what makes a good detective story - it's not the plot

By reading detective stories from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, we enter perhaps the defining world of this genre.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

And the master of the genre was Raymond Chandler, who wrote about the underworld of Los Angeles, but who went to school near London:

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."

Or, as others say on Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, this is what we like about the stories:

It's not the detective plot, [but] the noirish palette to everything, the enviably snappy dialogue, or terse brilliance of Chandler's prose...

This is why his books are so acclaimed - in that Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is in search of dignity:

One of the important aspects spoken about Raymond Chandler’s books is the style of the author. Chandler’s language was tough, he could throw one liners the same way Mike Tyson could throw a knockout punch, the dialog was witty and hard, the characters colorful and the plot convoluted. You did not read Chandler for the plot. (Indeed his plots sometime have holes which even Chandler himself couldn’t fill. When asked as to who killed the driver in ‘The Big Sleep’, Chandler is supposed to have remarked that he had no clue. Or something to that effect.) 

You read Chandler for his style the first time but when you keep returning back to his books, the realization dawns that beyond the style lies Chandler’s moral compass, which ensures the story moves in the right direction. It is this moral center which according to me has given immortality to Chandler’s best books. If there is one theme which seem to hold together the best novels of Chandler: ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘The Long Goodbye’, ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and ‘The High Window’, it is the search for dignity. In all these novels, Marlowe is trying his best to restore the sense of dignity of his client, even if this process hurts him personally sometimes.

BRITISH CRIME FICTION

Shockingly (!) Raymond Chandler took down Sherlock Holmes - that is, "the eccentric sleuths" modeled after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

Their stories go something like this: 

In the traditional Golden Age plot, a murder occurs — but not for any apparent reason beyond puzzle solving. After the discovery of the body (which is almost never found rotting), the private detective arrives on the scene, which is usually somewhere sensational, like a Georgian mansion or a yacht traveling the Nile. From here, suspects are questioned and clues examined. It’s an impersonal affair, almost like moving chess pieces or trying the Sunday crossword. By the end, the detective will assemble all of the concerned parties and explain to them how he or she solved the case with superhuman intelligence and the supernatural power of never being wrong. The criminal is then dramatically outed.

Not that Chandler had anything against chess and problem-solving - as his detective Marlowe enjoyed replaying classic chess games - but he did dislike the escapist lack of realism in classic British detective stories:

“The Simple Art of Murder,” which was first published in The Atlantic in December 1944, is essentially Chandler laying bare the ethos behind hard-boiled detective fiction... For Chandler, the detective novel should be a “realist in murder,” meaning it should inhabit “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities.” ... Chandler expounds upon how detective novels should represent the unsafe world of precarious civilization, not the idealized and contained world of the country house.

Raymond Chandler’s grudge against British mysteries has been reconsidered over the years - a recurring point being that Chandler slammed English detective novels and their authors time and again, but he didn't hate the literature, just the class snobbery.

Perhaps his criticism has been over-interpreted:

“Chandler despised the English school of crime writing,” pronounces the late modern English Crime Queen P. D. James in her short genre survey, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). Similar pearls of conventional wisdom have been placed before us by authorities who similarly have overgeneralized Chandler’s hostility toward the puzzle-oriented English detective novel. In The Life of Raymond Chandler, for example, Frank MacShane sweepingly refers to “Chandler’s dislike of deductive detective stories,” while in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, the academic scholar Leonard Cassuto categorically declares that “Chandler rejects the puzzle-whodunit.”

It seems that Chandler was a little less brutal:

In analyzing “The Simple Art of Murder” writers tend to focus on Chandler’s criticism of artificiality within the mystery genre, yet in his essay Chandler in fact spends much of his time blasting the classical English detective novel on what clearly are class-related grounds...

Throughout his “Simple Art” essay, Chandler repeatedly sounds cutting class notes. When praising his hard-boiled predecessor Dashiell Hammett for bringing something fundamentally new and bracingly authentic to the detective fiction genre, Chandler tellingly complains of English mystery novelists larding their tales with “dukes and Venetian vases.” In a famous statement, Chandler declares that “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.” Later he lauds Hammett (and by implication himself) for giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Elsewhere Chandler sneers at English “detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.”

FRIEDRICH GLAUSER:

The Swiss-German writer Friedrich Glauser is not well-known in the English-speaking world, but the Friedrich-Glauser-Preis has become the most prestigious award for crime fiction in the German-speaking world.

Indeed, much crime fiction in German has been marginalised:

Until relatively recently, German academia had largely ignored their home-grown talent and focused their scholarly efforts instead on the canonical English-language authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. As influential as these writers have been, Hall argues that this is a mistake, as “German-language crime fiction has also been shaped by its own crime writing heritage, for in the case of the early detective story, it was German-speaking crime writers who led the way”.

His English-language publisher says that Friedrich Glauser is "often referred to as the Swiss Simenon":

In 1939, a year after Glauser's death, the film of 'Thumbprint', the first Sergeant Studer mystery, was greeted with critical acclaim and commercial success. Studer became more famous than his creator, the mark of true success for a fictional detective. Glauser's elegant prose and acute observation conjure up a world of those at the margins of society. His Sergeant Studer novels have ensured his place as a cult figure in Europe.

An online blog on Friedrich Glauser looks at what makes him so special, even today:

Glauser wrote six detective stories, five of them featuring Sergeant Jacob Studer of Bern police. The novels are modelled on the Commissaire Maigret stories by Georges Simenon, as the author freely admitted. Not the criminal case as such is the main issue but the people and the atmosphere in which they move. Both Maigret and Studer are petit-bourgeois, in both cases the whole personality does the investigation, not just the intellect and both are very different from their authors .

