The English-speaking world of educated India, the benefits and extreme benefits of speaking good English, as the Indians see it

Russian students of English will, I am sure, be fascinated to listen to this programme, The Goddess of English, which was broadcast recently on BBC Radio 4. It is about the status and usefulness of English in India today.
     The narrator is an Indian and the programme makes it clear why British people and Indians feel so much at home in each other's company (at least the estimated 12% of the Indian population - 140 million - who speak English). Language really is one of the most important “hands across the water, hands across the sea”. Indians have got that message as far as English is concerned. Let's hope Russians get it too, pace Zhirinovsky (see post 24 January).  I'll say no more, except that the programme amazed, fascinated and charmed me.
     Try it!

Common mistakes #9: “220% times less” – the American academic who speaks Russian and English, but who cannot speak Arithmetic

It is often as important to be numerate as literate, especially in a digital world.
     One of the most infuriating aspects of innumeracy is the habit of saying things like “The total is two times less than last year.” It is meaningless. “Two times as much as last year” is fine, as it means that the total has been multiplied by two. It would perhaps be clearer to say, “The total is double last year’s”, or “It is twice as much as last year’s”, but if a fraction or percentage is involved, it is fine to say, “The total is 220% of last year’s”. That means, to take a specific example, that if last year’s total was 66,000 then this year’s was 144,000, or thereabouts.
     But this cannot be done the other way round without violating every rule of sense.
     This morning, while lounging in bed with my tea, I read, in the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law (2008), a long paper entitled “Vladimir Putin and the Rule of Law in Russia” by Professor Jeffrey Kahn. In the course of it, Prof. Kahn says of the beneficial effects of the new procedure officially operating in criminal cases in Russia:

“In addition to stripping prosecutors of the power to order pre-trial detention, amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and the Criminal Code, in March 2001 and October 2002, respectively, limited the types of crimes for which someone could be detained. Cases in which investigators requested pre-trial detention decreased from 144,000 in the first half of 2000 to 66,000 in the first half of 2003 - an almost 220% decrease.”

     That last sentence is nonsense.
     How can one figure be 2.2 times less than another if it not to be a negative number? The absolute minimum quantity of people held in pre-trial detention is 0. There cannot be a minus person,  as it were, unlike with temperature, say, which is -16C today in Khimki.
     What Professor Kahn ought to have said was that the number of pre-trial detention cases decreased between 2000 and 2003 by 54%. The decrease was 78,000 (i.e. 144,000 – 66,000), which is 54% of 144,000. It is not, and never can or could be on basic logical grounds, a decrease of 220%. To repeat: you cannot have a negative number of people, even—or perhaps especially—in a Russian pre-trial detention centre, which is another name for jail.
     The general rule should be: increases can be described as either fractions or multiples, but decreases can only be described correctly as fractions. 
     This is part of Arithmetic Etiquette for Americans, Russians, Britons, Brazilians, Burundians, Falkland Islanders, people in space, old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky to host a party at Butyrki prison with Mr Putin and me, and a hundred thousand others (minimum)

Mr Fatty needs either bigger shirts or a prison diet
(Photo: Moscow Times)

When I was a boy, which was not that recently, in fact at a time closer to the days when the Kaiser was still on the throne of the Second Reich than it is to the present, we used to think that the only regular users of long words were clever people and Germans.

     That should not be interpreted too freely as some sort of disguised compliment to our Teutonic cousins, beloved thought they were and are. Rather it reflected an article of faith in British culture of the time which held that most clever people were actually rather stupid, especially if they paraded their cleverness by making a noise in public. We called them “fat-heads”. They would do fat-headed things like come up with theories, and we all knew what damage theories could do. Just look at Communism. We saw ourselves as sturdy pragmatists who gloried in short words, short sentences and long lunches in City chophouses.

     So it comes as no surprise to see that Russia’s version of the Clever German Syndrome has been President Putin’s theory about the benefits of  “deoffshorization”. Forgetting the theory part, this is what in English is known as a “portmanteau word”, as it is assembled from several words or ideas, as the German language customarily does.
     However, long as it may be, it is not so long a word as “floccinaucinihilipilifcation” which, when I was a lad, was thought by every grubby-fingered school-boy to be the Longest Word in the English Language. It means “the act of estimating as worthless”.

