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The language of power
DESCENDING from the corporate equivalent of the lofty Swiss Magic Mountain dreamt up by Thomas Mann in his great 20th-century novel of the same name, your reporter has been decompressing from days of Davos-speak among the tycoons, oligarchs and well-heeled hangers-on.A mixture of corporate jargon, future-fixation and deployment of airy concepts intended to convey prescient […]
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New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://ift.tt/KQAo4H
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About a girl
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music. By Angélique Kidjo. HarperCollins; 256 pages; $27.99 and £20 ANGELIQUE KIDJO’S childhood in Benin was a whirl of different languages and cultural influences. Hers was a family that spoke French, Fon and Yoruba, and placed equal emphasis on Catholic rites and indigenous spiritual rituals. This mixing has had a continuing impact on […]
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Seeing red | Mind your language
A shocking story of verbal abuse suggests we should be more sensitive about using the word ‘ginger’ A couple of months ago, police were called in when red-haired pupils at an academy in Yorkshire were the victims of “kick a ginger kid day”. An isolated incident? Perhaps not. “This letter is to respectfully ask that […]
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Slave trade documents among illegal Foreign Office cache
Papers might provide information for people seeking compensation for ancestors’ suffering, says historian Historic papers about the slave trade are among the enormous cache of public documents that the Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded in a secret archive, the Guardian has learned. Some of the papers appear to date back to 1662 and are thought […]
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Dear Flacks… Love Hack
ONE of the most enjoyable pieces Johnson ever wrote was one on the etiquette of bribery. Even in the most corrupt places on earth, where bribery is constant, it is dressed up. Rarely is money passed from hand to hand and in plain sight. Rather, dropped envelopes and left suitcases are preferred, even if nobody […]