He wrote 'anti-detective fiction' - creating a sort of Atmosphere of Malaise:

Friedrich Glauser's Motto regiert (1936) tells a story with parabolic qualities: Sergeant Studer must investigate a murder that has taken place in a Swiss psychiatric clinic. The social and political issues that are roiling Europe in the years leading up to World War Two find condensed expression in this microcosm. The essay focuses on the literary devices the text employs to create atmosphere and asks how atmosphere functions both to support the construction of a classic murder mystery, while also subverting some of its generic conventions. The figure of the detective is of central importance, as he is portrayed as uncommonly sensitive to the atmosphere of his surroundings. At the same time, however, the clinic's atmosphere ultimately proves to some extent unreadable. Hence, Glauser's text can be viewed as a precursor of the what in post-war literature will come to be known as anti-detective fiction.

His English translator tells more about Glauser's sensitivity:

What particularly attracts me about Glauser’s crime novels is the way his detective — Sergeant Studer — understands and sympathises with the disadvantaged, even if his job means he has to continue to investigate them. There is a profound sense of humanity permeating Glauser’s writing, which at the same time throws a keen light on social conditions in Switzerland in the 1930s, but coming across as a concern for individuals rather than as a political message.

Here's a taste from his English translator: "From "Fever"" by Friedrich Glauser at Words Without Borders

So, yes, there's more to detective fiction than the plot...

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multilingualism in the classroom

It's good to speak more than one language:

Jay Doubleyou: ça va?! bilingualism is good for the brain

Jay Doubleyou: two languages good, three languages better

So it's good to speak more than one language at school:

Jay Doubleyou: bilingualism and school

Jay Doubleyou: bilingual teaching today

But how can we learn and teach other languages in a ''bilingual" way at school?

Jay Doubleyou: is clil working? is the bilingual class effective? are students learning through english?

There are a couple of interesting articles in the latest E L Gazette looking at recent research:

How might schools incorporate multilingualism effectively? Multilingual Learning Specialist, Valentina Spyropoulou explains the methods and techniques used in her school.

At Optimist International School (OIS), we believe that creating a nurturing and intellectually stimulating environment, where every child feels a sense of belonging, is essential for their holistic development.

However, when a child’s strongest language doesn’t align with the language of instruction, it can present severe challenges and lead to feelings of isolation and exclusion. According to Dr Jim Cummins’ research, developing basic communication skills, like social language, takes six months to two years, while cognitive academic language proficiency may require five years or longer. This can adversely affect a student’s motivation and overall development if we, as their educators, don’t offer them ample opportunities to express themselves.

Even though English serves as our primary language of instruction, we actively embrace and celebrate our students’ and teachers’ linguistic diversity. We integrate translanguaging techniques, allowing students to use their languages flexibly for both communication and academic purposes. Translanguaging, a concept delineated by García, creates a bridge between their prior life experiences and learning, capitalising on their existing knowledge. We are committed to reflection, updating policies, and incorporating translanguaging approaches to make language instruction more inclusive and visible. This ensures students develop a solid foundation in all their languages, enhancing their lifelong language skills.

Here are some of our key strategies:

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Embracing multilingualism - E L Gazette

AND:

L1 in multilingual classrooms

In this article, Hamish Chalmers analyses the evidence for multilingual classrooms.

Attitudes to the use of L1 in the L2 classroom is an area of contradiction. Think back to when you first started to learn a foreign language; if, like me, you grew up in the UK, your foreign languages classes were probably characterised by lots of English use, while you wobbled your way into a comfortable relationship with French or German. You will have been given translations of key words. Your teacher may have used English to explain grammar rules. This will have persisted throughout your formal instruction.

However, if you grew up somewhere else, your experiences of learning English might have been different. You might have been at an international school, where the only language you heard your teachers use was English. Your playgrounds and corridors were probably decorated with signs that read, ‘Please Speak English’. You might have been praised when a teacher heard you speaking English with your friends and told off when you weren’t. If this feels like a double standard, that’s because it is.

Both standards are not without plausible rationales; grammar rules, for example, can be tricky to understand at the best of times, let alone when they are explained in a language you have not yet fully mastered. Using the L1, therefore, can be argued to expedite meta-linguistic understanding.

International school communities are often composed of learners representing a multitude of different L1s, none of which may be shared with their teachers. English, therefore, can act as a lingua franca, levelling the playing field and encouraging teachers to make accommodations for emerging English proficiency a routine part of their practice.

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L1 in multilingual classrooms - E L Gazette

With more reading here:

Multilingualism in the Classroom

Multilingualism in the classroom: benefits in education and policy recommendations | Cambridge University Press & Assessment

Multilingual Learning: How To’s and Strategies for Teacher – Sphero

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eurish

English is of course spoken across Europe:

English language in Europe - Wikipedia

And in the meantime, a language is emerging that is spoken across the continent but not in 'English speaking countries': 

It is mostly used among EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU's Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language.

Euro English - Wikipedia

This started about a decade ago:

Eurish has developed a grammar of its own

Do you speak Eurish? EU has its own language that's far too difficult | World | News | Express.co.uk

And now after Brexit:

One feature is the European uncountable noun — singular in native-speaker English but plural in Eurish: “he received feedbacks”, “we have a lot of informations” and “we are producing online contents”.

There are other Eurish differences. I have heard both Germans and Italians say “we discussed about” rather than “we discussed”. “I will answer to your question” is common in many European discussions. Writing in the World Englishes journal, Mr Modiano adds others: “I am coming from Spain” rather than “I come from Spain” and “We were five people at the party” rather than “There were five people at the party”.

Continental Europeans are increasingly unworried about what Brits think of their developing English.

