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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
.pdf
Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality
This Anonymous, the publishers claim, is someone who has been
in the room with Barack Obama, though whether that’s the men’s
room or aballroom, they are not saying.
There is nothing worse than a know-all who is sometimes right.
Play the players, not the cards, he would say. Watch them from
the minute you sit down. Play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast
one. Never get out when you’re winning. Look for the sucker and,
if you can’t see one, get up and leave, because the sucker is you.
He wants to sell the family silver.
At the University of Missouri at Columbia a petition drive calls
for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been
adorned with sticky notes reading “racist” and “rapist”, in a reference to his ownership of slaves, with one of whom he fathered a
child.
How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better
when it is fair: a share, a fi ght, a maiden, a game and (for those who think
have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair
and square.
There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The fi rst is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I’m going to shut
the window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I’m going to shut the window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but Iwant to
shut the window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not
insist on a course of action at all: “Gosh, it’s cold in here.”
If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral
standards.
This is the land of smiley faces and the “have a nice day” greeting— Americans like to be liked.
There is life in the old dog.
Hacking is, nevertheless, a useful reminder of an old adage: if
something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
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Часть I
But being right and being seen to be right are different things.
Sherlock Holmes once remarked that: “It is my business to know
what other people don’t know”.
Ask people what they think of statistics, or try to use some in an argument, and you will often get the quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli
that lists them alongside lies and damned lies.
Odd that a meaningless phrase can be used so meaningfully by
so many people.
The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists v. egoistic hedonists, the Epicureans
and universalistic hedonism.
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.
Bharat Mata’s iconography remained vague. Did she have four arms or ten?
Was she accompanied by a lion, or a map of India? And which map at that?
A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to hi ikes it so
much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man
asks for one grain of rice for the fi rst square of his chessboard,
two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king
readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest.
They start counting out the rice, and at fi rst the amounts are tiny.
But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires
the output of a large ricefi eld. Not long afterwards the king has to
concede defeat: even his vast riches are insuffi cient to provide a
mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other
words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable
E (18 446 744 073 709 551 616 grains).
Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems:
a cover story entitled “The meaning of Lula” (see article) in October 2002
resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazi lians who were impressed at
our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us
that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.
It’s the old philosophy of buying straw hats in December.
If Noah took two of every animal on his ark, he must have had dinosaurs.
Could dinosaurs have fi tted into a boat only 300 cubits (about 135m) long?
122
Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality
Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing Ineed to make me
perfectly happy is someone to whom Icould explain this.
And yet the institution the caliphate had been in decline long before Turkish republicans deposed Abdul-Majid II, the last Ottoman sultan and titular caliph, who ended his years in Paris painting and collecting butterfl ies.
A Bible in a bedside table drawer does not constitute a state establishment of religion.
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Victor Hugo supposedly said, “He who opens a school door closes
a prison.”
One of the contractors in question is Aker, a listed Norwegian fi rm no
more related to Reliance than Roald Amundsen was to Gandhi.
The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel
laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West. In
the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the principles of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book,
“Kitab al-Jabr”.
The sight of a southerner in the Vatican will be as important, in its way,
as the arrival of the fi rst black man in the White House.
“Atheist” has many negative connotations: irreligious, ungodly, unholy, graceless, sceptic, doubter, and so on. But ask a question about
what atheists subscribe to— rationalism, logic, science and positivism— and a majority of people will admit that they adhere to such
principles. Then ask an alternative question covering the prevalent
aspects of most religions: “Do you subscribe to metaphysics, superstition, bigotry or dogmatism?”, and the majority will deny such practice.
The rulers of ancient Rome were ruthlessly pragmatic in matters of religion. When a tribe was subdued and its lands added to the imperial
realm, Rome would appropriate the subject-people’s gods and add them
to an ever-growing pantheon of exotic divinities.
There’s something for everybody, which means there’s something for everybody to hate.
