Diacritiques

Via Bystander, a blogging English magistrate judge: A youth from Kent has been issued a £80 (about 117.139019€, if you ask Google) on-the-spot fine for using “the F-word”, as they put it. Here’s the BBC news report:

Kurt Walker, 18, from Deal, Kent, said he would go to court rather than pay the fine handed out in a town park.

He said he received the fixed-penalty notice after he used the F-word to a group of friends he met in the park.

Kent Police said fixed penalty notices were just one tool to help them to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Student Mr Walker was on his way to a youth centre where he works as a volunteer when he stopped to talk to friends.

“One of my mates said, ‘What have you been up to’, and I swore when I replied,” he said. […]

“In my eyes I have not committed any crime whatsoever,” he said, adding that swearing was a normal part of the language he and his friends use.

Dover District Council’s anti-social behaviour unit works closely with Kent Police to tackle bad behaviour.

“Swearing and abusive behaviour certainly is not normal behaviour and I feel it should never be used in a public place,” said councillor Julie Rook.

A Kent Police spokeswoman said: “The public expect us to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Bystander quotes a different press report, one I can’t find online, in which a police spokesman draws a perilous comparison:

A Kent Police spokesman confirmed: “He didn’t swear at the police, he was talking to his mates [but] it was close enough to the police officer.

“It’s an offence under the Public Order Act. It’s quite reasonable to give someone a fixed penalty notice and if someone doesn’t want to pay it they can go to court.

“Some people think it [the fine] is over the top, some people think it’s perfectly reasonable.

“It’s one of those things that divides people, like Marmite.”

Now do we have to defend the honour of Marmite or the use of taboo language within one’s own social circle, be it in a public venue?

Marmite, the word, is of course a borrowing from French, where the noun marmite ([maʁ’mit]) denotes a cauldron or large cooking pot.

A small addendum, penned a few hours later: The Guardian is a paper on whose very sensible attitude towards taboo language I’ve already commented. Still, it was surprising to see in a book review by Natasha Walter (dated February 18, 2006) the word fuck employed outside a direct quote:

As Erica Jong, erstwhile celebrator of the zipless fuck, tells Levy: “Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven’t come.”

The book is Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy.

Via Dominique at the Petit Champignacien Illustré: The non-profit association graphê is trying to drum up support for their online petition, which asks the French state to preserve the collection and archives of the Imprimerie nationale (the national printing works), an institution that has existed since 1539 and whose premises are currently being sold off:

The historic collection it holds - due to be so dispatched - is a unique, priceless testimony of the history of the written form, from the 16th century to the present. It includes the Cabinet des poinçons, or Punch Room, holding hundred of thousands of letterform and character punches, for both western and oriental scripts; functional workshops - a foundry, presses for typography, lithography and copper-plate engraving work, stitching and binding - as well as a library with over 30,000 volumes, and the archives of the State printing works. Set up in 1539 by King Francis I, at the same time as the Collège de France, the national center of academic excellence, this collection stands as the memory of specialized know-how and expertise, and as a center for creation, now fated to disappear if its continued survival is not ensured.

Typography and its history and know-how don’t have a lobby, not even in such a relatively history-conscious place as France. The petition text is online in 26 languages.

From Le Monde:

Afghanistan : succès relatif de la journée électorale, un soldat français tué

[Afghanistan: Moderate succes of the election day, one French solider killed]

All right, they used a comma and not a colon, but still …

Debi Jones Joan Touzet, who blogs at An Atypical Life, has put up an uncensored recording (mp3 file, 3.2 MB) of the interview that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, gave to the radio station WWL-AM yesterday. I am locally mirroring the file here; another mirror is here. Via Debi Jones, who links to more […]

So Mr Schröder has made, er, creative use of the process that allows for a dismissal of (the lower chamber of) Parliament and new elections in Germany. It’s not entirely clear yet whether they will be okayed by the President. Just to make sure I’m up to date, I follow the political news that […]

Found among the gems on the wonderful Arte Radio site: a clip entitled “Chirac disco” which, in the typical fashion of the Arte team, mixes some (in)famous snippets of the French president’s speeches with, well, you could call it music. For the bit alone where he says “overdose” (of foreigners, by the way) it would […]

Someone (God, Toutatis, or the magic wand, I don’t care) help France! The New York Times has discovered the Polish Plumber, the one that appears on an ad by the Polish National Tourist office in France. Now that episode is really something to be ashamed of.

If this had been posted on about any other day of the year, I’d have loved to check out the C++ version of The Mill on the Floss. (Yet another Victorian novel I never finished. Not yet anyway. Don’t take me wrong, I am very fond of Jude the Obscure and liked Wuthering Heights quite […]

Shouldn’t we be glad that an influential bunch of religious leaders who otherwise don’t agree about much anything for once display unity when it’s about keeping “those” “dirty” people from committing “spiritual rape” of the holy city of Jerusalem? I’m getting more and more cynical about organised religion, mine included.

The French noun rencontre signifies a chance meeting, an intersection of one’s path with that of someone else. Sometimes, the paths run in parallel for a while, often they diverge again quickly. The English quasi-equivalent is “encounter”, but as always, the connotations are just a little different. This post is about three such encounters. All […]