The evolution of Eurish - Marginal REVOLUTION

Europe speaks its own post-Brexit English

Here's a look at the differences:

Preliminary observations on the differences between Eurish, Globish and “natural” English

With the full piece here:

ECA Subject Brief

The New European's Francis Beckett writes in the latest issue:

But at least, surely, English remains the language in which the European institutions work?

Well, in a sense. The language in which the commission does its business, in which meetings are held and all official documents are written, looks every year less and less like the language you and I speak.

The British staffers used to protect it, to point out gently that this or that construction might sound fine in French or Spanish but it wouldn’t do in the language of Shakespeare. But they are no longer there, and of the two remaining Anglophone nations, Ireland has chosen to nominate Gaelic as its official language, and Malta has nominated Maltese.

So a new language is developing, which may eventually be related to English only in the way that Yiddish is related to German, or Niçois to Italian. It is developing just as a new language always develops, by using English words in French, Spanish or Italian constructions, and by importing words from European languages. I’d be tempted to call it Eurish.

In Eurish, you do not attend a meeting; you assist a meeting, because the French word assister means attend. You don’t plan a project, you have a planification. A deposit is a caution (because it is in French.) Spanish has contributed “a planning” for a schedule, “formation” for education, and “actually” for currently.

More are added each year.

Replacing English as the commission’s working language would be difficult. But the French are taking the commission to court over certain examinations for commission posts being in English only; and increasingly it’s Eurish anyway.

Brexit has wiped Britain off the map - The New European

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translating with an accent

What should a translations sound like?

They should certainly reflect the original - which will included dialect and accent:

Translation is a tough enough discipline at the best of times, but when accents and dialects are factored in it becomes a real test of a linguist’s skills. So anyone hoping to use free software to translate something where accents are involved should give up now!

You may think that producing translations where the source includes a variety of dialects is something you’ll rarely be called upon to do, but everything from classic works of literature to Disney films makes use of accents as a way of fleshing out characters. By simply wiping all accents out, and making all of the characters speak a standardised version of the target language, the translator significantly alters the way the character is perceived by the reader.

Accents and Dialects: A Thorny Issue for Translators | Language Insight

Nelson Mandela famously said “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” That’s exactly why businesses need to consider regions as well as languages by using a localised translation service and dialect translator when translating content.

Translating Dialects And Interpreting Accents - Global Voices

Lost sales opportunities. Lost depth of character. Miscommunication between two people who, in theory, speak the same language. Glossing over differences between accents and dialects can be a recipe for disaster in all sorts of situations.

Would all of the characters in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be as good if their dialogue was blankly rendered into standard American English? Would a misused dialect word instantly kill off your chances of connecting with your new target audience?

Accents and Dialects in Translation

Much has been said about translation’s challenges, joys, and nuanced politics of choice – of the decision-making it necessitates. Perhaps not many people think simultaneously in two (or more) languages, two cultures, two texts as intimately as a translator. In the course of engaging with the rewarding art of translating a text – and translating a reader, as the writer, poet and translator A K Ramanujan saw it – I found myself struck by thoughts on language and specifically on literature in India, far more than I wanted to be, some days. These evolving, shape-shifting metaphors and ideas started with an untethered phrase: ‘to translate with an accent’...

I submit to you this: could we as translators cultivate a practice of translating with an accent? And editors and readers process it and read it, respectively, while noticing said accent? I understand this is a tricky premise to begin with, for the lines between foreignisation and domestication are constantly shifting, the blurriness between the choices blurred further by the translator’s own language, experiences, and so on. But what if we could find a way to retain a phrase here, a word there, to remind the reader that the text comes from another language; that, in reading an unfamiliar word, they have just learnt something new, have learnt a word which they might never use themselves but whose meaning, should they see it again, they might remember? In doing so, in my case, Kannada gains another reader. It goes without saying that there is a fine balance to be sought, between keeping some source language and ensuring a reader in English (in this case) is not met with an impenetrable target text. Here is where I shall argue that we, as various parties in this transfer between cultures, should, instead of trying to contort the source language to fit the English idiom, look for ways to stretch English so that it too can speak somewhat with the accent of the original language. Because, devoid of the musicality with which retained accents enrich the translation, we would remain separate languages and cultures, condemned to bear the burden of the proper in our unaccommodating, un-elastic cultural lives.

Working in the English language as an Indian with many languages is a process in negotiating with its politics every other day. Decolonising the mind, and then our outer worlds, and therefore our culture is but a lifelong attempt. In the meanwhile, though, I wonder if perhaps we could see the English language, in this context, for its elasticity. Language is meant to stretch this way and that; when an elastic band snaps back in place, it often no longer retains its perfect round shape. When we speak with an accent, write with one, translate with many, the palimpsest of language loses not much, but stretches across the artificiality of bridges and borders. Like that only, as we would say here in India.

To Translate with an Accent – PEN Transmissions

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'language shift', loan translation and 'calques'

What happens when your whole community changes your own language?

Peter Trughill looks at Ireland:

The traces that we can’t shift

Communities can switch language – like the Irish who gradually gave up Gaelic for English – but they retain parts of the old one, too

“Language shift” is a term which refers to situations where an entire community, or a large proportion of it, gradually stops speaking their mother tongue and switches to another language.

Until the 19th century, most people in most of Ireland were native speakers of Irish Gaelic. But then a process of language shift set in whereby the majority of the population gradually abandoned the Irish language and shifted to the colonial language, English. Today the entire island of Ireland has become a space where English is spoken natively instead of, or as well as, Irish Gaelic – there are still hundreds of thousands of people living there who can speak Irish.

