Items
Lotta proofreading done today. So I’ll give myself a little dessert, and link to a few miscellaneous items I’ve been meaning to link to for a week or so.
There is Julian in the Guardian on ‘dating’ for instance. It’s funny, I’m an American, but I’ve always hated that word. It just sounds like such a silly, stilted, unreal, arbitrary activity – ‘dating’.
Although I find US-bashing a tiresome game, I do object to one lamentable feature of the American way of life that has insidiously infected our indigenous culture: dating. When I grew up, no one talked about dating, let alone did it. You “went out” with someone or, if you wanted to be cool, were “seeing” someone. But it is not the word I object to. It’s the ethos.
Yeah. I object to the word too though. I think the word is probably part of the ethos. It seems to turn interactions between potential lovers into something bizarre, formalized, unlike more ordinary (or as one might say, ‘quotidian’) interactions between friends, colleagues, acquaintances, people on the bus and in the shops.
Then there are a few more of Julian’s columns – one on the use of making mistakes and one on the difference between Aristotle and self-help. And one on speech as act and the implications of speech-acts for freedom of speech. It’s relevant to what we’ve been discussing lately about Theo van Gogh and Rohan Jayasekera.
And speaking of that discussion, there is a post about Jayasekera and his article at Index on Censorship (not to mention his position at same) on Harry’s Place by Juan Golblado, a reader of ours who commented on the subject here too. There is a lot worth reading at Harry’s Place right now. Well there always is – and especially at the moment I want to point to a number of particular items. Maybe I will just mention one or two. There’s a brief but sharp comment on Livingstone and Qaradawi. There’s an amusing dissent from Johann Hari’s defense of Chavs. There’s a post by Harry on Jayasekera’s reply to his critics. And there’s a post on a book I read and recommended here a year or so ago, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
Hmm. That’s only some of the things I wanted to link to. Well – more later. There are still about forty pages left…
Wow, all that chav stuff totally misses the point. ‘Chav’ is a working class word for other (inferior) working class people. Those middle class liberals eh? What can you do?
Yep, PM, it’s largely thrown contemptuously by underclass types to other underclass types from other areas / housing estates, who are by definition ‘chavs’, and therefore ‘scummier’. Private Eye gets it about as wrong as it does Football. Nevertheless, some of the bile fashionably directed their way from middle classes has to be warranted. Just try living next door to the East Midlands version of the Dukes of Hazard for six months like I did. B@stards, frankly, probably just at home burning books as reading them… which links nicely to…
OB: Many thanks for the The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes link. Uplifting.
I wouldn’t say you had to be part of an -underclass- per se, just part of normal working class society. I think ‘chav’ is a bit like ‘dole scum’, we all know people we label with it, but we aren’t chavs, even if we’re wearing burberry, or dole scum, even if we’re on the dole. The sort of stuff they’re taking the piss out of on chavscum is simply the extreme end of normal working class culture – white trainers, branded sports wear, cheap knock-off designer labels, we’ve all worn it!
That said, looking at the chavscum site, they seem to get a bit mixed up – townies are not chavs, townies are the majority out on a saturday night that aren’t ponsey middle class students, although chavs are, by definition, townies. Pikey is an insulting term for travellers (likely to get you seriously injured) in my experience (although I have heard it used synonymously with chav further north), but scallies are northern chavs.
Welcome, Nick, glad you like it. It is indeed a terrific book.
I find all this chav stuff quite amusing, though of course most of it is over my head.
This chav stuff is giving you a proper education in British culture – a whole lot more than you’ll get farting around posh bits of London!
PM – Or farting around reading books ?
Posh, shmosh. What am I supposed to do, spend all my time looking at Dagenham and Brixton and Camberwell? I like the pretty bits, I like the bits where people like Keats and Coleridge used to live, I like the bits that have 18th century or earlier buildings, I like heaths and commons and parks. So sue me.