Schadenfreude.

Towards the end of today's Start the Week, a weekly topical programme on Radio 4, Tiffany Watt Smith seems to suggest that schadenfreude doesn't have a real equivalent in 'genuine' English.

But isn't it simply gloating?

Je Fume: Support the Strike.

British workers are on strike today – because people are fuming over cuts and pension age hike.

Despite the massive anti-strike propaganda pre-strike opinion polls showed that 61 percent of the public support the industrial action. It is expected to be the largest industrial action since the 70s. Estimates say that around 2 million workers will be on strike today. Follow the events on Twitter with #strike or #november30 hashtags.

Here is what some of the tweets say today:

-Average female NHS worker's pension: £3,500. Average Managing Director's pension: £224,121. That's why we #strike.
-When we're all working at 70 with no NHS and a broken education system, at least we can say we saved the banks. #strike
-Gove says it's unfair for taxpayers to support hard-working public sector workers - but footing the bill for bankers is fine. #n30 #strike
-Disgusted by some of the lies being told about the strikers today. As a private sector company director I support #nov30 100%. #strike 

-Proud of my dad on strike today. Ashamed of this out of touch, millionaire filled government #strike #solidarity
-Today's #strike will 'cripple the economy' but the bank holiday for the royal wedding was fine and dandy? Aye right! #priorities 

-School is closed. Some people not happy because the #strike is disruptive.... That's the whole point of a strike! Will take boy to toddler... [group]

I thought of posting a working class protest song, but then remebered Edith Piaf's 'Je fume' (I smoke). It's a love song with the refrain that goes 'I don't want to work, I don't want to lunch – and then I smoke'. Let's do a little fuming at what's going on:


 

Brothers and Sisters Have I None, or On the Moral Ascendancy of the Monarchy

Brothers sisters have I none, 
but that man's father is my father's son.
Who is it?

That is a well known English rhyming riddle. The story below uses the same technique, but extended to hilarious lengths. It's been a favourite of mine, giving me endless mileage at all sorts of dinner-table conversations. And a good test of others' sense of humour.

(The text below was sent to me by a friend and it looks like it has been circulating for a while. Please let me know if it needs attribution or copyright holder's authorisation.)

Gore

Make of this what you will. This joke was told the other day by Peggy Noonan, who used to be Ronald Reagan’s White House speech writer.

Al Gore was in London and met the Queen. Ever the policy wonk, instead of asking her about race horses he quizzed her on her leadership philosophy. The Queen said she found that the best way to govern was to surround herself with intelligent people.
“But how do you know they are intelligent?” Gore asked.
“I ask them telling questions” said the Queen and promptly telephoned Tony Blair. “Mr Blair,” the Queen said, “your mother has a child, your father has a child and this child is not your brother of your sister. Who is it?”
“Why, it’s me,” said the Prime Minister, without a pause.  “Correct” said the Queen.

Gore returned to America and called George W. 
“Mr President, may I ask you a question?” he said. 
“By all means,” said the President.
“Your mother has a child, your father has a child and this child is not your brother or your sister.  Who is it?”

Bush

George W. was stumped and remained silent for a while before saying, “May I get back to you on that, Al?”
He asked all his closest aides before finally ringing Colin Powell, to whom he posed the telling question.  Powell, like Blair, replied, without a pause: “It’s me.”
George W rang Gore and said: “I know the answer to your question.  It’s Colin Powell.”

“Wrong,” said Gore.  “It’s Tony Blair.”

Photo of Al Gore by Breuwi from here.
Photo of George W. Bush from here.

Life of Brian. Why Brian?

Russian version here.

There was a programme today about our brain. Contrary to the popular view, the brain apparently keeps on developing when other parts of the body start losing its youthfullness.

I've probably reached that stage, because it's only now that I asked myself: why Brian in Monty Python's Life of Brian is called that and not some other name?