This shift has meant that many traces of Gaelic can be found in the modern English of Ireland. These linguistic vestiges resulted from 19th-century English having been learnt post-childhood as a second or foreign language by people whose mother tongue had been Gaelic.

When adults and adolescents learn a foreign language, they invariably retain a foreign accent and tend not to reproduce the grammar of the new language exactly. This is how some non-native features found their way into the English of originally Irish mother-tongue communities – and have now become established as an integral part of the native-speaker English of Ireland.

The traces of Irish Gaelic which were left behind include Gaelic-origin words, and aspects of the pronunciation of Irish English, but we also find grammatical features. The grammatical construction known as the “after perfect” is exemplified in Irish English expressions such as “I’m after reading the paper”, meaning “I’ve just read the paper”. This is a direct loan translation or calque from Irish Gaelic, where that same grammatical pattern is used.

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The traces that we can’t shift - The New European

'Loan translation' or 'claque' happens a lot - 

In linguistics, a calque (or loan translation) can be defined as a word-for-word translation from one language into another. For example, when you take a phrase in French and then literally translate root-for-root or word-for-word into English, that’s a calque.

In English we see many examples of common phrases that are calques translated from other languages. For example; Beer Garden is a calque of the German Biergarten, and Adam’s Apple is a calque of the French pomme d’Adam. In both these examples, English phrases are derived from a direct literal translation of the original. Calque is a loanword from a French noun – it’s derived from the verb calquer, meaning to copy, to trace.

What is Calque (or Loan Translation) | BLEND Blog

Sometimes we adopt a word from a language and translate it more or less literally. And Sometimes, we borrow words directly from another language.

What Is Loan Word?

Borrowing or loan word is a word that is taken from a language and is used in another language, while calque or loan translation is a word that is translated into another language.

Types of Loan-Words

Loan words are those foreign words that one language borrows from another without changing their meaning. There are two types of loan words and we are going to clarify each of them.

Foreign words with the same spelling: a borrowed word of a foreign language that its orthography stays the same.

• Umbrella from (Italian) to (English)
• espresso from (Italian) to (English)
• pasta from (Italian) to (English)
• Café from (French) to (English)
• Ski from (Norwegian) to (English)
• Bazaar from (Persian) to (English)

Foreign words with different spelling: The orthography of the word changes in the target language.

• Chofer (Spanish) from (French) chauffeur
• Futbal (Hungarian) from (English) Football
• sˇekki (Finnish) from (English) check

What Is Calque?

Loan-translation or calque is used when a word is translated word by word into another language. Remember that calque is a semantic or syntactic translation and it does not have phonetic matching.

Types of Calque

Phraseological calque: when idiomatic phrases or sets of expressions have been translated word by word.

• 'It goes without saying' (English) tranlated from 'ça va sans dire' (French) In this example, ça = it, va = goes, sans = without, dire = saying
• 'schau stehlen' (German) translated from 'steal the show' (English)

Syntactic calque: Syntactic or structural calque is the product of an inexact connection between the elements of a sentence or phrase.

• in order to = en orden a (instead of ''para'') from French to English.
• to find guilty = encontrar culpable (instead of ''declarar culpable'') from Spanish to English.

Semantic calque: Additional meanings of the words in the source language are transferred to the word in the target language, with the same primary meaning.

• Biergarten (German) = beer garden (English) Here, the concept of 'beer garden' is derived from German language.
• Computer mouse (English) = souris (French)
• Hot dog (English) = perros calientes (Spanish)
• Gratte-Ciel (French) = scrape-sky (English)
• Marché aux puces (French) = flea market (English)

Loan Words and Calques in The English Language | LanGeek

With more here - including an interesting bit of translation:

Calque - Wikipedia

And more:

• brainwashing from 洗脑 – xǐnǎo
• lose face from 丢脸 – diūliǎn
• paper tiger from 纸老虎 – zhǐlǎohǔ

Fun Facts About English #31 – Loan Translations

Some lists:

German Loan Words in the English Language

English Words Used in Czech

Which brings us to Czenglish: 

Czenglish - Wikipedia

And Denglish:

Denglisch - Wikipedia

And the specific problems for Czech/German speakers learning English:

Common Problems for German Learners of English | The TEFL Academy

10 typical mistakes made by German speakers who are learning English – English with Kirsty

Pronunciation problems for Czech speakers of English

TEN ENGLISH MISTAKES CZECH PEOPLE MAKE - TOM CZABAN

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why giving a welsh park a welsh name is problematic - or not

Recently, one of the national parks of Wales changed its name:

Brecon Beacons: Park to use Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog - BBC News

And this is why:

Brecon Beacons: Bannau Brycheiniog rebrand shows why names matter - BBC News

Here's a bit of help with the pronunciation:

Bannau Brycheiniog is pronounced: ban-eye bruck-ein-iog. It’s derived form the plural of “ban”, meaning “peak”, and “Brycheiniog” referring to the old kingdom of King Brychan. Its English translation means “The Peaks of Brychan’s Kingdom”.

Brecon Beacons name change explained: How to pronounce the National Park’s new Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog

But not everyone likes it:

Business chiefs call for Brecon Beacons' English name to be reinstated over tourism fears | Daily Mail Online

Brecon Beacons National Park: Tories criticise renaming as 'symbolic' attempt to look 'trendy' | UK News | Sky News

Why associate a rapist with Brecon Beacons? | cambrian-news.co.uk

Unfortunately, this has become part of the so-called 'culture wars':

The new name, which took effect yesterday, has been imposed without consulting any of the thousands of local residents (or 4 million annual visitors) who so enjoy this breath-takingly beautiful landscape. It is purely the brainchild of an unholy alliance of virtue-signalling politicians and civil servants who appear to be prepared to spend taxpayers' money on the most lame of initiatives, as long as they can be passed off as contributing in some way to the sunlit uplands of 'net zero'.

