How language changes - from splitting to spitting

It is now 99 years and about three weeks since my great-grandfather was killed, leading his regiment into action at the Battle of the Aisne in 1914.  I'm not sure why I think of him particularly on these occasions, but I do.

This is what I ask myself.  If he rose from the dead, from the village churchyard where he now lies, and popped back to London - would he be able to understand our newspapers?

If we found ourselves in London in September 1914, we would undoubtedly be able to understand his newspapers, but what about the other way around?

I don't mean words like 'tweet' or 'online'.  They would have befuddled us even twenty years ago, but the way that language has changed, and the kind of shorthand language invented by the Daily Mirror under the future Lib Dem peer, Hugh Cudlipp.

And English usage changes surprisingly fast.  And I am in danger here of turning this blog into a middle-aged rant about sloppy English.  I have reached a dangerous age, and it is true that I notice shifts like 'taken off' rather than 'taken from'.

But the reason for writing this post is my surprise that the phrase 'splitting image' has now completely disappeared, to be replaced by 'spitting image'.

I've noticed it for some time, but it became kind of official in my mind at least this week reading two edited and proof-read document - including a novel by Kate Mosse - where it was clearly 'spitting image'.

Do I mind this?  Well, I don't think I have really any grounds for complaining about the way the spoken language changes, but I do complain when it is changed on the basis of a TV satirical programme using puppets, which ran on ITV from 1984 to 1996, with the name Spitting Image (a pun, geddit?).  Especially as the puppets by Luck and Flaw nearly torpedoed the career of David Steel.

Steel went on to greater things, people seem to have forgotten the series - 1996 was 17 years ago after all - but it does seem to have shifted the language.

Every time I hear the shift, it irritates me.  But it just shows how wrong you can be, because closer research reveals that actually the older version is 'spitting' after all.

What does that prove?  I don't know.  But here is one of their most spitting sketches, after Margaret Thatcher's overwhelming election victory of 1987.  Watch out for Ted Heath putting his head in his hand.

Energy giants, Liberalism and anti-trust

The headlines of national papers are very rarely the same, even if they are covering the same story.  But on Wednesday, the Times and the Daily Telegraph both came up with the same one: 'Profit is not a dirty word, says Cameron'.

This may be the sign of a similarly abject relationship to the press office at No 10.  But both papers saw this phrase as the key element of David Cameron’s speech to his own conference.

By implication, we were supposed to see this as a riposte to Ed Miliband's attack on the energy providers.  It also provides a glimpse of the next election – state control versus a defence of profit.

There is, in turn, an answer to Cameron: profit may not be a dirty word, but profiteering is.  Can he tell the difference?

This is important because it reveals just how impoverished this debate is in the absence of a distinctive Liberal voice – and you partly have to blame the Lib Dems for this.

In the blue corner one party defends big business, and in the red corner they attack it.  Where is the voice for small business which is not actually a subset of big business, but a distinct sector of its own?  And a really crucial one, given that it is the SME sector that produces jobs and pays taxes.

I’m inclined to blame this damaging blind spot in the debate on the way that Liberalism has rolled over and accepted the slow shifting of language in economics away from its traditional position.

Liberals have allowed big business lobbies like the CBI to claim that they are speaking for all business.

They have allowed Labour and Conservative governments to gear regulation – banking, energy generation, public service commissioning – to suit the big corporates.

They have allowed free trade – originally a Liberal imperative to banish the economic shackles on the poor - to become a licence for the rich and powerful to ride roughshod over everyone else.

The result, it sees to me, is that costs are rising, and in every area.  That is what happens when you become dependent on monopolies.  It isn't just happening in energy either.  Wherever you have monopolies or oligopolies of suppliers or providers, jobs shrink and prices rise.

The truth is, as I wrote in my book Broke, that costs are rising so fast that ordinary middle class lives are no longer quite affordable – nor for anyone poorer.  Because the economy is increasingly geared to suit the needs of the mega-rich.  Recovery won't change that, and the sooner we face that the sooner we can act.

Is there anything we can do about it?  Well, I think there is. It means re-dedicating the forces of Liberalism to their original economic policy: breaking up monopolies.

So I’m grateful to Tony Greenham for sending me this by the American Liberal Woodrow Wilson in 1913.  This is how he put it:

"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own...

"No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of America does not lie in the brains of the small body of men now in control of the great enterprises… It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of the already famous and powerful in control."

So that is the way forward.  Major anti-trust action, in energy, in the grocery market, in the online world, in pharmaceuticals and foods - not because they have necessarily broken the law, but because we need instead the inventions and ambitions of unknown men and women.

Tutoring for two-year-olds?

