By Harry Bingham
Celebratory, witty and exceedingly insightful, Harry Bingham explores the oddities and customs of the British country in a bid to reply to a query which has everybody debating – who're we?
For the British, ‘Who are we?’ is an oddly tough query. even if our nationwide self-assessment frequently notes a couple of features (we’re artistic, tolerant and no less than we’re now not French), it lists a torrent of undesirable ones too. Our society is fragmented and degenerate. our children are thugs, our staff ill-educated, our public providers abysmal. We drink an excessive amount of. Our condo costs are loopy, our legislators sleazy, our roads jammed, our soccer workforce garbage. whilst ‘The instances’ invited readers to signify new designs for the backs of British cash, one reader wrote in announcing, ‘How a few couple of yobs dancing on a vehicle bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes within the gutter?’
Is there relatively not anything to be pleased with? British inventors were chargeable for myriad marvels we now take without any consideration, from the steam engine to the area huge net. British clinical and public healthiness strategies – vaccination, built-in mains sewerage, antiseptic surgical procedure – have stored way more lives than all different clinical recommendations prepare. And why cease there? The British empire coated 1 / 4 of the earth’s floor yet used a military smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. the realm speaks our language. Our scientists have gained large numbers of Nobel Prizes. The evolution of ‘habeas corpus’, trial through jury and the abolition of torture aren’t only British in notion, yet owe extra to us than to an individual else. Our parliamentary democracy has been highly influential in spreading beliefs of liberty and consultant executive around the world.
If the fashionable international is richer, freer, extra peaceable, extra democratic and more healthy than it used to be, then Britain has performed a number one position in that transformation. This booklet is set simply that. Taking a specific curiosity within the many stuff that we did first, or top, or such a lot, or have been the one ones ever to do, this booklet focuses specifically on these of our oddities that unfold the world over – every little thing from soccer to the rule of thumb of legislation.
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Additional resources for This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World
Example text
If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionary-based word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000. The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example.
Sell translates as selle / selja. Horse is hors / hossit, and so on. The speakers of one group could fairly easily have guessed the broad meanings of the other party’s words. But what about all those word endings? The cases and genders, tenses, moods and the rest? The chances of a non-native speaker being able to guess the subtle implications of all those word endings would have been approximately nil. So—and still only in the east—the word endings started to disappear. As traders and others sought to do business, Dane with English and vice versa, they simply started to drop the parts of the language that didn’t function for them.
Any such celebratory tone can easily seem rather embarrassing, a display of bad taste akin to having a flagpole in your front garden or enjoying the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Personally, though, I’m not sure that questions of taste should determine what history to remember. The naval historian, Nick Rodger, had this to say about his own field of expertise: Many modern writers implicitly assume that the functions of the Navy were essentially aggressive, to win territory overseas. It seems for them to follow that sea power is nowadays both uninteresting, except to specialists in imperial history, and morally disreputable, something that the honest historian ought to pretend does not exist.