HARRY MOUNT: Renaming the Brecon Beacons is a victory for woke philistines | Daily Mail Online

There’s nothing that imperialists hate more than Welsh people (or Irish people, or Scottish people) doing Welsh (Irish/Scottish) things in their own country. Throw in concern about the environment and you basically have what amounts to a genius marketing strategy, and right before the coronation of the former “Prince of Wales” as King. Note my use of quotation marks, because the last true Prince of Wales – that’s literally his name – Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, died in 1282. These sorts of union-flag-waving English jamborees can make even the mildest Welsh person feel a bit queasy...

Bannau Brycheiniog: is this Welsh national park where Tory culture warriors will meet their Waterloo? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian

As covered by the EL Gazette:

Just when we thought it was safe to go back down the pub, the language wars have again broken out. This time it is the mighty ire of the English directed against a Welsh National Park...
The most common complaint is that it is “anti-English”. “The Welsh just want to have a laugh at us because we can’t pronounce it,” spluttered one commentator. Certainly the Welsh might enjoy the spectacle, just as English people collapse in giggles every time we hear an American trying to pronounce the word Worcestershire.

Putting out the flames of culture wars | E L Gazette   

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the origin of place names

There is a fascinating book just out which looks at the origin of place names:

Found In Translation — Duncan Madden

Found in Translation: The Unexpected Origins of Place Names | Stanfords

Here are a couple of excerpts, published in the i-newspaper:

Land of rabbits and the canoe – five amazing stories of how countries got their names

From one of our favourite holiday destinations to far-flung Australia, the names of countries reveal a fascinating insight to their history

By Duncan Madden

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While you may take the time to learn a bit about the country you’re off on holiday to, have you ever thought about its name – what it means and where it came from? The study of etymology and how places got their names is a treasure trove of extraordinary stories – invasions and rebellions, cultures and religions, adventures and disasters – that can tell us a lot about the countries we visit and the histories that shaped them.

Argentina – ‘silvery land’

Argentina’s naming is a story of adventure, misfortune and almost unfathomable derring-do. It concerns the travails of Portuguese conquistador Aleixo Garcia who, shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast in the early 16th century, became obsessed with the legend of a White King and his vast wealth hidden somewhere in the South American interior, most likely to be in the borders of the Inca Empire.

Garcia spent eight years planning his assault and building an army before marching into Inca territory and, amazingly, escaping loaded with silver booty. But on his journey home following the Río de la Plata, “river of silver”, into Argentina, Garcia was betrayed and killed by a supposedly friendly indigenous tribe. Those in his army who did escape survived to spread the story of the land of silver beside the river of silver.

The final linguistic twist in the tale comes from the switch in language – plata is Spanish but argentina is Italian for silver. For this we can thank the Venetian and Genoese cartographers of the time, whose Italian language maps became the mainstay throughout Europe and in doing so cemented Argentina as the name of the silvery land – much to Spain’s annoyance.

Spain – ‘land of rabbits’

Talking of Spain, the world’s second most popular holiday destination has one of the more curious meanings of any country, dating back to the time of the Phoenicians.

Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula around 1,000 BC, said Phoenicians were met with an unexpected sight – millions of rabbits running rampant across the landscape. Never having seen such critters before, they assumed them to be a type of hyrax, sphan in their language (a furry mammal native to their homelands in the Middle East), and so named the land for them, I-Shaphan, “island of the hyraxes (or rabbits)”. And yes, the Phonicians assumed, wrongly of course, that they had landed on an island rather than the peninsula of Iberia.

Despite the strange circumstances that inspired it, the empires and cultures that followed the Phoenicians stuck with their name, adapting it along the way until the Romans were using Hispania all the way up until the Spain of today.

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Land of rabbits and the canoe - five amazing stories of how countries got their names

Of course, there is lots more:

Place name origins - Wikipedia

The History and Origins of Placenames

The origins of place names

How to Navigate by Nostalgia: The Linguistics of Place Names - JSTOR Daily

Origins of Canada's Geographical Names

Diversity in New York Place Names | National Geographic Society

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highlighting wonky translations gives language learners permission to make mistakes

We all know the language-learning app Duo:

Duolingo - The world's best way to learn a language

It's just opened a gallery in Tokyo:

Language-learning app Duolingo has opened a ‘Museum of Wonky English’ in Harajuku, Tokyo, and is giving mundane phrases that have been mistranslated new and surprising meanings. In one, viewers see a coffee pot with a sign next to it reading: “When coffee is gone, it’s over.” As well as the in-person event and hero film, Duolingo is inviting people to share their own mistranslations on Twitter, with the best submissions being exhibited in the museum.

Ad Of The Day: Duolingo Creates Exhibition Of Dodgy Translations In Tokyo | The Drum

Here's the short film:

Museum of Wonky English | Duolingo - YouTube

The advertising industry likes it:

Duolingo launches Japan’s Museum of Wonky English - More About Advertising

As does the design industry:

'urinate with elegance': duolingo exhibits wonky english mistranslations in tokyo

And the teaching of English industry.

Here's the ever-vigilant Liz Granirer:

UltraSuperNew is a creative agency in Tokyo and it’s recently opened a new exhibit sponsored by the language learning app Duolingo at its UltraSuperNew Gallery that heroes ‘bad’ translations of English into Japanese. Examples include ‘Please urinate with precision and elegance’ and ‘Please do not eat children and elderly’. In fact, you can giggle at 16 of these deliciously mistranslated statements and even submit ones you discover. The ones chosen to be exhibited alongside those already in the museum win a month’s free subscription to Super Duolingo. That’s because Duolingo has always championed wonky translations, believing that highlighting them gives language learners permission to make mistakes.

