[lit-ideas] Re: What is the Purpose of a Pay Slip?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:10:13 -0700
On Aug 11, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Judith Evans wrote:
>Yes, there's a booklet here too
Ah -- OK
>What interested me about the British questions was
>that they seem to have abandoned story-telling as a national glue
that's probably deliberate, the citizenship ceremony itself also avoids it.
>Presumably whatever has replaced the Victorian, Empire
> glue stories now develops later,
I wasn't taught any Victorian, Empire glue story. (I'm pondering your points,
I'll try to say something sensible about them tomorrow; for now, briefly
You didn't get Alfred burning the cakes and the Magna Carta, and Kings and Queens, and Agincourt, Bannockburn, Crecy, Dunkirk, all the way through to Zulus and the battle of Rorke's Drift? You didn't grow up with people stiffening like old soldiers remembering parades, when "Land of Hope and Glory" was sung on the last night of the proms? My generation was tasked with quizzes and essays on all that and so aspired to undo much of it; we were well versed in what we wanted to undo.
I'm not at all sure we wanted to replace those myths with a shared understanding of quangos. What we had in mind was much more internationalist, a deep suspicion of nationalism would lead, it was thought, to an internationalism that had learned from the failures of the League of Nations and all those inter-war anti-war movements. What I didn't understand at the time is that one of the reasons esperanto failed is that it had no shared culture to draw on, no stories that everyone who speaks esperanto knows and shares. I think it is from such tales that we learn some of the behavioral cues that Mike refers to. If you grow up reading about fair play in cricket, you're likely, no matter how much you know of the world, to tend to assume that such a standard exists and somehow governs behavior. I certainly catch myself doing this. If you grow up reading trickster tales or even Brer Rabbit, I expect you end up with a different set of assumptions.
BTW, would Quango still be Quango in Welsh? Which is to say, does Welsh adopt non-native words or does it make up new equivalents?
David Ritchie,
wondering if there still might be money in an alphabet primer of battles,
Portland, Oregon
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