Cutting place-labels

We know that shortening a person’s name can be a way of showing an easy familiarity with that person. It’s often a way of belittling someone. There’s a reason why diminutives are still called diminutives even when they’re longer than the person’s real name.

But this urge to express ownership through name-shortening extends beyond personal relationships to relationships with places. This can be done with street names by cutting off the second half of the name. Sorrel Road becomes just Sorrel, Cheney Lane becomes just Cheney.

Various communication problems can and do arise with people who persistently cut short street names. One problem happens when different streets in the same area have the same first part to their names, e.g. Newland Street and Newland Close. Another problem arises when a street or road is named after the town or village it leads to, as with Cowley Road or Botley Road in Oxford.

A similar shortening process can also cause confusion between one town or village and another. The inhabitants of Chipping Norton refer to the town as “Chippy”, not caring that the good folk of Chipping Campden and Chipping Sodbury have almost certainly alighted on exactly the same affectionate nickname for home.

It becomes even more confusing when you cross the border into the land of silent post offices and confusing road signs. The prefix “aber” is very common in Welsh place names, which means that saying “I’m off to Aber tomorrow” makes it difficult for anyone without prior knowledge to guess where you’re talking about. The chances are that you mean Aberystwyth, but you might also mean Aberdovey, Aberarth or any of a multitude of places.

But, despite the rich potential for misunderstanding and confusion, the habit of shortening place names will always remain popular. This is because, as far as the kind of people who do this are concerned, it’s worth the risk. If the person you’re talking to instantly understands which place you mean, it’s a good way of bonding verbally. If the other person doesn’t understand, the hassle of explaining is well worth the feeling of superiority: I am from round here and you are not.

Today I chatted to a girl whose boyfriend is doing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. She repeatedly referred to the country as “Afghan”. I got the impression that this is what all his Army friends call it. I wanted to know if she knew that “Afghan” is a word in its own right, but I didn’t dare to ask.

4×4s and the mud myth

Urban 4×4s are the cars it’s OK to hate. We know that they’re more dangerous than other vehicles and that they lull drivers into a false sense of security. We also know that fuel-inefficient vehicles contribute to climate change and reduce ground-level air quality by creating unnecessary emissions.

I completely agree that your average 4×4 driver has no concern for the safety of others or the long-term safety of the planet we all have to live on. But this isn’t a rant about 4×4s, Chelsea tractors, SUVs, jeeps, whatever you care to call them. It’s a rant about the mud myth.

I’ve heard it voiced over and over again: “You can tell if someone’s a real 4×4 driver from how muddy their car is. If it’s sparkling clean, they’re just a poser.” Mud gives a driver credibility by implying that although today they’re driving through town, normally they’re battling tough off-road conditions. Even green groups seem to swallow this: Green Voice takes pains to single out “spotlessly shiny” vehicles, while a few years ago Friends of the Earth Birmingham offered “mudwashes” to drivers of urban 4×4s: “a lick of crud to cover their lack of cred”.

The narrative seems to be that the minority of SUV owners who use their vehicles for off-roading are justified in their actions, while the majority who use them for the school run should be vilified for their choices. Mud, in this narrative, demonstrates purity of purpose.

I really can’t grasp the logic. It’s like saying, “See the mud on these shoes? That’s because I wear them on my feet almost every week. So you’re not allowed to laugh at me when you see me wearing them on my hands.”

If you see a 4×4 in the middle of a city, it is by definition an urban 4×4. It doesn’t matter what the driver normally does with it; when you see it in town it is because the driver has chosen to drive a lumberingly inappropriate vehicle into town. They have chosen to enter a space shared by motorists, cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians while woefully inequipped to negotiate that sharing; the high-up seats of a 4×4, while greatly appealing to the lizard brain, make it much harder to see road users below a certain height: cyclists, children, wheelchair users, etc.

There’s also the issue that 4×4s aren’t exactly a socially responsible choice even when used for their intended purpose of driving off-road. Leaving aside the issue of carbon emissions and their effect on the global environment, 4×4s are usually bad news for whatever immediate environment they’re driven in, whether that’s Botswana salt flats or Dubai sand dunes. And it’s not as if keeping 4×4s out of the town centre will magically make us all safer: according to the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM), the majority of road deaths in the UK happen on rural roads.

Could it be that our bad record for rural road accidents is linked to the mud myth? In mocking Chelsea tractors for their cleanliness and trying to force them out of cities, urban activists are buying into the myth that 4×4s belong elsewhere. That makes it tempting for 4×4 drivers to see the countryside as “their” space, a place to forget about city things like speed cameras and vulnerable road users. Which then feeds into a general myth about the countryside being a place for all drivers to let their guard slip.

