Canny lass

I do my best, Merc, I do my best.

Anybody in the Edinburgh area 19-22 February, who would like to meet up for a coffee or something stronger? E-mail me at puttevanilla@gmail.com.

It's an annoying habit that I've developed over the years. You are forgiven.

... and by the way 2g, you don't need to read my posts if you think they are too long, too boring, or too 'anything else. As owner of this site you must be aware that there is a 'Mark site read' option at the top of the page, just under the 'search box'. It works well.

So I incorrectly wrote ‘Atlee’. My deepest apologies to the good people of Bedlington. There’s just no excuse for getting a proper noun wrong!. Ah well, at least I remembered the capital letter. However, if you want to play ‘language police’ or ‘naughty, pedantic language police’ as I prefer to call it, then I must point out that English words of Latin origin don’t usually take the prefix un-. This is most often reserved for words of Germanic origin. Non-, or a- are usually good substitutes for un-. Looking at some of the text submitted during the last few days (Where are you when we REALLY need you Clement Attlee) I see: Wednesday 13:30 “If you are referring to slavery, we pioneered the abolition of that - a practice which had gone on for thousands of years before we brought the forces off Empire to bear on it.” Some of us miss a letter (Atlee), some of us add an extra letter. I think ‘of’ might have made more sense here. Wednesday 14:25 “Good use of the old Ad Hominem there Merc!” Ad hominum requires only one upper-case letter, the letter A., and this ONLY in initial position in a sentence. Really surprised here as this is a frequently used expression when up against the wall or in a corner on this site. It just goes to show that practice doesn’t always make perfect, eh? Wednesday 15:02 “Berlusconi has his areas of support in the center of politics” That’s not very patriotic now, is it! Center is usually spelled ‘centre’ in British English. Feb 5th “I've just done a bike up for my Nigerian friend "Happy" so he can get from his hotel to the supermarket car park on the other side of town with less risk of being own down on these treacherous roads,” I think the particle verb required here is ‘run down’. … and you Merc. You really should know better! Wednesday 14:36, Lord Ridley socks it to the HoL on your behalf? “By the way, here's a tip for recognising when someone is really struggling to keep their place in a discussion: they start calling people names like 'leftie' and so on, as you have done! It's a dead giveaway! It's the equivalent of throwing ones toys out of the pram.” How many times must I tell you that the correct spelling of ‘toys’ is d-u-m-m-y (s-o-o-t-h-e-r, if you’re not patriotic and using American English) Consider your wrists well and truly slapped, young man!

L’enfant qui est aimé a plusiers noms. Non? Of course he was referring to the EEC. So was I. In 1962, when he made that speech, the EU was the common market but then came the Maastricht Treaty. You remember the Maastricht Treaty, don’t you, or did you not manage to get past page 3 the day the Sun newspaper reported (I use the word loosely) on it? Suddenly the EEC got a new name – the European Community or EC – and it didn’t end there! Do you remember the Treaty of Lisbon a few years ago? I’m sure the Daily Wail mentioned it a couple of times. Anyhow, that treaty lead to the dear old EEC getting yet another name, would you believe, the European Union (EU). I thought everybody knew about these name changes but apparently not. Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty, or ‘Amendments to the Treaty on European Union and to the treaty establishing the European Community’, to give it its full title, reads: “The Treaty establishing the European Community shall be amended in accordance with the provisions of this article. 1) The title of the Treaty shall be replaced by ‘Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’. 2) Throughout the Treaty: (a) the words ‘Community’ and European Community’ shall be replaced by ‘Union’ and any necessary grammatical changes shall be made, the words ‘European Communities’ shall be replaced by ‘European Union’, except in paragraph 6(c) of Article 299, renumbered paragraph 5(c) of Article 311(a). In respect of Article 136, this amendment shall apply only to the mention of ‘The Community’ at the beginning of the first paragraph”; (Oh, how I miss my job!) Both the good earl and I myself were, in fact, referring to the same thing, each using the terminology of the day. So, my “blundering” wasn’t totally irrelevant. The European Union is definitely a public issue in my time, is it not?

