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well_spoken

Listed below are comments made by well_spoken between Monday, 30th June 2008 and Sunday, 2nd August 2009.

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Pubs aren't dying - they are evolving 01:25am on 02 Aug 2009 "If you can stand at the bar and drink a pint, it is still a pub!" Yes Mr Collins, it's still a pub - but one with inconsiderate idiots standing at the bar obstructing others and preventing them from getting served!
Loneliness of the lower league loan star 6:27pm on 20 Apr 2009 Alternatively, there's always Germany...

The two best loan deals this season were Andriy Voronin's from Liverpool to Hertha BSC, and Claudio Pizarro's from Chelsea to Werder Bremen (at least from a German perspective!) Hertha, in whom I have a modest emotional investment, are going for the Bundesliga title, and Werder can still win the UEFA Cup and German Cup.(They play Hamburg in 'Hansa' derbies in the semi of both these competitions).

Nice blog, Paul. I am the Germanophile historian, with the obsession for sending you up tallest medieval structures in Europe, who almost killed you (through exhaustion/lack of oxygen) during World Cup 2006. (Just a final comment - if Hertha by some miracle do win the Bundesliga, it will be worth popping over to Berlin just for the ensuing celebrations!)
Learn EU-speak 01:40am on 17 Feb 2009 As someone who studied Latin for about 13 years (up to Mods at Oxford), I look forward to the revival of Latin! Nuntii Latini on the Radio Finland website is the finest news service in Latin on the planet. Take a look: http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/ It's certainly livelier than the Vatican's output (http://www.vatican.va/latin/latin_index.html).

Whilst on the subject of Latin as a 'lingua franca', I remember reading somewhere about a British and a German officer, both classicists, who for the sake of precision and the avoidance of misunderstanding, in 1945 conducted the surrender negotiations for a major town in Northern Italy entirely in Latin. Does anyone have any details, or is this story apocryphal?
Germany loses revs 01:53am on 21 Dec 2008 I was merely commenting that Mark's words "and in his sitting room a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg" would signify very little to many of my compatriots... and that the Spartakist Rising of 1919 was a significant historical event in pan-European terms (whatever you may feel about the aspirations of its leaders).

Please also note that it is perfectly possible for an Englishman with a degree in European Humanities (History and Languages) to consider himself both part of "the English-speaking world" and of Europe.

Personally, I think what has happened to History as a subject within our education system is tragedy. People elsewhere may consider Churchill 'a rugged individual'. Unfortunately, a recent survey suggested that nearly 50% of English children now think he is a nodding toy bulldog who sells insurance on television whilst muttering the catchphrase 'Oh Yes'.

I don't really want to open up the debate on 'rugged individualism' or its 'teachability'. I just suspect that in psychological terms many 'rugged individuals' are the opposite of 'risk-averse', e.g. those who led the US and UK banks into the current morass.
Germany loses revs 10:48am on 19 Dec 2008 Unfortunately, thanks to our wonderful education system, the name Rosa Luxemburg will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of British people.

Mark, why not check out the attendance the memorial ceremony in few weeks time (mid January) at the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It would be interesting to see who attends, as capitalism endures its greatest crisis for decades...

Also, are you making plans for next November ( the 20th anniversary of the fall of The Wall)?
The Valley Visionaries 10:13am on 12 Dec 2008 This represents a nadir in blogging...
Crunch: A new phase 7:24pm on 13 Nov 2008 I think I heard you stumped by a question on 5Live's Midday News of when we last experienced prolonged deflation. Your guess was pretty accurate. I'm sure you've checked, but in case you haven't there's a useful graph in Niall Ferguson's The War of The Worlds (Figure 9.2 on page 330 in the paperback edition) of UK unemployment and inflation between 1928 and 1939. The last period of prolonged deflation seems to have run from Dec 1930 to Jan 1934. Apparently we eventually got out of that mess by building Spitfires, and battleships? Would that work now?
France builds nuclear future 10:10am on 15 Jul 2008 I endorse jon112uk's comment ('it would be interesting to see more coverage...'). How about a companion piece on Germany? I recently went to Bremen for the first time, and then travelled round Lower Saxony by train, ending up in Cuxhaven. I have never seen so many wind-farms, or houses with solar panels! The Germans appear to following a different 'greener' route than France (Although I understand it also involves building a special relationship with Russia to secure gas supplies via a pipeline under the Baltic). This country, the UK, (typically) just dithers, unable to choose either the nuclear or the green path to energy sufficiency - and most people seem blissfully unaware of how close we have come to wide-spread power cuts on several occasions in recent years. If we ever again get a severe winter...
Goodnight Vienna 12:13pm on 30 Jun 2008 What I was trying to say is: In 2012, if for example someone writing a comment wants to spell 'Lodz' with a barred L and two 'acute' accents, they should at least BE ABLE to do so. This would also help explain to the unelightened why 'Lodz' is pronounced (approximately) 'Wootch'. Try travelling round Poland by rail, without aquiring even the basics of the Polish alphabet and its pronunciation. It's bad enough trying to buy a train ticket, but even worse when you can't pronounce your destination! (I see that Polish was recently judged by some academics to be the fifth most difficult language in the world to learn. I can only endorse that).
Goodnight Vienna 01:18am on 30 Jun 2008 Four years to Poland and Ukraine? That's four year's to sort out the characters and fonts available to your bloggers i.e. characters outside the 'standard' English character set. Am I the only one to be fed up with the number of 'Question Marks in a Diamond' appearing recent entries? All we are trying to do is write Spanish and German names and words correctly. In my case, all I did was try to use an umlaut! (At this point, gold star to Graham Taylor for being the only one of you lot to consistently pronounce the German manager's name correctly). How the hell are you going to cope with Polish and Ukrainian names in four years time? (I won't even raise the issue of cyrillic in Eastern Ukraine). Polish diacritics and indicators DO matter. The Polish 'barred L' is NOT the same as an 'L' - not that you'd have known it when you heard Blackburn's opponents in in last year's EUFA Cup described on 5Live as 'Wizzler Crack-ow'. Can you not get advice from your techical bods about character sets, and publish advice to us on how we can use them? I refuse to dumb down on this one - despite what Danny Baker says... But what is the point of learning French, Italian, German and Dutch, and acquiring smatterings of Spanish, Polish and Russian, if your national broadcaster's attitude to linguistic precision is 'sod that!'?

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