That might not be disastrous in itself if it didn’t collide head-on with the myth that the countryside is a safer, healthier place for children than the city. In fact, according to the full IAM report,  children account for over a third of the pedestrian and a quarter of the pedal cyclist casualties with fatal or serious injuries in rural areas.

Sexing up bad news

As the credit crunch bites, Britons may be turning to sex as a cheap way to pass the time, a charity says.

A YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found sex was the most popular free activity, ahead of window shopping and gossiping.

Publishing the results to coincide with World Aids Day, the Terrence Higgins Trust reminded people to practise safe sex and pointed out that a packet of condoms costs a fraction of the cost of a night out. [...]

Lisa Power, head of policy [at the Terrence Higgins Trust], said: We’re glad that people are finding ways of relieving some of their credit crunch woes, but if there’s one thing it’s worth forking out for, it’s condoms.

“Alternatively you can get them free from family planning and sexual health clinics.”

From the BBC News website, which accompanies the story with a stock photo of some feet in bed, captioned: “Snuggling under the duvet could also save on those heating bills.”

The Terrence Higgins Trust commissioned the survey to draw attention to the fact that rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are rising. I suppose that’s not newsworthy information in itself, unless it can be turned into another credit crunch story.

Forecasts for December

If you say “The next album/series/film is a lot darker and hopefully more interesting,” your fans will wish you’d stuck to what you do best.

If you say “Good morning, how may I help you?” more than five times in the same hour, your good-morning wish is insincere, as is your supposed desire to help.

If you say “Milton Keynes? Concrete cows!” you are trying too hard to be liked. Relax.

If you say “I really don’t want anything,” you are forcing loved ones to doubly second-guess you.

If you say “It’s like the United Nations in there,” it is not like the United Nations in there.

If you say “I’m not going to burn my bra or anything,” it’s OK: nobody expects you to burn your bra or anything.

Why is government never “just right”?

I’m having trouble with “small government”. Not the concept itself, but the phrase. I know it’s meant to mean a hands-off form of government, but to me a small government is one that’s little enough to fit into the small details of people’s lives and affect them at a minor level.

A big government should be one that’s too large to concern itself with individuals’ personal business, focusing instead on sweepingly large concepts like life, liberty and justice.

So why are the phrases the other way round? Is it because government looks smaller when it’s further away? But if so, why not call it distant government or something like that?

A further difficulty with the small government v. big government concept is that some libertarians who claim to oppose “small government” are absolutely fine with taking reproductive rights away from individuals and putting them in the chilly hands of the state. Perhaps they’d like government to shrink so small that it can fit inside the womb.

Talking to people who play sport

Sport. It’s confusing and boring. But it’s inevitable that sooner or later, the sport-hater will end up sharing a conversation – or, if they’re unlucky, a life – with someone who participates in sport, enjoys it and mentally engages with it.

If you love the sport-lover and want to spend your life with them, you might want to take the time to find out about the sport and perhaps get involved yourself. But if even love can’t motivate you to do that, or if the sport-lover in your life is just a friend, you could do worse than arm yourself with a few conversational techniques for when they come running up to tell you that “we just got 20 behind over a downturned mid-rush” or whatever nonsense it is.

Sometimes you can use non-verbal cues like facial expression and tone of voice to work out if what they’re saying is good or bad. Then you can respond accordingly: “Well done!” or “Bad luck!” But this is a risky strategy when the other person’s features and voice are distorted by their deeply-drawn gasps for breath. Better to have some neutral phrases that can be interpreted either way.

A sure-fire tactic is just to maintain eye contact and give the appearance of listening until your panting sport-lover finishes their tale: “And then the Blues ducked up over the westgate for a double pairing!” What you should do then is say in an emphatic voice, “I think you guys could use a drink!” or “You guys really deserve a drink.” The emphatic tone can pass for manly congratulation if that’s what’s required; but if they were defeated it looks like you’re taking their defeat on the chin and making the best of things.

A riskier, but ultimately more effective strategy is to dissolve the eye-contact you’ve been maintaining into a misty gaze into the distance. Then you say, your voice trembling with non-specific emotion, “I really feel for the team.” This works a treat if you’re using the sports match as an excuse to meet a sports-player that you fancy, especially if you suspect they already fancy you in return.

I hope I don’t need to add that you should never, ever ask, “So is that good or bad?”

Woolworths and the myth of consumer power

This blog is partly here to unravel the seemingly inexplicable elements of human behaviour and communication.

Many posts so far have skirted around one of the biggest causes of seemingly inexplicable behaviour, without mentioning it outright: power.