Absolutely!

I fail to see why Clement Atlee would be needed now at all. He opposed Britain’s entry to the European Union – as, in any democracy, he had every right to do. I might even point out that, despite Atlee’s opposition, Britain entered the European Union, so did he put up a good fight for his cause? Britain is now leaving the European Union thus rendering his opinion of 1962 superfluous to the debate. “I confess I feel gravely disturbed. We are allying ourselves with six nations of Europe; it may be more, but six at present. Four of those were rescued only twenty years or so ago from domination by the other two”. Would I think I’m right in thinking that the above quotation is taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee ,Atlee’s speech in the HoL August 2nd 1962? (It’s always nice with a source reference as it gives the reader the chance to place that quotation in its intended context. So much can be misinterpreted otherwise, I always think). If this is the relevant speech, then Atlee was discussing change in Britain’s ‘ways’. He mentions early on that the proposal to enter the Common market would involve “an extraordinary change” from the old ways of Britain to something completely new. However, he also points out that he is not saying “that necessarily old things are right: I should be showing my age too clearly if I did that. It may be they are right: but make no mistake: this is an enormous change”. On the subject of being tied to the common market Atlee goes on to say that “It might be right, it may be wrong […] it is entirely different from anything we have had before” and clarifies that Britain becoming part of a larger whole “may be right now, but, historically, that has not been our position”. He reiterates his resistance to change even in the speech of November 8th 1962 (from which, I believe your second quotation is taken) when he says quite plainly “As I read the Treaty of Rome, the whole position means that we shall enter a federation which is composed in an entirely different way. I do not say it is the wrong way. But it is not our way.” It appears to me that Clement Atlee was clearly concerned about eventual changes. That’s maybe not so strange, given that he was 79 years old when he made those speeches to the HoL. It’s a common fact of life that the older we get, the more resistant we are to change. I’m always telling the grandchildren that “things were better before” and I’m sure they will be telling their grandchildren the same – as will their children after them. What he seems to be doing here is expressing his very own personal opposition to change, which we are, of course, all entitled to do, including those who made speeches advocating change. There are probably loads of those floating about the Internet as well. In his favour, Atlee makes it quite clear that he is expressing only his own personal opinion rather than fact: he makes no sweeping categorical statements. Instead, his speech is strewn with markers indicating the possibility of what may happen rather than that which will happen: “I think”, “I might be right, I may be wrong”, “we may have been”, “it does not seem to me”, “so far as I can see”. On more than one occasion, Atlee even suggests that he himself “may be merely insular” – the marker ‘may’ suggesting that he is aware of the possibility).These are admirable traits in a speaker and ones which some of us would do well to adopt in our ramblings. Another quote attributed to Atlee reads: “When we are returned to power we want to put in the statute book an act which will make our people citizens of the world before they are citizens of this country.” (C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (Left Book Club, 1937). That statement begs the question: Is not a united Europe a small step in that direction? and, perhaps even more important in these times of mass migration: Should the title “citizens of the world” be reserved only for the people of Britain?

... and I was once a girl guide, so I'm not worried either

Why have a dog and bark yourself? The sleeping Jihadists will take care of that for you. 3g said so, so it must be right!

Malcolm Robinson's the man for that!

Ah, you meant people like me and 3g! Got it now!

It's quietened down now a bit but at the time of the Brexit referendum El País reported almost daily on the great joy spreading among Spaniards as the prospect of getting rid of "los guetos ingleses" - the English ghettos - became a possibility.

There's a great discussion in linguistic circles at the minute as to whether or not slaves can be classed as immigrants. It's all because of the wording in the definition. There's no doubt that they were persons - we've seen photos. There's no doubt that they are in a foreign country - they travelled there by boat, well most of them did, and the local natives look quite exotic by comparison. There isn't either any doubt that they lived permamently in their new land - the chains around their legs prevented them from walking, or swimming, home again. It's the little word 'come' that's causing the problem. Did they come to a new land or were they taken to a new land?

