SEATTLE—Deciding against interrupting the actually quite
gripping call on marketing and customer research, local Zoom crasher Mike
Gromer reportedly became too engrossed in a sales meeting Wednesday to scream
obscenities.
“I planned on barging in and shouting a bunch of white
supremacist stuff, but they were discussing strategies for increasing brand
awareness among the coveted 18-34 demographic, and I stopped dead in my
tracks,” said a naked Gromer, explaining that he totally forgot about his
intentions to screen share incredibly disturbing hardcore pornography the
second he heard the marketing team reveal their sales targets and tactics.
“I just got so wrapped up in Lydia’s PowerPoint presentation
outlining their Q4 projections that it didn’t even dawn on me that I hadn’t
gotten around to calling all the participants filthy names.’
Wow, I’m expecting big things from this team. I should
probably just turn off my camera so the giant swastika doesn’t distract from
these B2B figures.”
At press time, Gromer had been promoted to Southwest regional
account manager for his invaluable contributions during the meeting.
See what I mean? Scary prospect isn't it !!!
20:00 We sit down to watch some TV, but I have to admit that the prospect of tomorrow's appointment at the dentist is putting a bit of a dampener on our mood - damn!
We watch an interesting documentary on Shakespeare and the English language, by Irish historian Dr John Gallagher.
Gallagher emphasises what an insignificant language English was at the start of Elizabeth I's reign in 1558. Nobody much on the continent bothered to learn it because it wasn't much use anywhere else if you weren't coming to England. And England was finding itself pretty much isolated from most of Europe anyway because of the Protestant Reformation brought in by Elizabeth's father Henry VIII: this had made England into something of a "pariah state".
Even in the British Isles the English language was far from universal - in Ireland, for example, it was only spoken in the Dublin area. And Queen Elizabeth was even encouraged to learn a bit of the Irish language herself - Gallagher shows us on his tablet an extract from an Irish primer given as a gift to the Queen.
The flip-side to England being a pariah state was that it actually meant a huge increase in immigrants to the country - Protestants fleeing persecution on the continent, e.g. Huguenots and others, making London in particular a very multicultural city, where you would hear a lot of foreign languages on the street, especially French, Flemish and Italian: a multicultural atmosphere that Shakespeare would have been very much aware of after he moved down to the capital from Stratford.
In the linguistic field there were 2 contrasting movements going on: on one side a move to make English "purer" by returning it more to its Anglo-Saxon roots, and on the other an enrichment of the language by adopting more foreign words, especially from French and Italian.
John Cheek was in the forefront of the first movement, and he attempted to produce a more "Anglo-Saxon" version of the gospels, fearing that too many French and Latin words would make it incomprehensible to ordinary people.
He managed to do Matthew's Gospel, but after only two pages of Mark's Gospel, his "translation" petered out, stopping in mid-sentence. What madness !!!!
page two of Cheek's Gospel According to Mark:
"...came into Capernaum, and..."
Here the translation stops in mid-sentence. What madness !!!!!!
Cheek comes up with a few "new" Anglo-Saxonisms of his own, however, in the process, none of which have caught on, I'm glad to say. For example there's his word "helimp", meaning "child of hell": the word "imp" originally meant a child, apparently.
The opposite movement - to make English more cosmopolitan - turned out to be the stronger movement of the two. And in the course of the next couple of centuries thousands of new foreign words were adopted, from Latin, French and Italian for the most part.
Shakespeare would have been very aware of the new multicultural society forming in London, created by the flood of immigrants fleeing Catholic persecution. He himself lodged in a room at the top of a house lived in by Huguenots.
Many of the plots used in Shakespeare's plays were based on continental originals, featuring continental heroes and villains and featuring continental locations, especially Italian ones.
Shakespeare is also often credited with inventing a large number of new English words: three to four hundred is the figure often quoted. These figures are nowadays thought to be an overstatement, because many of the words first seen in Shakespeare's plays may well have been already in use, but just not put down in writing: words for everyday objects like the word "hobnail" for example. However, even if he only invented about one hundred new words, as conservative estimates suggest, this would still have been a great achievement for any writer, says Gallagher.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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