Reading classic crime stories from 75 years ago might be a way into enjoying a really good read.
THE QUEEN OF CRIME:
Even in the 1950's, Agatha Christie was considered rather old-fashioned, partly because of her use of archaic language - which by today would be even more 'out-of-date'.
One of the most influential genres of cinema is film noir. And many of these movies from the 1940s and 50s were based on detective stories of the time, including those by Raymond Chandler, many of which were on the radio as a show called The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.
It also helps to actually appreciate the richness of the writing style of Raymond Chandler language, in that "the master of hard-boiled detective fiction, is renowned for his distinctive literary style that reshaped the genre".
And the fact that he was educated in England before moving back to the States, means that Chandler’s slang is carefully crafted. And as an 'outsider' in Los Angeles, he challenged the way these stories were traditionally written: "My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description."
Perhaps we need to step back and consider what is 'neurodiversity':
Why there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ brainHaving been diagnosed with ADHD at 38, Howard Timberlake went on a personal quest to discover whether any of us has a “typical” mind.
According to one survey from 2016, around 62 million people across the globe were thought to have an autism spectrum disorder (including Asperger's syndrome), and 63 million had ADHD (though there can be crossover as some with autism can have ADHD and vice versa). That’s not to mention many other conditions – such as dyslexia, Tourette’s and Williams Syndrome (which involves a hypersocial personality) – that are also be due to differences in the brain’s anatomy.
People involved in the diagnosis and discussion of these conditions often use the term “neurodiverse” to describe the differences, and “neurotypical” to describe everyone else. But these terms have a long history and their meaning is constantly evolving.
The word neurodiverse was first coined in 1998 by an Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, who used it in her honours thesis. Shortly afterwards, it was picked up by a US journalist writing in a 1998 edition of The Atlantic, and the term began to evolve from there. As Singer explains to me, her original aim was to draw attention to a wide variety of conditions. “It was a time of incredible sharing and exploration,” she says. “I was just so overwhelmed with all these senses that people had that we didn't even know about – people who couldn’t recognise faces, people with extraordinary synaesthesia. There are so many things in the mind that we never imagined.
“I just thought, this is incredible diversity. With our stupid educational systems, we're trying to lock people into this narrow channel, instead of exploring what this diversity can bring us. We needed a movement, like the feminist movement, and that's where it came from.”
The term has since been employed for many purposes – as a word for empowerment, a means for celebrating qualities some neurological conditions can bring, and as a term of identity. But Singer had never intended for it to be used to describe a particular condition. Instead, she meant to for it to be used in a more general sense, to describe the variety of all brains.
“You cannot have neurodiverse as an adjective to describe anything else except the whole world,” she says. She draws a parallel with “biodiversity”, which is not used for a particular type of plant or animal but the overall variety of every living creature. “It’s the property of the whole biosphere.”
...Diagnoses are essential to ensure that people get the support they need - but there is a risk of "over-medicalising" traits and behaviours (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)
We mustn't forget that English is a European language (where it is used as a second language everywhere; and have you heard the average Norwegian youngster speak the language?)
And we mustn't forget that English is an African language (where it is not only a second language, but also the first and official language across half the continent!)
Language professionals challenge “native” requirement in hiring
After months of collaboration, educators Vincent Richard, Ana Jovic, Meri Maroutian and Dr Natalia Wright have published an open letter to the Council of Europe addressing what they describe as “the misuse” of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in the hiring practices of many educational institutions and employers globally.
An excerpt reads: “The CEFR was designed as a structured scale to assess communicative competence, not identity. Proficiency is achieved through study, exposure, and practice—not through birthplace or upbringing. Conflating “native” with advanced CEFR levels misrepresents how language skills develop and devalues the effort required to reach high levels of proficiency. It creates confusion for both job applicants and students.”
