The Symbiosis of Eros

Named after a house belonging to one Robert Baker, a tailor famous for selling Piccadills, a collar for suits.

But used for Capital Punishment centuries ago although we didn't know it when we sat there smoking cigarettes after our jaunts down Shaftesbury Av. The abbreviation DM is connected with a club at the bottom of the street called the LimeLight, probably not there anymore. It was neon green like the famous TDK ad board. This jaunt was long in the planning and how we got there with virtually no money was an odd achievement for Giro-jockies.
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He felt lost and silly.

The underground was full of staring faces.

Did he have wanker written on his forehead?

Or better still ‘here is a provincial lad’.

He felt in that moment, weak and exposed.

His lack of education and life was evident,

In his composure and witless conversation.

So what did he have, sat there, desperate

In Picadilly Circus?

Not Much.

Looking round at happy middle class students,

They seemed to enjoy life and pleasure.

He understood only isolation and suffering.

But still had hope.

I will follow Suit

There was a time when this kind of thing, cameraderie,

was frowned upon by working class types. But the one in the middle was no exception - I was soon to join him anyway. It was the early 90's and John Major's recession was a blight on all our futures. To take the Queen's shilling was an escape from the drudgery of going round in circles and bumping into ex-cons and druggies. The only thing keeping us sane were nights by the metaphorical fire with a brew and a book. However, the problem was that this literary life was at odds with the one outside and the two clashed often with friendships being the sacrifice. But in the end those friendsships proved to be superficial anyway. The literary moments were a break from a harsher side of a life of meaninglessness and in hindsite were an absolute tonic.

The Truth - there's a Beginning and an End

Talking candidly - I feel I must in this instance -

there wasn't much else to life. There had been a morass in indulgence and violent ignorANCE. Some might recount the hedonism of Madchester and the Hacienda but I was too poor to go that far. Trough of Bowland in an old clapped out Ford Cortina was the limit, breathing in the toxic fumes of the otherside of hedonistic life (hence the semiotic nature of this blog). Have you ever tried a bucket? Not the spade version. I hated it. The first time I tried it I felt guilty and horrid. There's more to life. There's music and emotion and feeling sorry for yourself. That DM music was the escape - it happened because young people think they will live forever and have the power to shape the world. You think you will fall in love and have the world's largest orgasm and be romantic at the same time. That's what the music provoked; it saved the mind from going mad.

Lexical Domination

18 months ago the international media picked up on President Chirac’s outburst at an EU’s conference on business and subsequently ran biased, sycophantic, and expectedly liberalistic stories about the global spread of English. 

Needless to say, my own article falls into one of those three categories. I am, as a native speaker, subject to the grammatical law of my language as each person is to their own. I am also privileged because I can communicate almost anywhere in the world and be understood, but my language is at the forefront of ‘linguicide’, along with Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic, destroying minority languages, along with culture and customs in many cases.

Chirac’s concern was not at someone speaking English but at one of his own countrymen doing so. The French government has laws in place, concerning the cultural value of French that protects that value from the influence of foreign languages, principally Anglo-Saxon, and rightly so.

Other countries such as Bhutan, Iran, or semi-autonomous regions like Basque [and Tibet] adopt similar methods, of varying degrees, of protecting their cultures from outside influences; or recently the newly elected President of Bolivia promised to decrease the predominance of Spanish in favour of local indigenous tongues. In Italy, I must watch a foreign TV programme in dubbed Italian, but in Portugal I can hear the original language, perhaps because the Portuguese government is less sensitive as there are a 150 million speakers of Portuguese in Brazil. 

In India, a sub-continent with hundreds of dialects, its parliament speaks in English, an alien language, otherwise each speech community would never be able to agree on whose dialect to use. This was the reason for the creation of Esperanto in the EU because it was not indigenous to any state; a wonderful idea in principle except that it failed, not for any innate error but for lack of native speakers and cooperation.

Yet, in the UN’s General Assembly every member country speaks in its own language, appropriately but not without problems. There are numerous positive arguments for global languages, we all know the benefits but English marginalises populations whose first language is not a global language, then it can and does lead to cultural and economic domination of the populations speaking English as a first language.

It would appear attempts like ‘Esperanto’ at this stage of our history are the roads forward. Is EngSpanAraFrenEse feasible (Spanglish exists)? If we all put our heads together to make such a language would it succeed, or be the exclusive language of those in power?