     Whether that was indeed the longest word or not, I could not say. I am sure it is not any more, and that today the record is held by the word which some half-German conservation scientist working for the RSPB has invented, meaning “the act of estimating as worthy of protection with public money so that I can have a permanent job with a copper-bottomed pension spending that money, mostly on myself”.

     As I see it, Mr Putin runs two risks when using words like deoffshorization, only the less dangerous of which is being thought of as a closet German. The bigger danger is, believe it or not, prison—at least if Vladimir Zhirinovsky has his way. Yesterday’s Moscow Times reports that Mr Zhirinovsky is preparing legislation aimed at banning the use of English words on Russian territory if they have a Russian equivalent. The Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party says his country is “tormented by Americanisms and Briticisms” (sic – an ugly word which I have not heard before). So the liberal thing to do, and the democratic one I presume, is to ban them.

     The article quotes him as saying that, for example, Russians should use the word лавка instead of “boutique”. He appears unaware that boutique is a French word which was adopted by English-speaking lovers of linguistic torment because it sounded cooler than “shop”. In that regard, Zhirinovsky reminds me of President Bush 2.0, who famously tried to ridicule our Gallic cousins for their supposed lack of business acumen by saying, “The French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur.” Of course, it was the English language which lacked such a concept, which is why the word was borrowed from French in the first place.

     But Zhirinovsky would do well to ponder the larger problem, which is that if his new Bill is passed, he is likely to land himself in jail too. And it gets worse. It will not just be Mr Putin with whom he will be sharing гречка and watery уха in the dining hall at Butyrki prison, it will be all the members of his own Liberal Democratic Party. The reason is simple. Only one of the four words in its name, Либерально-Демократическая Партия России, is of Russian origin. “Liberalno” comes from “liberal”, “Democraticheskaya” comes from “democratic” and “Partiya” comes from “party”. 

     But then it gets better. Since almost every Westernised person in Russia today, whether native or foreign, exercises their democratic right to make liberal use of words which derive from English or other non-Slavic languages, I suspect that the party in Butyrki might turn out to be rather crowded. I’d like to join the fun. It could be quite a blast. But I want to attend the party without joining the Party, if you see what I mean. So how does a scrupulous grammarian get an invite? Without one, I doubt I would get past face-control at Butyrki.

     Having given the matter some thought, I have come to the conclusion that the best strategy will be to get myself arrested for turning a Russian name into an English one. The name I have in mind is, in fact, Zhirinovsky. Since жир (zhir, which means “fat”) looks like the root of “Zhirinovsky”, I propose to stop using the Russian form but instead calling our host Господин Фатти, (Mr Fatty). This would be doubly appropriate since I notice he has put on  a bit of weight recently—so much so that, as the photograph in the Moscow Times shows (see above), he is unable to do up the top button of his shirt.

     No respectable politician—респектабельный политик, two more soon-to-be illegal words—dresses like that in public. I hope that the diet in Butyrki will cure him of this problem and, at the same time, prevent anyone thinking our friend might be on the way to becoming a fat-head. We have enough Germans running the country as it is, with all their strange theories, like деоффшоризация.

Confusing words #6: “kollaps” / “collapse”

A good friend in Moscow, who does not speak fluent English, asked me the other day, what the English word for “коллапс” is.
     My answer was “распад” as I at first thought she was speaking English. I could not understand why she wanted me to translate an English word into English. Perhaps she was so confused by the beauty of my presence that she had got her languages mixed up? To give her time to sort her emotions out, I added, “As in ‘распад Советского Союза’.”
     That was unsatisfactory. She started gesturing in a way which I took as symbolising the result of amorous emotions carried to their logical and physical limit. Intrigued, though still baffled, I said that was what collapse is in Russian, as far as I know. She said she wanted it in English. So I repeated my answer.
     After a lot of too-ing and fro-ing, I decided to look коллапс up in my dictionary. Nothing—in either the big “desk” one or the smaller one I carry about in my bag, either with that spelling or something similar.
     The only thing I did discover was that распад is given as “disintegration”, which is a subtly different meaning, when applied to the end of the Soviet Union, than “collapse”. But I was still no nearer to understanding what concept the Russian word коллапс referred to if it wasn’t “collapse”.
     Then my friend gave me a verbal explanation, which was much clearer than the one involving fingers and thumbs. I suddenly understood that she was talking about the way the city had ground to a halt with the weekend snow. Admittedly, life was restored to normal within a day or so, but for a while there was what I now know Russians call a коллапс.
     “Aha!” I said triumphantly. “The answer is: ‘gridlock’!”
     “Aah!” she said, smiling.
     Then I remarked that actually the phrase, “the gridlock of the Soviet Union” was rather apt, in the sense that until Yegor Gaidar and his chums liberated prices, goods did not flow through the economy, much like the Moscow traffic in heavy snow (or rush hour, or after an accident etc.).
     I saw my friend’s eyes glaze over with boredom in the normal Russian manner at the introduction of a subject like economic history. Collapse of stout party, as we say in English. No gridlock today, at least not in the sense than hands had expressed it.

