Labelling!

You can grow a tad tired of being categorised, put in box with a label on it, having people assume that you are nothing but a .... (insert type here). 

Recently when Marks and Spencer were having a change of top management and the usual round of criticism of their stuff - too dowdy, too frumpy, good quality but unfashionable (another example of cubbyholing) - and someone in one of the numerous interviews about it declared that the problem was that M & S tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal to too many age groups. According to the speaker this was a mistake because mothers and daughters never shop in the same place. Oh, no? I mentioned this in conversation with my daughter, and her daughter (18 years old) chipped in, "Well, all three of us often buy similar clothes to each other and often from the same shop!" So there you go! 

And just now I read about some psychological study which has concluded that people over 65 do not understand sarcasm. Clearly no-on has told them that 65 is the new 45, or something like that. And then, their study was based on the responses of just 116 (why that random number?) people of varying ages, which is hardly going to be a representative sample. Any basic knowledge of statistics would tell you that. Over 65 covers an immense age range. And maybe, when the over 65s in their sample responded in a way that suggested they did not understand implicit sarcasm, just maybe those over 65s were being sarcastic in their turn. That would be ironic, would it not? So, we must be careful about putting labels on anyone. That way intolerance and overreaction lie! 

I was in Manchester again today. The city centre still appears to be one huge building site, and looking even more miserable in the chilly damp of a grey January day. In one of the shops I called in at, the shop assistant asked what I was doing with my day. So I told him. I was on my way to an Italian conversation class. He asked where it was and on discovering that it was at the Manchester Deaf Institute (one of the few places where the rent is anything like reasonable near the city centre for a class like ours) he proceeded to ask if that was the place where they do music gigs. After a bit of orienteering and geography we discovered that we were in fact talking of the same place. I knew nothing of the concerts organised in upper rooms of the place and he knew nothing of all the stuff that goes on for deaf students in the whole place. We had different "labels" on the same building. 

We went on to chat about learning languages. He is learning French, gradually moving up through the levels of proficiency imposed by the Alliance Française. His motivation was having spent some time studying Media in Paris. He has a Masters in Media but, like many young people, the only job he has been able to get so far is working in a clothes store, perhaps one where he worked part time as a student. I wonder how many over-qualified shop assistants there are in Manchester alone! 

For today's Italian class we had been asked to write a short biography of someone famous, past or present and of any nationality. So I chose the writer Jhumpa Lahiri because I had recently read an article of hers in which she talked about her experience of learning Italian and her decision from now on to write only in Italian. This was partly as a means of improving her fluency in Italian; it works! I used to tell my students to try to keep a diary in French or Spanish. It helps you begin to think in the foreign language. In the case of Jhumpa Lahiri it was also because she was interested in the way writing in a foreign language altered her writing style. Here is a link to her article .

Interestingly, I read somewhere that Samuel Becket said that he began to write in French to improve his fluency but also that wrote differently in French and in English. Becket translated his own work from one language to the other but Jhumpa Lahiri has her Italian writing translated by a professional and experienced translator. Oddly enough, I also read that the Galician writer Domingo Villar does not translate his own work from Galician into Castilian. Apparently he said that if he were to start to translate his work he would feel the need to alter it. If he wrote his books in Castilian Spanish, he maintained, they would be quite different books. 

A different kind of categorising!