Back Again From England
A health scare with my mother, fortunately resolved, took me back to England again earlier than planned. The weather had been good there so I was hoping I could get my mother out into her garden for a few hours or maybe to drive somewhere with her. But the weather turned sullen, mostly overcast and with a cold wind that chilled even when the sun was out.
Nonetheless, the countryside looked sumptuous with its green livery of new leaves. Here the countryside looks green too but somehow less fresh than in England; I decided it is probably the predominance of evergreen trees here, the fir trees and truffle oaks, that makes the difference. And, in England, the wayside poppies here were replaced with ox-eye daisies everywhere.
When I stepped off the plane in Avignon, dressed in pullover and jacket for my early flight from England, I found that the temperature had risen into the 90s. While I was away the cherries that were loading down the trees all around had started to ripen and it looks very much as though there will be a glut. Unfortunately most of them are of white varieties that are good to eat but not for jam making; and the best for preserving in alcohol are the bitter variety. So a lot of eating has to be done! It still surprises me that there are so many abandoned cherry trees, on the edges of fields and by the roadside. Clearly at one time they must have been part of a garden or an orchard but now they stand in one or twos unattended; and a great source of free cherries. Strawberries too are now in plentiful supply so I shall make some jam. If the other fruit crops follow suit it will be an exceptional harvest all round this year. Already the first local melons are appearing in shops and markets as also are the first nectarines and peaches.
Also, the lime trees are now in bloom. The flowers have a wonderful scent of honey which, for some reason, doesn't carry into the tea that locals make from them. The tea used to be used as a soporific to help you get to sleep but has largely been superseded by sleeping pills of one sort or another. You can still buy the flowers occasionally in the markets but the tea tastes of nothing more pleasant than hay.
Fashionable English
Having breakfast with Daniel yesterday in the Cafe des Sports I noticed a headline in his paper that described someone as having been “relookée”; it was the “k” that caught my eye as it doesn't occur in pure French. Daniel explained that it meant that the lady in question had had a face-lift, in effect given a new look. It seems just one more case of English words being Frenchified in the French fashion world. This occurs in simply scores of instances in fashion magazines, Marie Claire, Elle, etc, presumably the converse of the English use of French words in fashion. “Le shopping” for instance is not used for everyday shopping but for clothes shopping, more specifically shopping for fashionable clothes. And “les people” are socialites. There is also “le best of” for the top fashion items. I suppose it is a back-handed compliment to the English.
jeudi 26 mai 2011
vendredi 6 mai 2011
Economic Distinctions
Nice Distinctions
One of the most important laws of language development is the Law of Least Effort. It normally applies only to pronunciation and spelling but seems to be taking a hold in semantics too. I've mentioned before the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, which seems to be fading; the distinctions between less and fewer and majority and most are other examples. It seems the same is happening in French.
A word that is ambiguous in English but which the French had sorted is “another”. In English, for instance, wanting another (item) can be either wanting one more of the same or wanting something different. In French the ambiguity is avoided, “encore un(e)” being more of the same and “un(e) autre” being something different. Admittedly, the same distinction can easily be made in English by using “a different one” or "one more" rather than “another” but another is still ambiguous. I mention this because the subject came up in conversation over dinner with Steve, Jo, Daniel and Michèle and Daniel and Michèle both said the distinction is going in current French. They are introducing the same ambiguity that there is in English.
As the world becomes more visually oriented so language seems to be becoming less precise, although there is no real need for this. It probably owes much, in England certainly, to the way language has been taught in schools over the past few decades. Does it matter? I've asked the question before, because there are always alternative ways of expressing oneself, but now I'm coming to the conclusion that it does; otherwise misunderstandings are too easily made. I've just started filling in my UK tax return for next year; I'm not sure why I still get one but I do. Being resident outside the UK I have to state how many days I have spent in the UK and I'm also asked to state how many working days. Since I normally come for a week, I simply subtracted the number of weekend days from the total days to arrive at the latter figure. Then I thought: why am I being asked this? I thought: OK, maybe for some statistics they are collecting. But then it occurred to me that what they really wanted to know was not how many working days I spent in the UK but how many days working. This is the kind of ambiguity that can so easily creep in and either needs footnotes to sort out or else buggers up their statistics (serves them right). Or, of course, we could pay more attention to the language we use.
It has just occurred to me that it would be possible to calculate the cost, for every official form and every recipient, of printing every foot note rendered necessary only because questions are badly expressed. The total must be millions of pounds. Now there's an argument that could be persuasive.
All this contrasts starkly with the time when I chaired the British Standards Institution committee drafting a definition of Year 2000 compliance, when every word and phrase in the definition was carefully examined for ambiguity. It helped then to have lawyers on the committee. I wonder how much money they are making because of carelessly drafted documents. Lazy language must be a gold mine for them.
One of the most important laws of language development is the Law of Least Effort. It normally applies only to pronunciation and spelling but seems to be taking a hold in semantics too. I've mentioned before the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, which seems to be fading; the distinctions between less and fewer and majority and most are other examples. It seems the same is happening in French.
A word that is ambiguous in English but which the French had sorted is “another”. In English, for instance, wanting another (item) can be either wanting one more of the same or wanting something different. In French the ambiguity is avoided, “encore un(e)” being more of the same and “un(e) autre” being something different. Admittedly, the same distinction can easily be made in English by using “a different one” or "one more" rather than “another” but another is still ambiguous. I mention this because the subject came up in conversation over dinner with Steve, Jo, Daniel and Michèle and Daniel and Michèle both said the distinction is going in current French. They are introducing the same ambiguity that there is in English.