Cliff Richard and the dogs of love

"I'm not gay," says Sir Cliff Richard, 72

Today I was trying to explain to a small group of lively and interesting students who work at a major multi-national company in Khimki how the word “bachelor” is used.
     I said that if you were talking of a 70-year old man and described him as “unmarried” that would be taken as a purely factual, morally neutral statement, whereas if you said he was “a bachelor” you might be thought to be implying that he had, shall we say, question marks over his sexuality.
      The liveliest and most intelligent of these people is a sparky woman who, like most Russians of her sort, is extremely interested in the subject of rich men, marriage and, if it can be managed too, romance. I was getting the feeling that she was not entirely following me on the subject of elderly, wealthy bachelors, despite the fact that her English is excellent.
     I decided to give an example. Had they heard of Sir Cliff Richard, I asked? Yes, of course. I tried them with the song “Bachelor Boy”, but that rang no bells.

Sue Barker, 56, the "dog" he rejected thirty years ago

     So I described the way in which millionaire “Move It” man, Cliff, was rumoured to have started dating Sue Barker, the attractive tennis commentator, some years after she had won the French Open in 1975, at a time when Cliff was still an eligible 40.
     She was said to have been keen, but when he seemed to want to be “just good friends” with someone as “fit” as Sue Barker many people took that to mean that he was not so much “unmarried” as a “bachelor”.
     “Do you see the difference?” I asked.
     “I don’t understand,” said my bright student, who had been paying close attention. “Why he wanted to marry a dog?”
     “A dog?” I said, aghast. “I never said he wanted to marry a dog. What are you talking about?”

     “You said he wanted he wanted to marry sobaka.”
     “Ahhhh! Sue Barker – sobaka!”
     (Собака, pronounced sabaaka, is Russian for “dog”, and I had pronounced Sue as Su rather than Syu as a Russian-speaker naturally would have.)
     The whole room collapsed into helpless laughter. Even before we had all quietened down, my student asked me with a sly grin if there was any chance that I could get hold of Sir Cliff’s telephone number for her.

New Year quiz: how many moustaches in the Rue de Poussy?

Eow menni mustashis does
Inspector Clouseau av?

A Happy New year to all readers of this blog.
      A good British tradition is to pass the time over the holiday by having little domestic quizzes. Conforming to the accepted etiquette, this blog is going to pose a couple of silly questions to readers which they might like to mull over during the long hours of productive indolence which is our reward for a year’s diligent study of English language etiquette. 
     A news story published this week on the BBC website about Naomi Campbell's having been mugged recently in Paris contained the following passage:

A police source quoted by the UK's Press Association said: “On November 21, two people [moustache] attempted to steal Ms Campbell's handbag as she sat in a vehicle on the Rue de Poussy.”

     The questions for the blog readership are about the word in brackets in that quote, namely “moustache”.

• Should that be: “Two people with a moustache attempted...”, which could be taken to mean that there were two people sharing the same moustache?
• Or should it be: “Two people with moustaches attempted...”, which could be taken to mean that they both had more than one moustache?
• Or is there a way of re-writing the sentence to avoid the problem?

     What do you think? 
     This being the season of goodwill, there will be a special prize of a Glenfiddich tasting invitation to the rebellious reader who comes up with an argument that totally destroys the basis of my questions. All clues necessary to find that argument are already in this post.