“Why do mistakes have such a bad rep?” asks UltraSuperNew’s associate creative director, Andrés Aguilar, as reported by lbbonline.com. “They’re the unsung language-learning heroes and we wanted this campaign to settle the scores. There’s a treasure trove of meanings you can only access when lost in translation and that’s what we wanted people to experience in the Museum of Wonky English.”

Tokyo has a new attraction for those who enjoy ‘bad’ translations | E L Gazette

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not every english/swedish/german/russian-speaker is english/swedish/german/russian

Not every speaker of English is English - of course:

List of countries by English-speaking population - Wikipedia

And 'English literature' is simply any literature written in English:

English literature is the literature which is distinctly written in the English language, as opposed to differing languages. English literature includes literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England nor primarily English-speaking nations; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Thomas Pynchon is American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world in countries originally colonized by the British.

Jay Doubleyou: english literature

There is a sizeable Swedish-speaking population in Finland:

Swedish Speakers - Minority Rights Group

Swedish-speaking population of Finland - Wikipedia

And they identify themselves as Finns:

Are there Swedish speakers in Finland who identify as ethnically Swedish, or do they all identify as Finns whose native language is Swedish? - Quora

Finland's foremost composer was a Swedish-speaker:

Sibelius was, after all, part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority (as was his great early champion Robert Kajanus). He spoke Swedish as his first language, wrote his diaries in Swedish, gave his daughters Swedish names and, when interviewed by Finnish radio in 1948 at the age of 83, asked if he might speak in Swedish (the request was firmly quashed).
Sibelius was 52 when Finland became independent. He lived the majority of his life under Russian rule and was much influenced by Russian music, as the first symphony shows. In what precise way should this music therefore be described as Finnish, or as the essence of Finnishness?

Holding out for a hero: the spirit of Sibelius is summoned to celebrate Finland's centenary | Classical music | The Guardian

One of the foremost writers in German was a Jewish resident of Prague:

Franz Kafka: German or Jewish? | Gabriel Josipovici

The Israeli and German Archive Battled Over Kafka - The Atlantic

As German as Kafka

Franz Kafka Wrote in German : Czechs Pay Scant Homage to Their Greatest Writer - Los Angeles Times

The foremost writer of detective stories in German was from Switzerland:

The Friedrich Glauser Prize (Friedrich-Glauser-Preis, sometimes Friedrich-Glauser-Krimipreis) honors the best crime novel written in German. It is named after Swiss author Friedrich Glauser, considered to be the first crime novelist to publish in German.

The Friedrich Glauser Prize: A Literary Award for Crime Fiction.

Swiss Germans definitely do not see themselves as German:

A survey conducted in the city of Zurich has shown that Germans are considered less likable than other Western Europeans.

Why Swiss-Germans dislike Germans | Request PDF

Cultural differences between Germany and Switzerland

How is Swiss German Different to German? - Chatterblog

Do the Austrians and the Swiss identify as German people (ethnically, not nationally) or have they distanced themselves like the Dutch? - Quora

Finally, there is a lot of literature written in Russian by Ukrainians:

Historically, many famous writers of Russian literature were born and lived in Ukraine. Nikolai Gogol is probably the most famous example of shared Russo-Ukrainian heritage: Ukrainian by descent, he wrote in Russian, and significantly contributed to culture of both nations. Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, as well as poet Ilya Erenburg. A number of notable Russian writers and poets hailed from Odessa, including Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel. Russian child poet Nika Turbina was born in Yalta, Crimea.
A significant number of contemporary authors from Ukraine write in Russian.[66] This is especially notable within science fiction and fantasy genres.[66] Kharkiv is considered the "capital city" of Ukrainian sci-fi and fantasy, it is home to several popular Russophone Ukrainian writers...

Russian language in Ukraine - Wikipedia

Ukraine's most famous writer today writes in Russian:

Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov (Ukrainian: Андрій Юрійович Курков; Russian: Андре́й Ю́рьевич Курко́в; born 23 April 1961 in Leningrad, USSR) is a Ukrainian author and an independent thinker who writes in Russian. He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, nine books for children, and about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts. His work is currently translated into 37 languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Persian and Hebrew, and published in 65 countries.[1] Kurkov, who has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the international media, notably in Europe and the United States, has written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism.

Andrey Kurkov - Wikipedia

And he has very strong opinions about the language:

Ukraine's star author Kurkov says his native Russian should be curbed

Writer Andrey Kurkov tells Ukraine’s story: ‘It’s my duty. This is my front line’

Putin’s bombs and missiles rain down, but he will never destroy Ukraine’s culture | Andrey Kurkov | The Guardian

ANDREY KURKOV on how citizens are refusing to bend to Russia's bullying  | Daily Mail Online

Andrey Kurkov: “It’s impossible to say that all the world is behind Ukraine”  - New Statesman

Andrey Kurkov: Ukrainians will never be Russians | News | The Sunday Times

'He is ready to die for the country': Famed Ukrainian writer on Zelensky - CNN Video

You can read this in three languages:

The Archeology of War | The New Yorker

Археологія війни | The New Yorker

Археология войны | The New Yorker

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how many meanings are there to 'love'?

What do you mean when you say you love your brother/mother/husband/friends, or you love chocolate/the Beatles/flying/this blog?

Words have lots of meanings - for example the word 'love' - as explored by Dr Tim Lomas BBC Radio 4:

The Death of Nuance - Twisting My Words - BBC Sounds

He has a book out looking at the problem:

Have you ever had a feeling that you couldn't quite describe, because no English word exists for it?