As the world becomes more visually oriented so language seems to be becoming less precise, although there is no real need for this. It probably owes much, in England certainly, to the way language has been taught in schools over the past few decades. Does it matter? I've asked the question before, because there are always alternative ways of expressing oneself, but now I'm coming to the conclusion that it does; otherwise misunderstandings are too easily made. I've just started filling in my UK tax return for next year; I'm not sure why I still get one but I do. Being resident outside the UK I have to state how many days I have spent in the UK and I'm also asked to state how many working days. Since I normally come for a week, I simply subtracted the number of weekend days from the total days to arrive at the latter figure. Then I thought: why am I being asked this? I thought: OK, maybe for some statistics they are collecting. But then it occurred to me that what they really wanted to know was not how many working days I spent in the UK but how many days working. This is the kind of ambiguity that can so easily creep in and either needs footnotes to sort out or else buggers up their statistics (serves them right). Or, of course, we could pay more attention to the language we use.
It has just occurred to me that it would be possible to calculate the cost, for every official form and every recipient, of printing every foot note rendered necessary only because questions are badly expressed. The total must be millions of pounds. Now there's an argument that could be persuasive.
All this contrasts starkly with the time when I chaired the British Standards Institution committee drafting a definition of Year 2000 compliance, when every word and phrase in the definition was carefully examined for ambiguity. It helped then to have lawyers on the committee. I wonder how much money they are making because of carelessly drafted documents. Lazy language must be a gold mine for them.
dimanche 1 mai 2011
House and Inland Revenue
House
I've been thinking for a while that I should get more pictorial and I finally got around to it this weekend. I keep wittering on about the pots at the front of my house and my small back garden but have never included any pictures. So, below is my back garden as it was last year in late May. The flowers in the left foreground are Salvia Pratensis which grow in profusion by the wayside here and from which I pinched a couple of specimens; they've since self-seeded.
And below that is the front of the house a couple of years ago when long-time friend and some time colleague Alan Knight came to visit with his partner. I'll try to include more photos in the future (he promised).
Government Intelligence
I seem to have resolved my differences with the Inland Revenue in England, at least in theory. The result in practice remains to be seen. However, the Glasgow office has admitted that it has no knowledge of the letter sent to me by their Nottingham office containing instructions on submitting my self-assessment return and, moreover, that had they had it the current misunderstandings would not have arisen. My reaction was to ask the Glasgow office to request a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office so the matter can be resolved. This, apparently, is not possible; I have to send Glasgow a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office. Joined up government? Dream on!
The stupid thing is that all such situations can be resolved by the simply ploy of having personal models. All it needs is for government departments/agencies to have a unique ID for each person they deal with common to all financial communications and to build a simple IT model around that. All communications are then attached to, and retrievable from, that model; it really is that simple. The Swedish government has had such a system for decades but made the mistake of making the social security number the unique ID for all individuals for all purposes. This makes it too easy for hackers to get at personal information of all kinds. What is needed is an ID that is unique for a specific set of purposes but not for all.
Around three decades ago an inspired IT manager at the Royal Marsden hospital, Jo Milan, recognised the problem and created an IT patient model. This is several orders of magnitude more difficult than creating a personal financial model yet he managed it with arcane and barely adequate IT facilities. The achievement was totally ignored, indeed rendered infeasible, by government when it came out with recommendations for computerising hospital systems. Three decades on, it seems that government intelligence remains, as ever, an oxymoron.
I've been thinking for a while that I should get more pictorial and I finally got around to it this weekend. I keep wittering on about the pots at the front of my house and my small back garden but have never included any pictures. So, below is my back garden as it was last year in late May. The flowers in the left foreground are Salvia Pratensis which grow in profusion by the wayside here and from which I pinched a couple of specimens; they've since self-seeded.
And below that is the front of the house a couple of years ago when long-time friend and some time colleague Alan Knight came to visit with his partner. I'll try to include more photos in the future (he promised).
Government Intelligence
I seem to have resolved my differences with the Inland Revenue in England, at least in theory. The result in practice remains to be seen. However, the Glasgow office has admitted that it has no knowledge of the letter sent to me by their Nottingham office containing instructions on submitting my self-assessment return and, moreover, that had they had it the current misunderstandings would not have arisen. My reaction was to ask the Glasgow office to request a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office so the matter can be resolved. This, apparently, is not possible; I have to send Glasgow a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office. Joined up government? Dream on!
The stupid thing is that all such situations can be resolved by the simply ploy of having personal models. All it needs is for government departments/agencies to have a unique ID for each person they deal with common to all financial communications and to build a simple IT model around that. All communications are then attached to, and retrievable from, that model; it really is that simple. The Swedish government has had such a system for decades but made the mistake of making the social security number the unique ID for all individuals for all purposes. This makes it too easy for hackers to get at personal information of all kinds. What is needed is an ID that is unique for a specific set of purposes but not for all.
Around three decades ago an inspired IT manager at the Royal Marsden hospital, Jo Milan, recognised the problem and created an IT patient model. This is several orders of magnitude more difficult than creating a personal financial model yet he managed it with arcane and barely adequate IT facilities. The achievement was totally ignored, indeed rendered infeasible, by government when it came out with recommendations for computerising hospital systems. Three decades on, it seems that government intelligence remains, as ever, an oxymoron.
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