I came across this in a shop window near where I live (Crystal Palace) - in fact it is the first tutors that I've seen round here with a shop front, and it is filled with symbols of reliable-looking old-fashioned education, with sums on blackboards.  A fascinating development.

This is the stuff of my time of life.  The panic is beginning to grow in the breasts of people like me round here, with children aged nine, about what we are going to do about secondary schooling.

Every place is hard fought.  A carpet millionaire has taken control of most of the nearby secondaries (from Peckham to Croydon), which seriously reduces our choices.  And for those who really want to compete, well, the sky is the limit - but most of us don't, if we can possibly help it...

Still, I know of parents who have had tutors since the age of five or six, and are putting their children in for the great Rat Race - entrance exams for the super-selective grammar schools, every weekend, around the M25.

There is a kind of tutorial arms race going on.  If your neighbours are employing tutors from the age of five, then maybe you have to - are your children going to be left behind?  Of course, in those circumstances, those who can't afford tutors lose out.  And so do the poor forcefed children, of course.

The Kent grammar school test is to be tweaked so that it can't be tutored, which is - as most people know - quite impossible.

As I took this photograph, someone came up behind me and said: "She's very good, you know."  It was a kind of freemason's handshake, for those of us in the grip of the Great Secondary School Panic - a word in the ear, secretive, knowing.  But then, this is the first hint I have ever seen that the tutoring arms race is now affecting the lives of those aged two.

I have tried to pinpoint the source of the panic in my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes, so I don't want to go into this now.  But part of it is undoubtedly the failure of successive governments to provide a major chunk of the middle classes with the kind of secondary schools they want - human-scale, friendly, inspiring, creative, nurturing...

And all they get to help them is school league tables, and I can't be the only one to be very dubious when confronted with the words 'outstanding'.  I know the way targets work.

So I was fascinated to see emerging at the same time a project for a new Crystal Palace Primary School, which lists its priorities as developing the following character traits:

Curiosity
Determination
Enthusiasm
Gratitude
Optimism
Self-control
Social intelligence

I know that the free school programme has been flawed by the Department for Education's centralising grip, but the idea that people can be supported to set up their own schools - with safeguards of course - is a life-enhancing business, and goes with the grain of people's energies.

Yes, they should be be brought under the auspices of local authorities, but at least people are able to provide themselves with the kind of schools they want in the great black hole of south London.

Otherwise we may go our whole lives before the local authorities or Whitehall provide us with a school dedicated to instilling gratitude and optimism, rather than the Gradgrindian business of tutoring kids into an early aduthood.

Why can't we have the choice of a secondary school dedicated to optimism and gratitude?  Oh yes, I forgot, because the carpet millionaire is establishing his grip on the local secondary schools and he gets what he wants.

Are you serving your children from a heart of love?

From Nancy Leigh Demoss...


(noisy children in background)

“All right. We have five minutes for a Bible story, and then you kids are going to bed! (pages turning) Let’s see . . . ‘One day God told Jonah . . .' Franky! Get over here and sit down!”

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You may be teaching your children the truths of the Bible . . .

“‘God told Jonah to go to Nineveh . . .' Sarah! I can’t wait till you kids are in bed!”

Nancy: . . . but are you doing it out of love? The apostle Paul says, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.”
If I’m teaching others God’s Word, but I don't have love, what does Paul say? I'm just making noise.

“Uhhh! I’m trying to read here!”

Nancy: Are you serving from a heart of love? Ask God to fill you with His love. Ask Him to love others through you.

The truth about authenticity

On one of the hottest afternoons of the summer, the comedy writer Jane Bussmann came down to the allotments that encircle my home in Crystal Palace to talk about authenticity.  The resulting radio programme struggles with the idea and it is rather good.

My only mild complaint is that the way it was cut made it sound as if the Canadian writer Andrew Potter was calling me a purveyor of "dopey nostalgia".

But then again, maybe he was.

Because actually, the authenticity debate - if there is one - is not really about a face-off between nostalgic romantics and hard-headed, world-weary post-modernists.  It is about the nature of humanity, and whether people need human contact.  whether they are suited for living permanently in a virtual world - or even an entirely ersatz one.  And it is about the truth.

My position is that people need the human element very much, and will fight to preserve the link to that - or at least the option of it - very hard indeed,  Not everyone, but enough people.

So Andrew Potter rather misses the point.  So does the Harvard University Press's contribution to the debate by James Gilmore and Joseph Pine.  Of course authenticity isn't an absolute.  We would be pretty suspicious of anything claiming to be completely authentic - it doesn't work for such a contradictory, mutli-faceted concept.

My own book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life came before either of them, and might sound a little starry-eyed by comparison - but actually I think it still stands.

