(Part 2) Top products from r/britishproblems

You need to read Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson [1]. It's his impressions of the UK when he first arrived from the states. His observation of how we talk about the roads is spot on:

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“If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, ‘Well, now that’s a bit of a tall order,’” writes Bryson. “‘There’s the Great West steam rally at Little Dribbling this weekend,’ somebody from across the room will add, strolling over to join you because it’s always pleasant to bring bad motoring news. ‘There’ll be 375,000 cars all converging on the Little Chef roundabout at Upton Dupton. We once spent 11 days in a tailback there, and that was just to get out of the car park. No, you want to have left when you were still in your mother’s womb, or preferably while you were spermatozoa, and even then you won’t find a parking space beyond Bodmin.’”

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1. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Notes-Small-Island-Bill-Bryson/dp/0552996009

If you're learning C and not C++ I highly recommend picking up The C Programming Language. It's a fantastic introduction to C and unmanaged languages but you do already need to know how to program to get the best out of it.

This is a pretty fascinating book which goes into similar observations.

This book is a great read for anyone who thinks psychics are daft!

You should definitely get a Little Book of Calm.

I've seen this book a couple time in books shops and it seems to have some interesting ideas

Alright then

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Curry-Secret-Indian-Restaurant/dp/0716021919

you can have a browse on Amazon. After the introduction, it does seem to have been copied and pasted from here.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-British-Problems-Awkward-Ourselves/dp/0751552593/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383242946&sr=1-1&keywords=very+british+problems

Today actually. A BBC podcast by David Mitchell touches on it a little and Kate Fox's book Watching the English does as well neither are serious but they sing to the same tune about this.

IS THIS YOUR CAT DAVE

Should order this to work:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Your-Beeswax-Queen-Mystery/dp/0425241599

http://www.amazon.com/Godll-Fix-Jimmy-Savile/dp/0264664574

I dont believe it.

He also wrote the introduction to his https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2239276.Benjamin_Rabbit_and_the_Stranger_Danger

You read it in this didn't you?

It won't! Didn't you ever read, "Emily's Legs"?

We have mislaid a large spider that was in the bath last night. I thought it would still be there this morning, but it wasn't.

They wrote the book though! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rogers-Profanisaurus-Viz/dp/0752215078

have you seen Anyoade on Ayoade? He wrote an entire book where he interviews himself and it's absolute ridiculous.

The excellent book Risk looks at the amount of money spent on preventing terrorism compared to how much terrorism actually affects us. It's fair to say that terrorism has a pathetically tiny affect on our lives.

This sure touched a sore point going by the comments here and people raging against the sterotyped surrender monkey stuff, nearly all of them raging about how France was just outnumbered in WW2 and their soldiers served with distinction.

You guys are missing the point that Britain and France have been at war with each other hundreds of times over the last thousand years, its only recently we are allies. This is why we pretend to hate each other, this is why we have sterotypes about them being rubbish at war

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Years-Annoying-French-Stephen-Clarke/dp/0552775746 interested read, obviously biased but funny and in the spirit of this post.

http://www.militaryfactory.com/battles/french_military_victories.asp lists quite a lot of their major military engagements over the same period showing the victories and defeats over the centuries of Anglo French warfare.

Before you go raging at people and quoting recent events, try and think more about the history between Englang/Britain and France and realise its all just a god damned joke.

Linguistics Intro by Akmajian et al.

another Linguistics intro that you can apparently rent (?) McGregor

a really in depth and expensive one but new, by Lobeck and Denham

Janet Holmes very good intro to sociolinguistics

Also, for regional/class dialect variation including lexicon, William Labov is brilliant and this book about American diversity is quite good. He has very well known and respected for a colossal body of work.

For a linguist or a sociolinguist, the word 'determine' means something like 'create', except it's more than that. It's creation and definition, it's putting it in its contextual paradigm. People who use the word first determine the very beginning of its evolution. I don't know if anyone's done a case study on twerking's origins, but what often happens is that it changes a bit on its way to common usage, and then it changes some more. The word 'villain', for example, originally meant something like a feudal/indentured person (usually male), who lived on someone's land and helped farm it in return for a small farm of his own. But then it evolves. Class distinctions become more and more important as a middle class struggles to differentiate itself from the working classes. (I'm being general here, and this covers many years.) Soon, the people who use the word villain start to sling it as an insult - they determine that it no longer means 'honourable but poor dude', its contextual paradigm now includes 'you disgusting peasant who is very obviously below me on the social ladder.'

A dictionary written at this time might include both definitions. But the dictionary itself HAS NOT DETERMINED meaning or context. The people who use the word in general usage have determined it. Now, if you are called a villain on the street, can read, and are confused, you could look it up. The dictionary isn't determining usage/definition, because that's not the job it does. It describes. What if, now, you see someone calling a hanged murderer a villain 100 years later? You think, WTF? That guy owned his own shop! He may have schemed to murder his wife, but he clearly wasn't poor!

So now you go to the updated dictionary. Voila! Now it has evolved into something like modern usage - a really bad guy who does really diabolical shit. The speakers of the language have, through time and changing circumstances, re-determined what 'villain' means in context. Now, if you have NO idea what that word means and you look it up, the dictionary tells you - noun, bad guy. Now you have added a word to your lexicon, and when you try it out you find out if the dictionary was correct. It's still possible, though, that it's not correct. That's because the dictionary doesn't 'determine' meaning and usage. Speakers do. So let's say you move to, idk, Boston. You notice that really scraggly looking hookers are often referred to as 'villains' by native Bostonians. WTF is going on here?! They've 'determined' what villain means to them. The usage and context (icky hooker) may spread, and then the dictionary gets updated again. Or perhaps not, because it stays regional. Either way, language users determine its meaning. If you were in this fictional Boston and you called a short-shifting bartender a 'villain', they might get a lot more pissed off at you than, say, a New Yorker who doesn't use that specific meaning. Either way, the dictionary was only partial helpful and didn't determine much of anything. Bostonians did.

So, you see, dictionaries aren't the end all and be all of a language. They're one tool. They're useful, but as anyone who's learned to speak another language can tell you, the dictionary definition doesn't determine meaning. It can only describe what the dictionary writers find as common at any given moment.

Another short example would be the Spanish word 'puta', which to many Spanish speakers means 'bitch' and isn't a nice word. However, there is a region in Spain where it's considered quite normal for older ladies to refer to younger ones as 'puta', as in 'Come on in, I'm so happy to see you, my little puta!' Now, the dictionary didn't determine that. The speakers did. You might get really offended because the dictionary says puta means bitch and it's a curse word and curse words are 'bad'. But those regional speakers have determined another meaning. Not the dictionary. And it's a term of affection, not an insult, and they'd be hurt if you got all huffy and angry. So the regional variations or meaning are determined by the speakers in the region. Not the dictionary.

Shit, I'm sorry this is so long. And my Outlaws are here for the weekend (yay) so I won't have any computer time for a while. Please do look at some of the books and if you have university access, borrow them! And I don't have anything against hookers, regardless of origin.