123
Часть I
The Mormon church is probably the best-organised in the world and
certainly the most cost-effective. The president and his 12 advisers sit
at the top like the board of a multinational. Below them, the church depends on a throng of lay volunteers. Church members begin to perform
in public at the age of three. They become “deacons” at 12 and are given
more demanding jobs as they grow older. The faithful are expected to
give 10% of their pre-tax income to the church. No one knows how much
money it has, but unoffi cial estimates are in the billions.
Beast, a clothes shop, makes T-shirts celebrating local speech
that are famed city-wide (and sold to homesick Bristolians worldwide). Top-selling shirts proclaim “Gert Lush” (slang for “good”),
“Ark at ee” (look at/listen to that) and “Cheers Drive” (used when
stepping off a Bristol bus).
Wanted: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive
pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply
spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is alot to ask, but that is the
emerging profi le of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to
see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.
After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy
bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they
cannot help it.
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different
from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound.
The real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that
your prejudices are correct.
The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak
easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn;
do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk
about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.
Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing examples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages:
there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa
(Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam
(Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter),
loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minis-
124
Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality
ter), slug (Gaulish for servant), fl ab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron
(Welsh for carrot).
Scores of native speakers of around 50 languages, including Arabic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Pushtu and Bengali, have been hired—
some say the NYPD has more Arabic speakers than the FBI. It has,
at times, irritated both the CIA and the FBI, who are jealous guardians of their turf.
Three Egypt’s Coptic Christian bishops will be elected 40 days after Shenouda’s death and then a blindfolded child will select the new patriarch
from among the three, as ancient tradition dictates.
But being right and being seen to be right are different things.
English has a tendency to absorb foreign words and then neutralise
them— ad hoc, feng shui, croissant and kindergarten are all good examples— which may be why English-speakers often fail to realise quite
how wonderfully subtle and evocative other tongues can be.
It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for
snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but
those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male
vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish
for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied
Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to
beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.
Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than
280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have
27 words for moustache — including mustaqe madh for bushy and
mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both ends— that gin is
Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when
they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice
Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper!
Now for the fi rst time he had become conscious of the terrible
mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.
Translation into Spanglish of the fi rst few pages of Cervantes’s “Don
Quixote”. It begins: “In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who
125
Часть I
always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase.”
Thirteen languages in Germany are on UNESCO’s endangered list.
Mr Ellemann-Jensen explained the idea by reference to Hamlet: “To be
or not to be, that is the question. To be and not to be, that is the answer.”
Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient
world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess— his
jealous wife, Deianira.
I scoff at Tuyuca and Kwaio for having only two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. In English we have three: the regular we meaning you
and I, as in “we had dinner together”; the royal we meaning I, as in “we
are not amused”; and the marital we meaning you, as in “we need to take
out the garbage.”
Travel was not just about seeing, but about being seen.
Muslims are obliged to go on the haj at least once in their lifetime. So
many pilgrims want to make the journey that the Saudis now impose
strict national quotas (calculated according to national populations) on
pilgrims. Once arrived, they begin their rituals: the changing into simple
white clothes, the tawaf or circumambulation of the ka’ba, the drinking
at the sacred Zamzam well, the prescribed running and collecting of pebbles, the shaving or cutting of one’s hair and the renewed commitment to
the principles of Islam.
The Christians all say that reciting the fi rst verse of the 23rd
psalm helps them enter a religious state.
Right back at you across the pond: Sprain, Bad Reportugal, Inkland, Direland, Not-so-Niceland, Greece Trap, Francid, Itally, Wild Turkey, Check
Republic, Repoland, Slowvakia. You started this.
That approach was fi rst used by German scholars, and then British ones, just over a century ago, on the texts sacred to Christianity, using techniques honed on the writings of Greece and Rome.
From small diffe rences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclusions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to “all those in the
house”; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide “those coming into the
house”.
126
Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality
Nowadays, all the world over, people speak with accents.
Halloween bridges the retailers’ gap between the return to school
and Christmas.
Now that “nigger” (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite
society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing
that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point
on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped
slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association survives in the fi rst name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on
federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (asNew York state maps
do) seems a pity. “Nigger” and “Jap” are now banned on American maps,
though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to
the non-American is the onslaught on the use of “Squaw”, which according to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word
for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So
Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the fi rst Native
American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.