Not an immigrant! At risk of sounding like Widow Twankey, “Oh yes you are”, 3g! You’ve just perfectly described your status as ‘immigrant’. You meet all the criteria for being an immigrant; here I’m assuming that you are a “person” and not a cabbage or a bot. Let’s look at the definition again. an immigrant is “a person who has come to live permanently in a foreign country” (my underlining). You say: 1. “I am British”. That leads me to believe that you are a person for, as we all know, cabbages and bots have no nationality. 2. You yourself, despite the fact that the info under your avatar gives your location as “Bedlington, Northumberland”, make no secret of the fact that you have resided in Italy for at least 10 years. I don’t think there can be any doubt that you live permanently in Italy. You wouldn’t need a residence permit otherwise. 3. Italy, if my memory serves me correct, is not a part of Britain. It’s what we Brits, and many other nationalities, call a foreign country. 4. “my documents clearly say resident” (FYI that’s a person “who lives or has a home in a place, not a visitor” (OALD). Residential permits are not handed out on the beach in Italy, or anywhere else for that matter. If you are a resident in Italy then you have physically applied for and received a residence permit in accordance with the …. wait for it ….. European Union’s IMMIGRATION rules. You can read about them here: http://ec.europa.eu/immigration/who-does-what/more-information/explaining-the-rules-why-are-there-eu-rules-and-national-rules_en or here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/living-in-italy So,tell me 3g, which part of the dictionary definition “an immigrant is a person who has come to live permanently in a foreign country” (OALD) do you not understand?

“I am an immigrant”. That’s exactly what I said. How on earth do you read from that statement that I do not know the difference between a legal- and an illegal immigrant? An immigrant is an immigrant, like you, myself and presumably this Happy fellow you mention. We are, all three of us, immigrants regardless of any nominal modifier you may care to attach. The nominal phrase in my statement, an immigrant, is of the simplest construction. It has one specifying element, the indefinite article an, which serves only to narrow down the reference to a single member of a class – in this case immigrants. To add the words ‘legal’ or’ illegal, serves only to further narrow down the reference. Let me try to demonstrate that. This requires only two one and a half grey cells working so I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it. I’m sure you will remember Mary’s lamb: little, white, fluffy, three legged thing with a penchant for following its owner to an unnamed academic institution? Let’s see if he can help us. We’ll start with the easy bit. · Mary had a lamb. According to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, a lamb is “a young sheep”. So, if Mary had a lamb she was, in fact, the owner of a young sheep (that’s one of those animals that’s covered in wool, says baa and leaves small heaps of ‘dottles’ here, there and everywhere). I have determined that this animal is no particular lamb. He’s just a lamb, any lamb. He’s simply one of a class – in this case lambs. · Mary had a little lamb. Here, the addition of the word little narrows down the field a bit. It tells us something of the lamb’s size. It is not large. However, the fact that the lamb is little does not change the fact that it is still a young sheep with the usual propensities for growing wool, saying baa and leaving small heaps of ‘dottles’ here, there and everywhere. · Mary had a little, white lamb. Another word, another bit of information and we narrow down the field even more. We now know the colour of Mary’s lamb. It is white but never the less it’s still a young sheep. It’s still growing wool, still saying baa and still leaving heaps of ‘dottles’ all over the place. · Mary had a little, white, fluffy lamb. Another word, more information. So we now know not only the lamb’s size and colour but even the quality of its wool. Has the lamb turned into a goat because of this new characteristic? Not on your Nelly! It’s still a blinking young sheep, still growing wool, still saying baa and still sh*tting all over the place. · Mary had a little, white, fluffy lamb with three legs. Do I need to say more! It doesn’t matter how many appendages you dangle from this lamb, it’s still going to be a young sheep. Now let’s apply that to my statement: · I am an immigrant. According to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, an immigrant is “a person who has come to live permanently in a foreign country”. So, if I am an immigrant I must also be a person who has come to live permanently in a foreign country. · I am a legal immigrant. Here, the addition of the word legal only tells you something about the manner in which I entered the foreign country. That is to say, I came with the necessary, official permission to enter and reside. Does that mean I am no longer an immigrant? Does that mean I am here on holiday? It certainly doesn’t. The fact remains that I came here to live permanently in this foreign country and am, therefore, an immigrant. · I am a British, legal immigrant. Another word, another bit of information. You now know that I’m not only a legal immigrant but also that I originate from Britain. Does that mean I’m here to visit my maiden aunt? Does being British take away my immigrant status? I’m afraid not! I’m still an immigrant. I came here to live permanently in a foreign country. · I am a British, law abiding, and legal immigrant. Another word, another bit of information. You now know a little bit more about the type of person I am but being law abiding doesn’t either alter the fact that I am an immigrant. The fact still remains that I chose to come here and to live permanently in a foreign country. In other words: A lamb is a lamb and an immigrant is an immigrant, regardless of any appendages you may choose to dangle from them. Q.E.D I AM AN IMMIGRANT! It’s nice to know we have something in common, you, myself and Happy.

