Conversation

Replying to
To connoisseurs of language, this makes “standard Englishes” (there’s like 2-3, like BBC, American-TV, etc) almost offensively unaesthetic. They are too legible, too geographically large-scale, too rooted in modern white-collar institutions rather than farms and factories etc.
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Standard Englishes are the MCUs of language. Derived from the comic-book realities of institutions, and sprawling diffusely over continents. They are offensive to aesthetes who prize their “ear” for language in the same way MCU movies are apparently offensive to Martin Scorsese.
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These Bureaucratic Extended Universe Englishes are a unique feature of English I think. A show like Yes, Prime Minister, where the elite bureaucrat is the source of linguistic wit and mastery would be very difficult in most languages.
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In Hindi movies for example, the equivalent of Humphrey Appleby type characters are *invariably* pathetic figures played for laughs. Their bookish bureaucrat Hindi marks them as trapped in weak institutional realities.
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Frankly, this is a condition I totally love, and that’s what makes me an unrepentant globalist neoliberal shill. People routinely underestimate the power of this world, just as they routinely underestimate the power (and GDP) of middle-class English, which actually isn’t anemic.
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“Anemic” is a revealing metaphor. It suggests a full-blooded vigor that, it is implied, can only exist at the “sons of toil buried in tons of soil” level of a language. If you feel Bureaucratic Extended Universe (BEU) Englishes are “anemic” it clearly reveals your politics.
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Note the unusual role language played in Trumpie/anti-Trump relations. The whole thing about correcting your/you’re type grammar errors. It’s difficult to imagine bureaucratic dialects even punching in the same weight class as popular dialects in other languages.
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I suspect if the same pattern occurred in other languages, the attempted corrections would go the other way. The working class language stylists would be schooling the BEU-native speakers on the right way to speak “street,” idiomatically acceptable grammar errors and all.
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Replying to
Could this be a uniquely American influence? Since the US, idealized into some conceptual abstraction, is a nation from nowhere - not intrinsically tied to land nor ethnic history. "The English an idealized American would speak"
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