Speaking exclusively to EL Gazette, Vincent Richard said: “This letter has already drawn a lot of attention, especially on LinkedIn. Some prominent academics, teachers and teacher trainers, for example, have already signed it. This is very satisfactory. But for it to really have an impact and encourage the Council of Europe to respond, the campaign must continue. We want as many people as possible to sign it, of course, and we will be especially pleased and grateful if the big actors which we have invited to sign the letter, take the plunge as well. One of the reasons why native speakerism and bad hiring practices carry on is the law of silence. This must cease. There are people and institutions which could take a clear stance at last and make a real change. So here lies an opportunity!”
In the popular press, the idea is generally to 'lock them up' - but as the Daily Mail notes, it's not so straightforward:
Tough justice? What we need is effective justice... and that doesn't mean locking up thousands of sad, mad people to watch TV in overcrowded jails
The aim is not simply to lock ’em up in their cells for up to 23 hours a day – even if, to quote our ‘tough’ Justice Secretary, they’re sitting there ‘watching the Sunday match on Sky Sports’. No, the aim is to protect the public by preventing re-offending which, with a re-offending rate of 65 per cent, it is clearly not doing very well. It is said there are three types in prison; the sad, the mad and the bad. Of these, only the really bad – at most 15 per cent of the prison population – need to be there because they present a risk to the public, and their offending must be challenged.
"I was rather interested in my fellow prisoners who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence – as was shown by their having been caught."
If one spends any time around prisons, it does not take long before you hear inmates classified as either mad, bad or sad. It is a simplistic characterisation, and it carries pejorative undertones, but there is some sense in its development. Of these three ‘types’, two of them, the ‘mad’ and the ‘sad’ are worthy of considerable compassion rather that derision. The third type, the ‘bad’ are often marked by an innate desire to harm without remorse and most people find these inmates more difficult to view with any compassion, though they too are worthy of compassion.
This is part of the bigger question of how we view people generally - how we categorise and judge them.
Here's the viewpoint of a psychologist:
I first got my head into this stuff by reading a book by Australian academic Deirdre Greig: “Neither Mad nor Bad. The Competing Discourses of Psychiatry, Law and Politics.” She wrote about the interface between law and psychiatry precisely to acknowledge that the ‘mad / bad’ dichotomy was unsatisfactory to explain it...
So why does this debate exist in developed societies in the 21st century? Well, it is at least partly because the current constructs of medicine do not fully account for the human experience of mental illness or mental wellbeing – it’s known to be about more than medicine. You only need look at the tension surrounding the re-drafting of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual to see this. And it is partly because the law has sought to define legal constructs that account for these primarily medical, not psychological definitions – and we know the law hasn’t done this in the context of what we know about 21st century experience of mental illness. You only have to look at how laws have only comparatively recently considered ‘personality disorder’ as a ground to detain someone under mental health law.
Our ‘insanity’ laws were written in the first half of the 19th century. Just think what science has taught us about medicine and mental health since then? Just think what we have learned about the role of psychology and sociology in the development of mental health problems; think what we know about our politics and society and how we respond to mental ill-health … can it be the our laws are right and remain current? But then attempts to reform them are extremely difficult as the previous Government found during the first decade of this century.
More to the point of the title of this piece, we hear “mad versus bad” as if they are opposites of some kind. in fact they are two inherently unrelated constructs from two different paradigms: medicine and law. So this misunderstanding leads to us rarely seeing any debate about criminal suspects who are mentally ill that acknowledges that someone could be both mad and bad. Even if someone was suffering from a mental health problem at the point where they committed an offence, that illness or disorder does not necessarily excuse them from criminal liability – but it might.
Personality disorders are a contentious issue in psychiatry. How many are there and how reliable is their diagnosis? Are we just medicalising bad behaviour and social inadequacy. How should medical and criminal justice sectors divide responsibility? This is part of Professor Wilson's series of lectures.
What will help is if we learn to listen in different ways - as there are very different things out there to listen to: Jay Doubleyou: ways of listening
Radio 4's Word of Mouth takes us into how we can do this better:
Michael Rosen talks to sociolinguist Dr Haru Yamada about how we listen in different ways across different cultures and social groups. It's the side of conversation that is not about talking, but which is equally - if not more - important to how we communicate. Haru is the author of 'Kiku: The Japonese Art of Good Listening', and she believes that listening is something we can all learn to do better in order to build stronger relationships with each other, and with the world around us.