     And since it is New Year, a final, non-linguistic point: I always thought Rue de Poussy was a street in Paris—until I discovered Christ the Saviour at Kropotkinskaya.

A Christmas feast for all lovers of books, language and the written word

From Vanity Fair: this image featured in its collection of the best pictures from the magazine this year. It is not of some inaccessible Oxford college, or of the stolovia at Downton Abbey, or even the language laboratory at the Higher Technical School in Khimki.
     It is, wait for it: the main reading room of the central branch of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue. It is open to you, me and Joe Citizen, which is what real culture is all about: complete freedom of inquiry, thought and expression.
     Who needs Santa when the North Pole is all around you, its contents catalogued on the Dewy Decimal system? (well, er.... hem!)

Note, as with all pictures in this blog, you can click on it to expand to full screen

“No podarki for Putin!”: two more words the upholder of the Constitution appears not to understand: “democracy” and “law”

Perhaps a more subtle riposte to the Magnistky Act would be for
President Putin to give Obama a ZiL for Christmas

A final note on yesterday’s presidential press conference, which was almost as long as one of Leonid Eyebrows Brezhnev’s speeches to the party faithful in the days when détente meant the Soviet President receiving another Cadillac from the American President.

     (On that subject, one wonders if “re-set” means the Russian President being humiliated by being forced to drive a BMW or Mercedes. As the Moscow Times reported yesterday, not even the pseudo-Cadillac recently offered by the ZiL factory seems to be good enough a man accustomed to world-standard luxury. How the mighty have fallen!)

     Getting back to the grubby present: the Moscow Times today reported the President’s response to the Isvestia question about authoritarianism slightly differently from the BBC (see yesterday’s post).

A reporter from Izvestia, widely regarded as one of the city’s most Kremlin-friendly dailies, accused Putin of building a totalitarian regime of personal power over the past 12 years. “Don’t you think that this hinders Russia’s development?” he asked.
     Putin rebuffed the question by saying his decision to heed the Constitution instead of changing it in 2008 and serving as prime minister for four years was ample proof that he was not authoritarian. “I consciously moved to a second post to guarantee the continuity of power,” he said, adding that “democracy is to observe the law.”

     Leaving aside the breathtaking, Nixonian arrogance of a President who is effectively saying he will obey the Constitution only as long as it suits him (see yesterday’s post), the statement that “democracy is to obey the law” needs to be noted. Even making every allowance for the shades of meaning lost in translation, it a complete travesty of language.

     Democracy is a system of government in which the people are ultimately in charge of those who rule them. Law is a system of rules by which society is supposed to operate and, in particular, to resolve conflicts without violence. The observance of rules has nothing whatsoever to do, either logically or factually, with the system of choosing rulers.

     If Mr Putin does not understand that law and democracy are completely different concepts, describing totally different things, which have no more in common than potatoes and wallpaper, then Russia is heading for an uncomfortable future. This is especially so as he appears to see no obligation to abide by the country’s Constitution, saying that he did so in 2008 not because he felt he had no choice, but because he personally took the “decision to”.

     In the modern world, a civilised country is more or less defined by saying that it is one in which the constitution is where law and democracy meet. Few countries are perfect in that (or any other) respect, but most people understand that definition and broadly accept it. If Russia is a bit of an outcast, as Putin is constantly saying it is, then perhaps part of the reason for that is the perception is that its President does not appear to understand the three key words of that definition as well as perhaps he might. 

     No wonder he has to buy his own automobiles. I can see just see Mr Obama sitting is his sweats, puffing and panting at the edge of the Executive Office Building basketball court, and saying to his Chief of Staff for the International Leader Christmas Present Procurement Program, who is sitting beside him in his shirt-sleeves, scribbling ostentatiously on a yellow legal pad: “No podarki for Putin.”

President Putin, Kamikaze pilots and the obligations of the logic of language

This man has accepted an obligation to die.
So what is the logic in the fact that he
appears to be wearing a life-jacket?
Does the act of tying a flag round your hat
destroy the capacity for logical thinking?
Many would say it does!