I also think the debate is kind of going my way,   I've spent the decade since the book came out pouring scorn on the branding industry, which seems to me just to be a fancy name for image - and pouring particular scorn on the naive branding consultants who talk about people's emotional commitment to particular brands.

In fact, most people I know hate most of the brands they use.  They feel manipulated by them.

What I tried to say back then in 2003 was that, to genuinely feel authentic, companies needed to allow more human contact - or, as Anita Roddick used to say, to show more sophisticated emotions than fear and greed.

And now here is one of the world's top brand consultants, Chris Malone, saying something along the same lines.  I haven't read his book The Human Brand, because it isn't published yet,  But I read what he said in this week's Fortune magazine:

"Every brand is human, and every human is a brand.  how we damage our reputations and repair them is surprisingly similar.  It's about warmth ... it's humanising."

Quite right.  Authenticity isn't really about nostalgia at all, it's about how to humanise.

But then, if I was truly authentic, I ought to admit that the allotment Jane interviewed me on, and which they described as mine, is actually Sarah's.  I just cut the grass.  I'm not that authentic.

My favorite all purpose cleaning solution...

(photo from here)

I've been having issues with the skin on my hands for some time now. It is mostly my right hand and fingertips.  I've narrowed it down to the cleaning products I've been using.  I HAD to change something to get the cracking, bleeding, itching to go away.  NOTHING worked to bring relief. 

I've gotten rid of all store bought cleaners and am making my own all purpose cleaner now.  The recipe below doesn't do well on mirrors or glass, so I simply added a pump spray to a bottle of rubbing alcohol and that works like a charm!!!!  Cheap AND doesn't bother my skin!  Love that!!!

Of all the all purpose cleaners I've tried, this one has been the best!  It's great that I can mix it up quickly, it does a good job of cleaning, AND it smells great!!!


Natural Homemade All-Purpose Cleaner


In a spray bottle mix:

• 1 tsp borax
• 1/2 tsp washing soda
• 1 tsp liquid castille soap
• essential oils as preferred

Then add 2 cups of warm water. Distilled is best, but any water that has been boiled will work. Cover bottle and shake well. Use as needed.


What works for you??  

The new conservative mood and why it matters

Have you noticed that the word 'modernisation' is slowly disappearing from the political lexicon.  At roughly the same speed as Tony Blair.

Why?  Because people don't believe it any more.  It became a weasel word.  If you heard any service was being 'modernised', it usually meant 'streamlined', which took the humanity and usually also the effectiveness out of it.  Nobody, except maybe the dinosaurs at McKinsey, believe in that kind of modernisation any more.

The last thing anybody wants of any institution they use is that it should be 'modernised' in that sense.  Why would you, when modernised has come to mean 'lobotomised'?

I thought of this as I read a fascinating article by John Harris in the Guardian, which describes the emerging new conservatism in the UK - and how far away it is from the conservatism practised by the current leaders of the Conservative Party.

The first thing we think of in these terms, because we are members of the metropolitan middle classes (speak for yourself! I am), is UKIP and the hatred of foreigners.  But don't let's dismiss English conservatism so blithely.

Harris was talking about the growing sense in the nation that modernisation, globalisation and internationalisation, as practised by Blair and Osborne (can you see the difference between the two twins?), has not served us very well.

It is small C conservatism to regret the closing of your local pub or post office, to bemoan the destruction of traditional banks, the failure of lobotomised institutions.

It is small C conservatism to regret the privatisation of Royal Mail, one of the great institutions of state.

Nobody any more believes that this will improve the service, provide any sense of mutuality or leadership, or give any grounded sense of community.  Not even the promoters of the privatisation plan can possibly believe that.  But they believe somehow that it will be worth it because a new owner can raise the necessary capital to - no, don't say it - modernise.

That is not a conservative act.  Not something that any middle English conservative, with a healthy sceptical view of political language, could possibly be thrilled about.  This is how Harris puts it:

"But too many modern Tories' conservatism is dissonant, for some key reasons. First – and here, picture George Osborne, who is not actually a small-c conservative at all – most of them are brimming with neoliberal zeal, and for all their thin approximations of patriotism, have a tin ear for issues that go from politics and economics into questions of national identity, culture and people's feelings for where they live."

That is absolutely right, and it provides an opportunity for the opponents of the Conservative Party, which Miliband tried to fill a little last week with his Labour-style populism ("keep still and we'll give you money").

The great danger is that the Westminster elite will regard this quiet kind of conservatism as too dangerous, too backward-looking, even mildly racist - so that they don't hear it properly and miss its creative, localist power.  

Or take the usual line of the Westminster bubble and shut it out completely, while the elite embrace our existing lobotomised institutions with new fervour.  The danger then is that you push middle England straight into the waiting arms of Nigel Farage - or worse.