I flicked through numerous dictionaries and sites and couldn't find anything idiomatic about Brian.  Nor in the reminiscences of the members themselves. Monty comes from a fictional dodgy bookie. But what about Brian?

I started asking around and immediately got a surprising reply: Brian is stupid. As in a school teaser. To call someone Brian is to call them stupid. It looks like it's a specifically British middle-class usage, and probably also generationally restricted to those who are now in their late 40s-mid 50s.

There is a Stupid Brian in the British TV sitcom My Family. He turns out to be not that stupid when it comes to practical matters, just like fools in some folk-tales.

Let me know if there is more.

Here's Brian trying to join the People's Front of Judea:

Aerate Your Grievances

Aerated balloon

It’s on the black list of words I never use myself, but I've long accepted that ‘pressurise’ may mean to lobby, to put pressure and not just to put some air into your tyres, but I have never come across 'aerate' in the sense 'to express, make known, promote – to air'.

Apparently this other pneumatic word is acquiring that meaning. Here is the phrase I stumbled on in the Daily Telegraph the other day:

'They are taught to aerate their grievances in order to get political power and public money.'

I’ve asked a fellow blogger, whose instinct in these matters I always trust. His reply was ‘weird-sounding but immediately understandable’. And he found another example from a 1997 book (Music in Western Civilization, by Paul Henry Lang): ‘The church elders seized this opportunity also to aerate other 
grievances, but the affair ended with a reprimand, and Bach was
 reinstated in his position.’

While ‘aerate’ usually means ‘to introduce air into a material’, Oxford dictionary also cites ‘aerated’ as British informal for being ‘agitated, angry or overexcited’.

Perhaps this usage is a subconscious evocation of both 'irate' and 'berate'. It’s a small step from a-irate, be-irate to aerate. I wonder if we are going to see anything further down the ABC. C-irate? In-ci-ne-rate? De-aerate?

Microsoft's newspeak, Apple's (good) oldspeak

Microsoft uses Orwell's Newspeak while Apple uses proper (Standard) English, or Oldspeak in the novel 1984.

I was working with spreadsheets today using both MS Excel and Apple's iWork/Numbers and noticed that where
Apple menu options offer a choice between

Hide and Show,

corresponding
MS Excel menu options choice is between

Hide and Unhide.

Exactly according to the great principles of Newspeak where the pair good – bad was replaced by good – ungood.

Did anyone notice?

This post is from my iWork/Pages blog.

No Russian Thesaurus? Really? (An Incredibly Shrinking Claim)

The original full version of this article is in Russian here. Please contact the Editor if you would like to republish it in English or in Russian. 

Russian is shrinking, losing its lexical richness and there are no Russian Thesauri, because there aren't enough synonyms to put them together.

And English is three to four times lexically richer than Russian. 

These are a few of the claims made by two Russian linguists Alexander Dolgin (State University - Higher Economic School) and Mikhail Epshtein (Emory University, Atlanta) in a discussion published by Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

I am arguing with them in the Russian version of Tetradki on several points:

- There are numerous Russian thesauri published as slovar' sinonimov (dictionary of synonyms) and include the venerable, though largely obsolete Slovar' Zhivago Velikorusskago Yazyka (Dictionary of the Living Language of Great Russia) compiled by Vladimir Dahl.

- Claims that English is lexically richer are founded on dubious counting methods and stem from self-promoting campaigns by groups and persons often mocked by serious linguists. 

- Globalization of English in fact reduces its richness as users tend to stick to a lower common denominator.

- Mass migration of Russian speakers after the collapse of the Soviet Union has created new sources of enrichment of the language.

Please join in the discussion.

Update (December 2010): Johnson, the Economist's language blog, recently showed why claims that English has the largest vocabulary in the world are silly. Johnson points out the problems with counting inflections, compound words, different meanings of the same word and, yes, different approaches to compiling dictionaries in different countries. Read their post here.