The Happiness Dictionary: Words from Around the World to Help Us Lead a Richer Life eBook : Lomas, Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Here he is giving a TED Talk on so-called 'untranslatable words':

Tim Lomas: Expanding our experiential horizons through untranslatable words | TED Talk

Expanding our experiential horizons through untranslatable words | Tim Lomas | TEDxZurich - YouTube

He has a 'positive lexicography' where he looks at this in detail:

Welcome to the positive lexicography, an evolving index of 'untranslatable' words related to wellbeing from across the world's languages. For an introduction to the project, please check out my new TEDx presentation.

drtimlomas/lexicography

Click on the example of 'love' in the top-left hand corner to see a wealth of language:

Lexicography

And here he has an article where he explores

... love is far more complex. Indeed, arguably no word covers a wider range of feelings and experiences than love.
So how can we ever define what love really is? In my new study, published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Analysis, I’ve made a start by searching the world’s languages for words relating to love that don’t exist in English...

How I discovered there are (at least) 14 different kinds of love by analysing the world's languages

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research skills

Where are you from? Where would you go to find anything about it to share with others?

Rousnam – Boarische Wikipedia

Stadt Rosenheim: Willkommen

Rosenheim | Bavarian towns and cities

Touristinfo :: Touristinfo Rosenheim

rosenheim skandal - Google Search

If you're looking up stuff online, do you go to Wikipedia as the starting point?

Jay Doubleyou: wikipedia and bias

Or would you go to RT?

rt.com/search?q=wikipedia

Or others:

Jay Doubleyou: english-language news media

Jay Doubleyou: english-language news media - part two

Of course, with conspiracy theories, you can't really do any 'research' as such:

Jay Doubleyou: conspiracy theories

And if you don't like the results of any research, you can always cry 'fake news':

But it's been around a long time:

Jay Doubleyou: how is world war one seen in different countries

Jay Doubleyou: propaganda, public relations and manufacturing consent

And it's very much alive and well today:

Jay Doubleyou: english language media as propaganda in the ukraine

Jay Doubleyou: the politics of language

But your sources might not be 'pushing' a certain point of view.

There is bias:

Wikipedia:Systemic bias - Wikipedia

And there is bias:

Confirmation bias - Wikipedia

It's where you go to 'naturally' or 'normally' for your sources:

Falkland Islands - Wikipedia

History of the Falkland Islands - Wikipedia

Historia de las islas Malvinas - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

When did WWII start:

World War II - Wikipedia

Вторая мировая война — Википедия

Великая Отечественная война — Википедия

Eastern Front (World War II) - Wikipedia

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alternative wikipedias

The go-to place for information online is Wikipedia:

Reliability of Wikipedia - Wikipedia

Wikipedia is by far the largest online encyclopedia, and the number of errors it contains is on par with the professional sources even in specialized topics such as biology or medicine. Yet, the academic world is still treating it with great skepticism because of the types of inaccuracies present there, the widespread plagiarism from Wikipedia, and historic biases, as well as jealousy regarding the loss of the knowledge dissemination monopoly. This article argues that it is high time not only to acknowledge Wikipedia's quality but also to start actively promoting its use and development in academia.

Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics?

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED

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Certainly it's a good starting point - and a place with lots of references:

How to Teach Students to Use Wikipedia | Edutopia

How Many References Do You Need To Get A Wikipedia Page? - Legalmorning

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It's also a good place to go with ESOL/EFL students - as the same article can be compared but in different languages. 

For example:

History of the Falkland Islands - Wikipedia

Historia de las islas Malvinas - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

Geschichte der Falklandinseln – Wikipedia

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Here's another example:

Articles about the same topics are written and edited independently of each other by authors in different languages. They may emphasize different aspects of issues; there might even be very different information. For example, entries about Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in March 2014, differ depending on the language. DW's fact-check team analyzed the German, Russian and Ukrainian entries. The German version called Crimea a "Ukrainian peninsula," while the Russian did not mention its belonging to Ukraine, though it acknowledged a territorial dispute. The entries contained most of the same basic factual information about the region, but the entries differed on more recent events: The Ukrainian version has a section called "Annexation of Crimea," but the Russian refers to the "Accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation." Most Russian entries on the topic fail to mention that the March 2014 referendum that led to Crimea's annexation was not considered legitimate by the government of Ukraine and many international institutions, which do not recognize the annexation either.

Fact check: As Wikipedia turns 20, how credible is it? | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 14.01.2021

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But there are alternatives, the most famous 'original' being:

Encyclopedia Britannica | Britannica

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For ESOL/EFL students, we have this excellent version:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

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And there are more:

Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia | OEDB.org

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There are several 'wikis' which challenge Wikipedia directly:

Conservapedia - RationalWiki

RationalWiki - Uncyclopedia

Wikipedia - Conservapedia

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This is a list of very strange 'alternatives':

5 Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model | Cracked.com

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the babel fish ideal of perfect real-time translation

A device from the 1970s cult sci fi series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Babel Fish | Hitchhikers | Fandom

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Since then, it has become the ideal for real-time translation devices 

Real time translation: Can tech help you break down language barriers?

Translate this: How real-time translation breaks down barriers when you don't speak the language

- all of which, so far, have not worked:

Google's Pixel Buds are not the Babel fish they were made out to be

Translation gadgets in 2020 are nearly as good as Babel Fish | Engadget

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This is from the New European:

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Why tech will always be lost in translation

person

Tracy King

0 COMMENTS

Published: 4:00 PM April 3, 2021

Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.

When comedy science fiction writer Douglas Adams imagined a device that could instantly translate any language, he saw it as a small, yellow, telepathic fish that you put in your ear.