And BBC Radio 4's programme looking at words has done just that [from 32 minutes in]:
"Our Eartoon (a cartoon for the ear) this week delights in the seemingly arbitrary and confusing nature of phrasal Verbs. This is the latest episode in our series by Stagedoor Johnny 'Richard Poynton' in which he offers an origin myth for the English Language."
Linguist Peter Trudgill has been writing for the New European for the last decade - and his pieces are always a wonderful insight into how language works.
Here's his recent piece on why children are better at acquiring languages. [And you can access three articles a month from TNE]
Why learning language is child’s play
Children have an innate ability to learn foreign accents that is lost as they grow up... but is it always an advantage?
The distinguished Swedish linguistic scientist Prof Östen Dahl once wrote that, when it comes to language-learning, “human children have an advantage compared to adult members of their own species”.
The point is that human beings are genetically programmed to learn perfectly any language they are sufficiently exposed to in early childhood, while it is an extraordinary adult who is capable of doing the same thing.
This is particularly obviously true when it comes to pronunciation. Virtually everybody who starts learning a language after the age of eight or so ends up with a non-native accent. But there are advantages to this. It can be helpful if you are a foreigner to sound like one.
A young woman I knew who had been born in England to Polish refugee parents, and had grown up in Britain bilingual in English and Polish, reported that she experienced severe difficulties when she first moved to Poland to take up a job there. Polish people in Warsaw could tell from her accent that Polish was her mother tongue, so they therefore quite rapidly came to the conclusion she was crazy or stupid because she did not know how to do all the many Polish things which any adult Pole would know how to do.
During the act of speaking, our pronunciation depends on millimetre-accurate movements of our tongue and lips, and millisecond-accurate synchronisations of these with the movements of our vocal cords. We learn how to do this as very small infants by mimicking precisely the speech sounds of those around us.
Since these acts of speaking involve producing individual speech sounds thousands of times a day, these movements eventually become deeply automatic and hardwired in the infant, and they are therefore extremely hard to override later on, thus leading to foreign accents in adolescent and adult learners. There is lots of individual variation here, but most people lose the innate ability they had as infants between the ages of, say, eight and 14.
There are rare exceptions: the late Robert Maxwell – millionaire, media proprietor, MP, crook – who was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch – sounded remarkably like an Englishman when he spoke, even though he grew up in eastern Europe speaking Yiddish as his mother tongue, and started learning English only at the age of 17 (see TNE 233). But for the vast majority of us, this degree of achievement is impossible.
This raises an interesting question: is there any point in a non-native learner trying to sound like a native speaker, given that they are never going to succeed? I would say that the more you try to acquire a native-like accent, the nearer you will get to that goal – which will generally make it easier for native speakers to understand you. But of course it may not necessarily make you more intelligible to non-native speakers: a Greek friend of mine claims that he always enjoys visiting Italy because he can so readily understand the English spoken by Italians – and, equally, they can understand him easily, too.
It is also of course the case that native speakers tend to speak more rapidly than non-natives – they have normally, after all, had a lot more practice! – and speed can also cause comprehension difficulties for listeners.
Soon after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022, the NY Times looked at the 'culture wars':
Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture
March 2022
In a blast against “cancel culture,” he said the West is “canceling” Russia by going after “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.”
Russia, Mr. Putin’s argument goes, is culturally superior, because it respects history and traditional values. Now, he says, the West is betraying its “Russophobia” by trying to “cancel” Russia itself, including its contributions to the arts and to history, particularly to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Indeed, how broadly to punish Russian cultural figures in response to the war in Ukraine is a topic of debate around the world. Some have called for Russia’s total isolation, while others argue that blanket bans on all Russian entries at film festivals, for example, go too far.
In the main, however, relatively few Russian artists have been “canceled,” as Mr. Putin would have it. While there have been scattered examples of arts organizations in the West canceling Russian works and performers in the aftermath of Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the vast majority have continued to prominently feature Russian culture.