I believe that a large proportion of behaviour which otherwise makes no sense whatsoever can be explained with reference to power. Men who wolf-whistle at women in the street despite the fact that this method has never been known to attract a woman; toddlers who take your hand to lead you into a different room before immediately turning round and leaving you there; the colleague who takes more time asking you to do something than it would take her to do it herself. They’re all ways of reinforcing, testing, demonstrating power relations.

Power is the elephant in the room, so we joke about inexplicable behaviour instead. In reality, it’s quite straightforward. The goal of the wolf-whistler is not to attract a woman; it’s to reinforce his status as dominant by reminding women not to get too comfortable in “his” space. The toddler who wants to take you on a pointless journey is testing the limits of what he or she can get an adult to do. And the colleague who makes a fuss over simple things is using demands to reinforce the power relations between you. It’s all ritual and it’s all about power.

Capitalism is the ultimate outlet for the cultural narrative that ignores power and brushes off its manifestations as inexplicable, confusing or boring. The rhetoric in favour of a free market makes it sound as if capitalism is a vehicle for natural justice; good companies make money, good workers get jobs. We carefully maintain the myth that capitalism is about rewarding hard work, climbing the ladder, being competitive, making good. We pretend that it’s a system where customer feedback, in the form of increased or decreased spend, helps businesses adjust what they provide to better suit the needs of the customer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is about power. That’s why so many elements of it are inexplicable. It is not, and has never been, about rewarding hard work. It’s about using a system that pretends to reward hard work in order to reinforce power relations between employer and employee. It is also not, and has never been, about giving the customer what he or she wants. It’s about seeing how you can manipulate the customer into wanting whatever you’ve got. Advanced capitalism is about seeing how miserable you can make the customer and still make money out of him or her. Because being able to make someone miserable and take their money at the same time means that you have a lot of power.

The phrase “consumer confidence” plays into the myth that consumers have power, that there is some link between how a company treats its customers and how likely it is to survive the “credit crunch”. The reality is that consumers continue to take huge amounts of crap in return for handing over their hard-earned cash.

I went into a branch of Woolworths a couple of weeks ago. They were offering various deals on boxes of chocolates: two for one, three for two, £2.50 off, etc. Signs listed the types of chocolates included in each deal. It sounds simple, but it was made fiendishly complicated by the fact that most of the brands of chocolates listed as part of each deal were not on sale anywhere in the shop. The chocolates that were part of a deal and available in the shop were scattered all over the shop rather than together on the shelves. Some chocolates were part of two separate deals which were not to be used in conjunction with each other.

In order to take advantage of any of the deals, the customer had to be able to memorise several separate lists, search the shop for items on the lists, mentally eliminate items that were on the lists but not available in the shop and perform other demanding feats of memory and mental arithmetic.

You might ask why this branch of Woolworths was putting certain brands of chocolate into three-for-two deals when it didn’t stock those brands. Some people might suggest that it’s because they made a mistake. Others might say that it’s because the signs listing the deals were created centrally and didn’t take individual shop stock into account. I think the answer is simpler than that: power. Advertising unavailable items is one of the oldest capitalist tricks in the book. Even better if you can offer a juicy deal on the unavailable item. You manage to attract people and make them miserable at the same time. And once they’re in the shop, they’ll probably sate the desire you created by buying something else. You have a miserable, frustrated, paying customer. That’s power. The wild-goose chase is a classic manifestation of capitalist power.

Moving from aisle to aisle on my own wild goose chase, I was slowed by the sheer volume of other customers trying to buy chocolates. We were all confused and stressed, getting in each other’s way, blocking each other’s view of the chocolates and the offer signs.

Woolworths has been in trouble for quite some time, but it’s nothing to do with consumer spending or the lack of it. It’s in trouble because the parent company Kingfisher has made millions of pounds by selling off Woolworths properties and overloading the subsidiary business with debt.

I found out shortly after my trip to Woolworths that it’s now in big trouble, on the verge of being sold off for £1. This conversation on the Money Saving Expert forum is an unintentionally hilarious take on the whole thing. The posters have reacted to the news that Woolworths is in trouble by sharing tips as to how they can continue to buy from Woolworths, circumventing the stock problems in the shops and the website’s usability failures. Bear in mind that this conversation is taking place on a money-saving forum where people are supposed to be helping each other buy less unnecessary crap.

And yet the media keeps bringing up the myth that “consumer confidence” is a factor in Woolworths’ failure, that this hundred-year-old chain could have been saved if only we’d bought more. The thing is, it will be saved. It will be bought up (probably by Hilco) and it will continue to make us jump through hoops in order to buy things we don’t really need or even want.