Further to the piece I wrote yesterday about a BBC report on President Putin’s marathon press conference on Thursday, the Moscow Times published several articles today about the same meeting. One of them reported the President discussing the Russian tiff (contemporary translation: “spat”; likely result: “bitch slap”—see post: 18 September) with the Republic of Georgia. The President seemed not to understand either the word “logic” or the word “obligation” since he used the two together in a way which offends the linguistic obligations of general logic:

The president also promised that Russia would lift the ban on importing Georgian wine and mineral water if doing so is required by WTO rules. The ban was introduced in 2006 amid a surge of political tension between Russia and Georgia.
     Since Georgia, which was blocking Russia’s accession to the trade organization, withdrew its objections, “we must be logical and fulfill our obligations,” he said in answer to a question from Georgian journalist David Akhvlediani about opening Russia’s market to the Georgian goods.

     You do not have to be “logical” to “fulfill obligations” since an obligation is a requirement to act imposed by private law (in this case, WTO law) or etiquette. However derived, an obligation generally implies reciprocity. It does not arise from the application of logic, which does not usually require reciprocity.
     If the house is on fire, it is logic that dictates that you go outside as soon as possible. You have no obligation to leave. Self-preservation is logical but it is not obligatory. Indeed sometimes the opposite is the case.
     An example of that might be the Japanese naval pilot in early 1945 who found himself in a Kamikaze squadron. He was under an “obligation” to crash his plane directly onto the flight-deck of an American aircraft carrier, thereby killing himself and destroying his plane, but without any realistic hope of imposing serious damage on a 30,000-ton armoured ship.
     There was no logic to such acts. They were done out of a sense of obligation which was so strong that it required the senseless sacrifice of a life and a plane. It would be like an artillery battery deciding to throw their gun at the enemy than to continue firing it.
     A civilised Western equivalent of the Kamikaze pilot might be the person who feels he has an obligation to finish all the food on his plate, since to waste food is to behave arrogantly in a world in which so many people are starving—or so his parents have told him since he was a boy. When the fire alarm sounds during dinner, he starts eating more quickly, but still not quickly enough. The flames are already licking the other end of the table and the flowers in the vase in the middle have wilted. But he still has three roast potatoes on his plate, two slices of lamb and a pile of peas, which always take time to eat politely.
     The Kamikaze diner is faced with a dilemma: does he behave logically and leave the house before the fire engulfs him, or does he respect the obligations of moral etiquette and express his respect for those in poverty by never getting up from the table while there is still food on his plate? Out of such situations are many profitable dramas and amusing comedies made.
     These Kamikaze examples may seem extreme, but they spring to mind because a friend of mine this morning paid me a handsome compliment on his blog on LiveJournal. He is a doctoral student of international naval policy and recent naval history. I feel an obligation to reciprocate. Anyone interested in the logic of maritime conflict and the obligations international naval co-operation should consult his blog (in Russian) at this link.

Bye, bye Russia, hello Putinia!

A boy who turned out to have more power
than Harry Potter

President Putin does not appear to understand what the word “constitution” means. Alternatively he enjoys a level of power which surpasses that of the tsars, and verges on the magical. What is your reading of the quote below?
     A story on the BBC website today about his response to the Magnitsky Act in the United States ended with these three paragraphs:

A questioner from the Izvestiya newspaper asked him about his “authoritarian style”.
     Mr Putin denied that his system was authoritarian, saying that if that were the case he would have made changes to the constitution. He pointed out that he had taken on the role of prime minister after two presidential terms.
     “I cannot call this system authoritarian, I cannot agree with this,” he said. “If I considered a totalitarian or authoritarian system preferable, I would simply have changed the constitution, it was easy enough to do.”

     So, the situation is that the only reason we do not have a “totalitarian or authoritarian system” in Russia is because Mr Putin does not want one. If he did, he would, he says, simply change the Constitution.
     But a constitution is a basic law which exists in order that major changes cannot be made to the general governmental system by politicians without wide consultation and general, informed consent. So Russia appears not to have a constitution in the accepted meaning of the term. Therefore the country is, if not totalitarian or authoritarian, at least autocratic. The basic law is not the Constitution but Mr Putin’s ideas of what is “preferable”. The will of the Tsar is, once again, the only law. Even Harry Potter has Lord Voldemort to contend with. But Lord Vladimir Vladimirovich has nobody, not even the Russian electorate, to worry about!
     Bye, bye Russia, hello Putinia!