The Metropolitan Opera on Friday was opening a revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” featuring three Russian artists. That same night, the New York Philharmonic was performing Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony (next week, the orchestra will play Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev). The Chicago Symphony, meanwhile, is in the midst of a series of all-Tchaikovsky concerts.
To Mr. Putin, though, the idea that the West is rising up against all things Russian is a convenient foil. He had the conductor Valery Gergiev join him for Friday’s videoconference, which was held to mark Culture Workers’ Day in Russia and honored the winners of a Kremlin arts prize.
Mr. Gergiev, a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, was removed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic this month after he refused to denounce the invasion of Ukraine. On Friday, Mr. Putin dangled what appeared to be a reward for Mr. Gergiev’s loyalty: He asked the conductor whether he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
A year later. ABC news looked at the developing 'cultural war':
A report by PEN America published in Dec. 2022 said that “culture was on the frontlines” and that Putin “seeks not only to control Ukrainian territory, but to erase Ukrainian culture and identity.”
Olga Kozyrieva lives in the eastern settlement of Petropavlivka, Kharkiv region, which was occupied by Russian forces before being liberated in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in September last year. “Many children came here for books in Ukrainian,” Kozyrieva told ABC News, standing in the ruins of a school that was shelled. “But during the occupation, the Russians brought their own books and they wanted to teach our children the Russian language and literature.”
Families there said they hid Ukrainian books in their homes -- evidence that Russia was not just trying to take Ukrainians land, but turn it into Russia.
In a piece from last year, the Global Government Forum looked at how this battle has become international, pushed by Russia:
Organised chaos: how Russia weaponised the culture wars
December 2024
Social divisions, conspiracy theories and populist politics are rife in the democratic world. And these are not just home-grown problems: Russia and other hostile states have deliberately stoked internal dissent, weakening their opponents overseas. As we enter a year during which more than two billion people will go to the polls, Global Government Forum is publishing a five-part report on foreign interference in elections – beginning with an explanation of Russia’s goals, and the threat its actions pose to democracy itself
Russia’s goals
Various states have sought to surreptitiously influence public debates and election results in the democratic world, including North Korea and Iran. But the big players are Russia and China, whose contrasting approaches illustrate the range of techniques available – with Russia taking a far more aggressive line.
Russia’s over-riding goal appears – in the words of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) – to be the “poisoning of the political narrative in the West by fomenting political extremism and ‘wedge issues’.” UK Labour Member of Parliament Ben Bradshaw – who is taking the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights over its failure to commission an independent investigation into Russian interference – tells GGF that “Russia’s strategic goals have been pretty clear for some time. Along with other hostile state actors in autocratic countries, it is to do whatever they can in their power to weaken, destabilise, question, and cause division in democratic countries”.
Sometimes, Russia does seek to build support for its own narrative, or to assist into positions of power those sympathetic to Putin’s world view. Trump is the obvious example: Russia’s interventions in the 2016 presidential election campaign remain its biggest single overseas influence operation (see below). But just as often, Putin backs any force likely to weaken and divide western nations – including the Scottish independence and Brexit campaigns. “With regards to the Brexit referendum, it was an openly stated objective of Putin’s that he wanted Britain to vote to leave the European Union,” says Bradshaw. “The allyship he showed with pro-Brexit and far-right politicians in this country was in plain sight.”
Russia regularly supports both sides in the West’s ongoing culture wars, simply to deepen social divisions and stoke anger. In 2016, for example, its Internet Research Agency (IRA) published nearly 600 YouTube videos and 30 Facebook pages about police violence against African-Americans: some of these attracted more visitors than the official Black Lives Matter page, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The IRA used its influence, the report found, to stoke anger among African-Americans and to encourage them not to vote. At the same time, the New York Times found, Russian operatives were publishing ‘Blue Lives Matter’ material online – seeking to build support for the pro-police campaign established as a counterweight to Black Lives Matter.
Meanwhile, Russia works to undermine trust in public institutions, established information providers and mainstream media organisations – whittling away the shared truths that support the public discourse, and encouraging people to put their faith only in the partisan voices reinforcing their existing opinions. And it mounts very public attacks on election systems, with the goal of weakening trust in the elections process itself.
