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Juanie Baby,  Would you elaborate a bit, por favor? Specifically: were you thinking of something specific that we take for granted, and which Babel Tower are you referring to? Church language? Gracias--
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Jackie.
I think I know what has happened with my post.
I posted it regarding a jhm posting which said that about the 14th century people of different regions of Britain could hardly, if possible at all, understand each others.
How I’ve been missing for a few days my posting has gone to the end of the stack and now seems anachronistic.
Pressing the ‘Threaded mode’ button helps a little in those cases.
Thank you for your observation. It has helped me to celebrate a double graduation this night. Without your cues I would have had to change my nickname juanmaria for 'John Doe the stranger'.
Juan Maria.
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>I think I know what has happened with my post.
'brick and I exchanged some thoughts on this problem of responding to posts after some passage of time and having said response end up at the end of the thread. like you say, the threaded mode can help a bit; but overall it leaves a lot to be desired too. we finally agreed that the least bad alternative is to quote a bit of the post to which you're responding, to give your post some context.
hope this helps...
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#2700
05/28/2000 12:50 AM
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>>change my nickname juanmaria for 'John Doe the stranger'
You did it, Journeyman John!!
Congratulations, felicitations, and exaltations upon you!
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#2702
05/28/2000 10:20 AM
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> hope this helps...
Sure. Thank you!.
Juan Maria.
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Pooh-Bah
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> I thought a woman overly dedicated to the female cause was a feminist. After all, you never hear of a maleist, do you?? (or do you?).
I think I will have to join in, I can bear it no longer.
There seems to be totally different way of describing men and women here.
The point about feminism is that it is about an oppressed majority in search of equality, no more, no less. When the suffragettes chained themselves to railings it wasn't because they were overly dedicated to the female cause it was because they thought it would be nice to be able to vote for the government of the day (and therefore have their views taken into consideration by those in power), a right which was at that time in the UK not only not available for women, it wasn't available to working class men either, so they took the on the cause of non-land owning men too. We've all benefited.
When the women in the sixties and seventies burnt their bras it wasn't because they were overly dedicated to the female cause it was because many quite ordinary rights were denied to them. Women would now be appalled to be told that they couldn't sign a cheque or have a mortgage in their own name but these are relatively recent rights in the UK. A friend's mother pretended she wasn't married so that she wouldn't have to give up her Civil Service job in the early sixties - she was the main breadwinner in her family but knew she wouldn't win the battle if she told the truth.
When we try to do something about mandatory female circumcision or the plight of women who are outcasts following fistulas related to childbirth traumas we are not overly dedicated to the female cause, one would hope that any modern, caring man would be a feminist too.
So call us female chauvinists, not feminists, when we want to set up a women-only club or fail to employ men when they are better qualified for the job. We can behave badly too.
I'm sure that in some matriarchal societies it would be right and proper to have a maleist movement. It may be just round the corner as more marriages fail (or never happen)and so many boys are brought up without access to their fathers.
So I suspect the reason that the "male" has started to disappear in the word "male chauvinist" is that we don't get enough time to be "female chauvinists"!
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> by the end of 15th Century Gutenberg’s invention started putting an end to that local Babel Tower
I heard a wonderful radio programme where they discussed the evolution of BBC English - they couldn't call it standard English (as it wasn't) and eventually settled on "RP - received pronunciation", essentially the way English was spoken by "educated people" in the South East of England. They asserted (and played tapes to prove it) that the dialects spoken across Britain could not be understood by people from outside their area (I listened to schoolchildren in Devon and in North East England and it was very difficult to tell what they were saying).
It was only in the last twenty years that today's (modified over time, dialects) were "allowed" on to the airwaves. (The popular dialect for radio DJ's was for several years "mid Atlantic").
So if it took the printing press to encourage standardisation of written English (I can only speak for Britain), it took another invention (the radio) to begin the standardisation of spoken English.
Perhaps in the future, people using whatever the Internet becomes will talk of the days when people all over the world spoke different languages. Who knows?
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> chauvinism - 3) an attitude of superiority toward members of the opposite sex masculinist - an advocate of male superiority or dominance so, by definition, a male chauvinist is a masculinist. Yep. I'll go with that - despite the ambiguity. > [this is similar to what happened with 'decimate', which started out applying to a narrow ratio (1 in 10) of punishment and the definition was broadened to include "a large part of" (and then it got misused by *narrowing* application to specific ratios other than 1 in 10).] Which brings us around to my original point about broadening definitions to 'suit the occasion'. But I'll leave it at that. I think that I (and everyone else) has got the point. Nice work tsuwm. I am suitably impressed by your research skills and good argument. Maybe it is you who should be the lawyer! 
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> I imagine that by the end of 15th Century Gutenberg’s invention started putting an end to that local Babel Tower.
I agree. But only for the educated few. Books were expensive until mass production in the 1800's and even then only a few people could read due to illiteracy amongst the proletariat.
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> So if it took the printing press to encourage standardisation of written English (I can only speak for Britain), it took
another invention (the radio) to begin the standardisation of spoken English.
This is very interesting. There was a programme on BBC last year about 100 years of cinema (or something) and the producers interviewed a number of English people who had been to see the first talkie 'The Jazz Singer'. Previous to this the British audience had seen only silent American films.