The Babel fish “excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them”. In other words, it takes words in one language and poops them out in another, straight into your brain.

It’s as good an idea as any, given the difficulty of real-time instant translation, and one which the translation and technology industry has been enthralled with since Adams’ novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was published in 1979.

...

Let’s take the work of one of Britain’s most famous translators, Anthea Bell, as an example. Along with Derek Hockridge, her work translating the much-loved Asterix comics is as important to English readers as the art and writing of Goscinny and Uderzo. Indeed, it forms part of the writing. 

For example, in French, the word melon means the same as in English, the fruit. But when the book Asterix in Britain was published in 1965,  a ‘chapeaux melon’, meant a bowler hat, as worn by the typical British gentleman. It was a poke at British culture, but not directly translatable because we Brits don’t compare bowler hats to melons.

In the drawing, a grocer character is holding half a melon and arguing with a bowler-hatted Brit, while the dialogue makes use of the ‘chapeaux melon’ pun. What was Anthea Bell to do? She couldn’t change the artwork, so she needed to find an alternative pun. She changed the angry grocer’s dialogue to “OH! SO THIS MELON’S BAD IS IT?”, while the very snooty customer replies with a phrase beloved of the British upper classes, “rather, old fruit!”.

You may groan at the pun, but it perfectly illustrates the art of translation and the cultural differences that make it near-impossible to give accurate interpretations of speech in real time.

...

While there are some incredible real-time translation devices available, including in-ear speakers with mics that pick up your words and translate them to a paired device in someone else’s ear, the technology is still limited to homogeneous words and concepts. To use the technology, many of us first have to translate our native speech into an approved version before that can be translated to another language, stripping us of our individuality and expression.

It will get better, but the Babel fish ideal of perfect real-time translation (which Douglas Adams joked would end in “more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation”) needs to move away from its current cultural defaults.

Being translated is not the same as being understood, and there is no such thing as universal translation because there is no such thing as universal culture. A translation device that knows this and factors it in, well, now you’re talking my language.

How close are we to making the Babel fish a reality? | The New European

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bab.la online dictionary

There are some very good online dictionaries:

Jay Doubleyou: on-line dictionaries

Jay Doubleyou: more on-line dictionaries

Jay Doubleyou: which on-line dictionaries can you use on your smartphone?

Jay Doubleyou: translate with reverso context

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Another good place to go is bab.la - with lots of other help:

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Online dictionary for 28 languages.

Everything about languages and translation: Conjugation, Phrases, Living abroad, and much more.

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Online dictionaries by bab.la - loving languages
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how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think

Boris Johnson has accused the BBC of 'wetness' over not wanting to have singing at its biggest classical music festival:

Jay Doubleyou: rule britannia?

A linguist looks at the origin of the term:

‘Stop this wetness!’: the roots of Boris Johnson’s watery contempt | Language | The Guardian

And he's just written a book - reviewed in the Guardian:

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language

A myth-busting account of how languages emerge, change, and influence the way we think

Joe Moran

Sat 10 Aug 2019 07.30 BST

414

As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.

Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.

Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together.

Languages do shape how we think and act, but this usually happens not at the level of vocabulary but of linguistic structure. The psycholinguist John Lucy has given language as one explanation for the starkly different rates of workplace accidents in Sweden and Finland. In Swedish, prepositions allow for the nuanced account of actions over time; in Finnish, case endings stress static relationships. This may make Finns less alert to the temporal arrangement of a process, leading to more interruptions and accidents at work.

Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land – wrinkled in some places, straight in others. Every language is a different throw of the net. Language sieves and strains reality but never imprisons it. There are always holes for the real world to escape.

Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used. (Adam Gopnik once wrote that prescriptivism was “as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy”.) But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that “decimate” comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)

Words aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything

He also rescues nonstandard forms, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), from the routine condescension meted out to them. AAVE misses out the linking “to be” verb (“you late”) but then so do many other languages. The AAVE construction “he be singing” does not mean “he is singing” but “he sings [as a hobby, professionally]”. It is an efficient means of marking the habitual aspect. “Imma” for “I’m going to” is another standard linguistic move: cutting a word or phrase that is just a grammatical marker. “Imma” doesn’t work with the more literal sense of “going to”, which is why you can say “Imma let you finish” (I’m going to let you finish) but not “Imma the shops” (I’m going to the shops).

All languages move naturally towards abbreviation and compression, guided by what the linguist Rudi Keller calls “the invisible hand in language change”. Shariatmadari compares it to the desire path that forms on the lawn of a university campus after thousands of students have taken a short cut across it.

He is sceptical of Noam Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar, the idea that human beings have a sort of syntax-generating implant in the brain. Language for Shariatmadari is not a piece of brain software but something that emerges when we interact with others. It is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it”.

This is quite a scholarly and serious book. I admired its refusal to lighten its denser arguments with that jokey “here comes the science bit” flippancy that so often grates in non-fiction books on complex topics. Shariatmadari’s style is never less than clear, but there isn’t too much handholding. His account requires a little patience, but then so does linguistics.

Stick with it and it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. Shariatmadari begins by pointing to “an almost insatiable appetite for linguistic debate” in our culture. But as he then shows, most of the focus is trivial – “how to speak like a millennial” – or myth-ridden. Our wider culture seems profoundly uninterested in the dynamic, makeshift nature of language, the way that it gives birth to thought as much as articulates it.

Politicians, caught out saying something that they actually believe, instantly apologise for their “poor choice of words”. It is as if words were just a light dusting of salt on the meal of meaning, and not that important. But words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything.

This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.

• Don’t Believe a Word is published by W&N (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language | Books | The Guardian

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