“We saw in the 2016 [presidential] election that there were attempts by Russia to manipulate the election,” comments Braw. The US elections system is secure, she says, and Russia did not alter the records of votes cast – but that isn’t the point: “They wanted the public to say: ‘Oh, Russia is interfering. I can’t trust the election system any more’,” she explains. “What matters is that people lose trust in the election system, because if you don’t think that the outcome represents the votes cast, then you won’t have any trust in the politicians elected through that election.”
Pursuing this tactic, Russia has found, can help boost populists in the West – building support for politicians who themselves further divide societies and weaken democracy. Donald Trump has, of course, spent the last four years claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen”: his attacks on the election system’s integrity serve both his own electoral interests, and Russia’s strategic goals.
As Spiked magazine showed after the Trump/Zelensky meeting in the White House earlier in the year, this culture war is very much at the heart of the US response to the war in Ukraine:
Ukraine has become a casualty of America’s culture war
The anti-Ukraine set confuses right-wing boomer memes for reality.
March 2025
Zelensky’s absorption into the American culture war is not his fault, but it is a disaster for Ukraine. As a result, his pleas – about Russia’s tendency to ignore ceasefires, or about Ukraine’s heroism or its gratitude to the US – are falling on deaf ears. To Trump’s base, Zelensky is not a legitimate leader, but an international ‘welfare queen’.
Perhaps Zelensky does not yet grasp how much has changed since Trump took over. After the debacle in the White House, American officials issued a clear warning: Trump is playing a new game, and Zelensky has missed it. ‘There is a new sheriff in town’, as Vance said in Munich last month – and his name is Donald J Trump.
Donald Trump is not an ideologue. I believe big ideas or big questions never interested him. He is more of an opportunist who utilizes ideas — to the extent he is capable of understanding them. During his second term, he relies on ideas more than during his first term, when he relied mostly on conspiracy theories.
As a political animal with strong instincts, he feels that ideologies have more power to consolidate his power. That is why he has decided to create ample room around himself for various ideologues who have big ideas and look for opportunities to test them in real politics. Two opportunisms, thus, meet together and drive Trump’s policies.
Ideologues crowding around Trump represent varying lines and trends: neoconservative, libertarian, post-liberal, etc. Their common denominator is a vigorous opposition to liberalism, which they identify, somehow confusingly, with the Democratic Party. They all are also “culture wars” warriors determined to win these wars, whatever it takes, and showing no mercy to their ideological enemies. Most of them are “burned out” liberals.
In the words of Curtis Yarvin, they are “dark elves” who became disappointed in their “elvish” liberal ideals...
Russian war propagandists claim that they invaded Ukraine to fight Western liberalism and Ukrainian identity. Therefore, by the way, Putin promotes ethnic Ukrainians with Russian identity to key positions—from negotiators to generals. He thereby wants to show that those who, in his view, are “real” Ukrainians cannot have their own identity different from Russian. Putin and his propagandists equate Ukrainian identity with Russophobia.
Thus, Putin’s war is a violent form of American culture wars, with their dichotomization between “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies. This is not the first time that Russia has borrowed Western ideological schemes and turned them into weapons. The most striking example is Soviet Communism. It took as its basis Karl Marx’s ideas and their interpretation by Western socialism theorists and established a totalitarian regime that caused a bloody bath for its own and neighboring peoples...
That is why many Americans who are at the forefront of their “culture wars” have such irresistible sympathies for Putinism. This enhances the bond between Putinism and Trumpism, which share the same DNA.
Going to English UK news, "according to these latest annual figures, UK ELT held steady in a year of global uncertainty and turbulence".
And as reported across the industry's media:
Ivana Bartosik of English UK’s intelligence partner Bonard said, “In a year marked by global uncertainty, significant government interventions and projected double-digit declines in affected ELT destinations, the UK sector held steady. While overall growth remained flat, this consistency amid international turbulence reflects the UK sector’s enduring appeal and ability to adapt.” Steady year for UK ELT sector in 2024 - StudyTravel Network