On my last trip to Woolworths, I had a lab-rat’s pride in negotiating the maze that had been set for me. By combing the shop I managed to find two items that were part of the same deal. I bundled them into my arms, joined the queue… and waited. I waited with a line of people ahead of me and a crush of people surging forward behind me. Checkout assistants blipped purchases through and mumbled totals before sitting, arms folded, waiting and watching without lifting a finger while customers packed their own shopping. They would start blipping the next customer’s purchases through while the previous customer was still standing there, struggling with plastic bags and stuffing change into their purse. Each customer was set up to fail in their task of promptly packing their bags, because almost all their purchases would be blipped through before the previous customer had got out of the way.

After ten minutes I was bored of watching this display of contempt and I was no closer to the front of the queue, so I put my boxes of chocolates back and left the shop without buying anything. But most people in the shop had already invested too much time and mental energy in their purchases to give up at this stage. So they remained, waiting patiently to hand over their cash.

Wales through a window

We’ve already established that the “they all started speaking Welsh” story is problematic. Luckily, there are other ways to identify arrogant English attitudes. One great way is if you’re chatting to an English person and you mention that you’re Welsh/a Welsh-speaker/someone who has lived in Wales. If the other person says, “I know one word in Welsh – ARAF!” you know you have a bona fide case of English privilege on your hands.

Araf, as many people already know, is Welsh for “slow”. Lots of people know it because they’ve seen it on Welsh roads. When they tell you that it’s the only Welsh word in their vocabulary, what they’re really telling you is this:

• They’ve been to Wales on at least one occasion but haven’t tried to learn a single word of the language.
• They’ve been to Wales by car on at least one occasion without trying to learn a single word of the language. In other words,  either they haven’t grasped the fact that safe driving involves preparing for driving through an unfamiliar area, or they believe Wales is essentially the same as England and can hold no surprises.
• They think this is nothing to be ashamed of.

I would also guess the following:

• They see driving as an easy option compared to public transport, because the car is a magical metal case that will protect them from any foreignness that the country can throw at them.
• They haven’t grasped that safe driving, just like being a decent human being, involves interacting with other people and being aware of your surroundings.

When they’ve told you all about how they learnt the word araf, they will then try to tell you that actually, they’ve remembered another word they know. That word is almost always gwasanaethau, which means “services”. Unfortunately for the English person, they’ve never learnt how Welsh pronunciation works, so even if they remember how the word is spelt, they can never pronounce it. And so the marvellous joke, the “I went to your country and all I got was this lousy road-sign” joke, never reaches its full potential.

An Englishman walks into a pub…

An Englishman decides to go on holiday to Wales. He chooses to visit North Wales or mid-Wales rather than South Wales, because he wants to go somewhere rural and different from his city home in England.

In other words, he chooses to holiday in a part of Wales well known for Welsh nationalism, anti-English sentiment and high levels of Welsh-language fluency.

Then he walks into the pub. Or the post office. Or the village shop. And suddenly we’re in a Wild West tableau. Everybody else in the pub (or post office, or shop), who had previously been chatting away happily in English, falls silent. Then they resume their conversation – in Welsh. He feels excluded yet gratified. He goes home and tells his friends, “I walked in… and they all started speaking Welsh.”

But this story is part of another story. The bigger story is about a Welsh person who’s moaning about the stupidity of the English. He or she tells the straw-Englishman’s story as part of their own story, which is about English ignorance. Google for “they all started speaking Welsh” and you’ll see that none of the anecdotes are from English people complaining about Wales. They’re all from Welsh or pro-Welsh people complaining about English people complaining about Wales.

I’m not saying that you don’t get real anecdotes ending with the words “… and they all started speaking Welsh”, and I’d be interested to hear about any spotted in the wild. I’m just saying that to tell those stories is to position yourself, unwittingly, inside someone else’s story.

I have heard a genuine version of the “I went in to the post office…” story, but it was a dramatic variation on the usual one. An English friend of mine said that he walked into a post office in North Wales and heard people speaking Welsh. But as soon as they spotted him, the counter staff realised he was English and switched to speaking English out of courtesy. He was very surprised because he’d always been told it was supposed to happen the other way round. He thinks the surprising politeness was because he’s black.

Time-stealing tricks: using the landline

Most time-stealers learn this one fairly early on: always ring the victim’s landline, never their mobile. Mobile phones have caller ID; if they can see it’s you, they’re much less likely to answer.

Some of them try to get round this by withholding their number and then ringing the victim’s mobile, but this technique has limited success. Most victims have some experience of time-stealing tactics already, so they’ve already learnt not to answer calls from withheld numbers.

Of course, people who are very used to time-stealers often end up getting caller ID on their landlines too.