lies in the family background. Ms Harman’s mother was a redhead, and so are two of her sisters. Her father, I gather, was a man who admired redheads above all other women. So behind his daughter’s hate crime does there lie some feeling of rejection?
The British Library is inviting members of the public to read the opening chapter of Mr Tickle, one of the Mr Men books, for it to record. Then it will assemble a report of how pronunciation differs and alters, called Evolving English. The view always put forward by language experts — the British Library has its own ‘socio-linguist’ — on these occasions is that there is no such thing as a ‘right’ pronunciation of anything: it is all a matter of fashion. There is a sleight of hand here. It is true that language always changes, and so no one way of speaking is eternally correct. But it is also the case that, at any one time, certain things are, effectively, wrong. For example, ‘Mr Tickle’ could, in theory, be pronounced ‘Mr Tickly’, but if a child were to pronounce it that way any sensible teacher would explain that this was wrong, and also, since the word ‘tickly’ is an adjective, confusing. It is rather like manners. It may be arbitrary to stand up when a guest enters the room, rather than, say, lie down, but it nevertheless matters very much, at the time, which you do. The socio-linguists, under the guise of an ‘anything goes’ policy, are themselves being normative. They are, in effect, favouring any pronunciation which they perceive to be new and demotic against any which they think is old and hierarchical. The evolution of language, surely, is the result of constant struggles for mastery between contending classes, regions, moralities, generations and, in the case of a world language like English, nations. No one is neutral in these struggles, and it is mischievous (even if you pronounce that word ‘mischeevius’) to pretend otherwise.
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