Think medication!

Correction? What correction? An immigrant is an immigrant - whatever their legal status. There's nothing to be corrected.

You should talk Eggy! I wasn't even allowed a vote but even if I had been allowed one, I'm not sure how I'd have used it - or even if I'd have used it. Being as I am, an immigrant, I'll have one foot in and one foot out of EU so for me the odds are even. And now - in the even of my life - even my pension is half and half, though both halves are no longer equal one half having recently decreased greatly in value. It's strange that. My old man is a mathematical wizard and even he can't understand it. He thinks it may have something to do with the B-word. Not to worry, I'll soon be able to buy my whisky tax-free when I go through the airport at Newcastle on my homeward journey. Even the darkest cloud can have a silver lining it seems.

My family as well, Vic - every generation before me, that is. I understand that the explanation I gave may have beeen a bit difficult to understand, but it's nothing to do with you being from Blyth. It's just that we have different areas of interest and expertise. If it's any comfort, I have the same problem with mining related explanations - but please keep them coming because even if I don't understand everything I'm always a bit wiser after reading them. Knowledge shared is a wonderful thing and there's a wealth of knowledge, covering a diversity of subjects on this site: History, mining, computers, politics, Bedlington, and, dare I say it, language. Long may we keep sharing.

Sorry if it caused you offence, Vic. That was not my intention. I think you may have misunderstood my use of the word 'even'. ’Even’, in its adverbial capacity, has several uses. It can, on the one hand be used to emphasize something unexpected or surprising (which I believe is your interpretation here): Even a person from Blyth can say it in a more easily understandable way (and therefore somebody from Ashington, Bedlington or Cramlington certainly can). On the other hand, it can be used to invite comparison of a previously made assertion (as was my intention): Even a person from Blyth (and not only a person from Ashington, Bedlington or Cramlington) can say it in a more easily understandable way. Hope that’s cleared it up a bit.

Quite right ex Bedlingtonian! Blyth it was but the rhetorical impact is the same and I'm sure that even someone from Blyth, could have said it in a more easily understandable way. I wondered why he needed to paraphrase at all and have yet to decide if the slur was directed at the language skills of all Ashingtonians, BLYTHONIANS(?) and Cramlingtonians or the HoL's lack of the same.

Nice one at 1.23 as well: ”In the part of the world where I come from, in Ashington, Bedlington and Cramlington, they will say – and I paraphrase - How dare that unelected panoply of panjandrums and pampered popinjays think they know better”. Paraphrase? Is he serious? To paraphrase is to express the meaning of something in different words to make it EASIER to understand! Any Bedlingtonian or Cramlingtonian would have been more easily understood (not sure about Ashingtonians, as I don’t know enough of them to be able to judge). Ah well, it is the HoL! On a positive note – some nice rhetoric touches. I particularly liked the strong alliteration in “panjandrums and pampered, popinjays” and three is truly a magic number is it not! And, the A, B, C (in that order) of Ashington. Bedlington, Cramlington is also a nice threesome. Oh, Lordy. I almost thought I’d died and gone to a rhetorical heaven!

Same here but the prettiness of him was questionable.