One English girl recalled that she had never heard the American accent before and neither she nor her friends could understand a word that Al Jolson siad for the rest of the film. Watching the same film today it is laughable to think that this could ever be the case because we have become acclimatised to others' accents through broadcasting and media but, back then, American English was a foreign language and was just as difficult to understand as spoken English in one area was to someone living in a far corner of England. So the radio standardised spoken English whilst the movies (and later television) standardised global speech. Local dialect can be heard interspersed with snippets of foreign slang on every street, in every major city in the world but I believe that this foreign slang is itself being turned into a unique form of local dialect.
An example. In the US it is common (or uncommon) to say 'say what?' In Dublin you would hear a variation - 'you what?' which means exactly the same thing. But 'you what?' has only become Dublin parlance in the past 20 years - clearly a fallout from TV.
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>the point about feminism...
exactly why I didn't equate feminism to masculinism. it is instructive just to compare the definitions:
masculinist - an advocate of male superiority or dominance
feminist - an advocate of women's rights and interests
say no more!
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>Which brings us around to my original point about broadening definitions to 'suit the occasion'.
...and me back to the point that broadening seems natural and doesn't bother me too much with decimate, since the original sense isn't too useful these days -- it's the re-narrowing, as it were, that can rankle.
I wish we could think of some other examples, now that we've decimated these.... ;-)
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I might have missed your point, tsuwm, but it seems to me that the word "millennium" fits the original description put up by Rubrick in his opening post.
M-W defines it as follows:
1 a : the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20 during which holiness is to prevail and Christ is to reign on earth b : a period of great happiness or human perfection
2 a : a period of 1000 years b : a 1000th anniversary or its celebration
What appears to be happening currently is that "commercialism" has picked up on the word; it appears in all sorts of guises, and has become overworked, with the result that the original meaning has changed to suit the usage in the media.
I hear advertisements on radio and TV - lines like "toys for your millennium", and "a special millennium offer". "M&Ms - the official candy of the millennium". By whose authority, other than the advertisers?
I'm probably suffering from millennium overload!
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So what's the term for an advocate of female superiority or dominance?
Also what is the term for a man who campaigns for male rights?
Will we need to invent the terms when these issues arise? Only then will we have true "opposites"
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> back then, American English was a foreign language and was just as difficult to understand as spoken English in one area was to someone living in a far corner of England
As now we have "tuned in", in the main, to voices from people from most parts of the world (I did have a completely incomprehensible removal man from Glasgow when I fist moved up here, but that is by the way)
Perhaps, to disagree with myself, that standardisation has relaxed it's onward march. In the same way that my children are bi-lingual - street Scottish at school and plain(ish) English at home, many of us can understand (and often speak) several varieties of English.
So in the Flicks we get sanitised, clearly enunciated Disney mixed in with Al Pacino's Godfather and Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting or Robert Carlyle in "The Full Monty". (I wonder how many people understood all three films).
So now, not only have the accents become less deviated from the mean but our understanding has expanded - so we are all now polyglots!
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> Books were expensive until mass production in the 1800's and even then only a few people could read due to illiteracy amongst the proletariat. Reading the history of the Macmillans I was surprised how little was available in print. The early books subscribed to religious ideals, it was only in living memory that anything remotely challenging was published and available freely. The Lady Chatterly trial was only in the sixties and the question was "Would you let you maidservant or wife read this book?" http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/apm/publishing/culture/1997/richards.htmlIt is only now that we have real-time access to the unedited rambligs of people from other countries!
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>So what's the term for an advocate of female superiority or dominance?
consistency demands that I answer "female chauvinist" (one overly dedicated to her cause)! :-)
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David108>I'm probably suffering from millennium overload!
no doubt this one has been driven into the ground recently, but we may have to resort to the OED as to which sense came first. Webster's Third Int'l has the order reversed from what you quoted and logically you'd think that it originally meant simply a period of 1000 years, given its roots are New Latin mille + ennium.
[later in the day}
okay, this one is arguable -- according to the OED, the first known written English usage (ca. 1634) was indeed in reference to the 1000 year reign of Christ, borrowing directly the existing New Latin word for 1000 years (which follows the pattern of biennium, triennium, etc.); English poets soon (ca. 1711) picked up on the general usage. Reading between the lines here, W3 evidently lists the general usage first becasue of the pre-existing NL word. (quoting the W3 preface) "In definition of words of many meanings the earliest ascertainable meaning is listed first."
Credit current overuse to the Mass Media. (no pun intended with 'Mass' :)
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#2716
05/30/2000 11:46 PM
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Folks--
This poor, frayed, single thread has now decimated decimating, Latin, chauvinism (et.al.), the millennium,
and the printing press. I may even have forgotten one or two! I wonder if the wanderers would care to return, or
perhaps create a new path? (I still refuse to say you-all were rambling, given its original meaning!)
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> Perhaps in the future, people using whatever the Internet becomes will talk of the days when people all over the world spoke different languages. Who knows?
What is very clear is that never in mankind history communication has been so easy, cheap and quick. Although I like finding historical situations that can be used as a model it’s impossible to find anything comparable with our communications.
Communication examples based on past history will not be valid until mankind starts colonizing other planets.
Juan Maria.
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Well Tsuwm's made a start with increasing our understanding of Mars!
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