Trump’s rhetoric: a triumph of inarticulacy | US news ‘It’s all fake news, it’s phoney stuff – it didn’t happen … I think we have one of the great cabinets ever put together … Don’t be rude. Don’t be rude. Don’t. Be. Public oratory has been at the centre of the American project from the time of its founders. So what does this augur for the public face of his administration? 1) Trump uses a pretty small working vocabulary. 2) His syntax, spelling and punctuation are – in conventional terms – a catastrophe. 3) The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs. All of those qualities, though they invite sneers, have something to be said for them as communicative strategies. Simple (or absent) grammatical structures leave the audience with nothing so taxing as a train of thought: rather, a random collage of emotive terms, repeated for emphasis. Trump’s plain style is unvarying, though, and that’s a key part of his ethos, or how he projects himself to his public. To many of us, that looks like a failing.
DCblog Linguistics Research Digest Princess, love, girl – when is a term of endearment not welcome? | Rebecca Nicholson When I think of Paul Hollywood, TV’s floury-haired fox and staunch upholder of a strong crumb, I think of a man who only ever seems to be one pint of bitter away from turning into your dad hitting the dancefloor at the end of a very long wedding. The Bake Off judge has been all over the tabloids this week – happily, not for wearing a Nazi uniform as fancy dress this time (it was an ’Allo ’Allo!-themed night and he’s sorry, OK) – but it was one particular answer in one particular interview that raised the bristles on my broad, lefty, feminista chest. You’ll remember that when the Bake Off moved to Channel 4, Hollywood was the only original host to stay with the programme, and for a while, he says, this made him the most hated man in the country. The girls! But it made me think of the countless times I’ve been called a “girl” or one of the “girls” by an older man – and it usually is an older man – and the point in my life at which it started to bother me.
East Norfolk English Language Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants? | Global Development Professionals Network In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat”. What is an expat? And who is an expat? According to Wikipedia, “an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (‘out of’) and patria (‘country, fatherland’)”. Defined that way, you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat, regardless of his skin colour or country. Africans are immigrants. Don’t take my word for it. The reality is the same in Africa and Europe. Most white people deny that they enjoy the privileges of a racist system. Mawuna Remarque Koutonin is the editor of SiliconAfrica.com, where this blog was first published. Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians.
Language Log The battle over the words used to describe migrants - BBC News Images of people scrambling over barbed wire fences in Calais or crossing the Mediterranean in fishing boats have dominated the media over the last few months. And a debate has even emerged about the very words used to describe people. The word migrant is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as "one who moves, either temporarily or permanently, from one place, area, or country of residence to another". It is used as a neutral term by many media organisations - including the BBC - but there has been criticism of that use. News website al-Jazeera has decided it will not use migrant and "will instead, where appropriate, say refugee". There are some who dislike the term because it implies something voluntary but that it is applied to people fleeing danger. "Migrant used to have quite a neutral connotation," explains Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University. "Refugee implies that we have an obligation to people," says Betts. More from the Magazine
What happened when I started a feminist society at schoolWhy I started a feminist society at school I am 17 years old and I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality, and am under no illusion about how far we are from achieving it. Identifying as a feminist has become particularly important to me since a school trip I took to Cambridge last year. A group of men in a car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and me. For those men we were just legs, breasts and pretty faces. Shockingly, the boys in my peer group have responded in exactly the same way to my feminism. After returning from this school trip I started to notice how much the girls at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender. I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of "the best schools in the country", to try to tackle these issues. What I hadn't anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. I fear that many boys of my age fundamentally don't respect women.