Philosophers have rarely fl ourished on foreign parts: Kant spent
his whole life in the city of Konigsberg.
Echoing ancient thinkers such as Democritus and Lucretius, they held
ideas that were to prove too revolutionary even for a revolutionary age.
The apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four
horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something
to drink.
Nationalism and religion can be a toxic brew.
Myth and fantasy populate the world with “othermen”— the elves,
goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave
or on the high mountain peak. Not animal, but not quite human
either, they feed fear and imagination in equal quantity. Nor are
such creatures merely the province of the past and the poetaster.
It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say,
or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw
differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one
would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love
as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched
127
Часть I
only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can
come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and
disappointment.
If this walking penitentiary is such a worthy symbol of religious
piety, why isn’t the burqa worn by men?
For broadcasters, more eyeballs mean more subscribers and advertisers.
Forecasts a decade ahead are no likelier to be accurate than a bet
on ahorse.
Hell is a city much like London.
When is a Jew not a Jew? When he’s a Karaite.
He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman
aphorisms: “If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often
get it right.”
Morality is powerful stuff, and as such should be used with care.
No wonder novice writers are often at a loss, and put commas where
they do not belong. The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller
“Eats, Shoots and Leaves” comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated
wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.
Science, technology, progress,
history, civilization
“
Einstein: “Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?”
Science fi ction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s law: “90% of everything is crap.”
Privacy is also at risk. Users were appalled when it emerged iRobot, a robotic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the fl oor, but creates a digital map
of the home’s interior that can then be sold on to advertisers, Standard
128
Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
Innovation, a maker of a connected vibrator called We-Vibe, was recently ordered to pat customers $10,000 each after hackers discovered that
the device was recording highly personal information about its owners.
Three-quarters of Americans admit that they search the web, send
e-mails and check their social-media accounts in the bathroom.
The GAFA, as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are collectively
called, also have good arguments on their side.
Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant’s hippocampuses
are about 40% larger than those of a human being, suggesting
that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have
a grain of truth in it.
For every Spotify there is a WannaCry.
Do you know how a toilet works?
Wherever David Rockefeller went in the world— and in his 35years at
Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles— David Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found
a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own solitary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up
a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled
and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in
Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and
tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few
people saw. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war,
when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of
junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was really going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.
At the heart of myriad devices, from computers and smartphones
to drones and dishwashers, a microprocessor can be found busily crunching data. Switch the power off, though, and this chip
will forget everything.
No one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the fi rst
place. Regardless of any practical benefi t, though, the three researchers,
are surely contenders for an Ignobel prize. That award is made every
year for work which “fi rst makes you laugh, and then makes you think”.
Their study of laces looks like a shoo-in.
129
Часть I
Dolly the sheep was cloned from an udder and named after a
singer noted for her ample bosom as well as her talent.
You know, young man, one day all of these will be replaced by quantum
computers.
If the history of human civilisation is of the collapse of distance—
from walking to horses to carriages to motorised transport to jet
engines— then what happens when you take that thread to its
logical conclusion, when it becomes possible to move from any
one place on Earth to another simply by walking through a door?
People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the
wavelength of visible light. Until the electron microscope was invented in
the 1930s, infl uenza was, like the Higgs boson before 2012, a theoretical
entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncertainty, public faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition:
sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic fi res to clear “miasmas”.
“Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers,” Voltaire
advised.
As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: “If quantum physics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
Most of the people who buy computers don’t even know what a
transistor does.
By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides
of nitrogen and sulphur— gases much worse for global warming than
carbon dioxide— than all the world’s cars put together.
You can’t fl ush your toilet over the internet.
Once upon a time the space race was driven by the competition between
capitalism and communism. Now it is driven by the competition between
individual capitalists.
Almost 1.1 billion websites are currently online; global internet
traffi c will surpass 1 zettabyte for the fi rst time this year, the
equivalent of 152m years of high-defi nition video.
Science is an intellectual dead end.
130
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