The GOS has been speaking English for a long time now, and speaking it quite well, he thinks. At any rate, he usually gets what he wants in shops, and doesn't have too much difficulty on the telephone although he's not too good at Indian accents - oops, sorry! Mentioned India - that's racist. It's always racist if you mention someone's nationality. Funny thing that. It's almost as if nationality has become a dirty word.
But since The GOS is reasonably fluent, he finds it very hard to understand that others aren't equally at home with what is, for many millions of people, their mother-tongue.
Here's a case in point. It's a story from America of course, where the English language is under even more threat than it is here, and we found it on the Classically Liberal blogsite.
Greg Soucia from Shenectady is a bad boy. The 21-year-old is a thief. But his theft also made him a "sex offender" once the local prosecutor got hold of him. Greg stole a credit card. And, as a result, he was prosecuted under the 'Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act'.
What gave the low-life prosecutor, aptly named James Conboy, the excuse was that the young man used the stolen credit to hire some strippers. In the logical world of Mr. Conboy: "If you commit a burglary and your goal is because of your own sexual gratification, it's a sexually motivated felony."
I sincerely doubt that Soucia broke into a house to rob it just to get his jollies. I doubt that the reason he robbed the house was so he could hire a stripper. And, even if he wanted to hire a stripper, to call this sort of theft a "sex offense" is absolutely ridiculous. Either Mr. Conboy is incredibly moronic or incredibly power-hungry. Either way he is a threat to the decent people in his county.
Conboy admitted that by pretending that common theft was now a sex crime he could get a longer sentence for the offense. In addition the young thief will have to register as a dangerous sex offender. And how will the offender's registry, or what vigilantes call "the hit list", describe Mr. Soucia? When he is released from prison his picture, along with his home address, will be published on a sex offender's web site. He will be listed as having been convicted of a "sexually motivated felony". That sounds really bad. No doubt the morons who troll the lists will see this as proof that Soucia was out raping children at the local church nursery. Instead, he broke in a house and stole a credit card. And when he got the card he used it to hire a couple of strippers. Carl Strock, a local newspaper columnist, wrote about the case (unfortunately the original link is also now defunct). He wrote: "What interests me most is that when he gets out he will be registered as a sex offender, thereby becoming subject to all those local laws that will prohibit him from living within 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet of a park, day care center, playground etc., even though the sexual aspect of his crime was perfectly legal. Yes. It's perfectly legal to hire young women to put on a strip show as long as no physical sex is paid for. It happens all the time. The Schenectady company that provided the service in this case openly accepted a credit card, after all. But if you put the two things together, the illegal burglary and the legal paying for strippers, all of a sudden you have a sex crime under this new law, and you have generated another sex offender for people to go into convulsions over. Isn't that cute? We don't know yet if young Mr. Soucia will be a Level 1, 2 or 3 offender. He will be classified when he finally gets released, but he will be on the state registry and will be marked as a "predator," in the terminology preferred by politicians."
Consider the ramifications of this theory. If you are the mother of a randy teenage boy beware. If Junior slips a few bucks out of your wallet, when you aren't looking, and spends the money to buy a Playboy or some condoms he apparently is now a sex offender. If he borrows, without permission, the car so he can have a back seat romp with his date, he is now a sex offender -- even if both of them are legally considered adults in sexual matters. The kid who shoplifts a dirty magazine from the corner store can be labelled a "sex offender" instead of a shoplifter.
When these sex offender lists were started they were justified on the basis that the police needed to have access to a centralized data base of sex offenders for investigation purposes. Then the sex panic brigade got involved and cried out that the public ought to have access to the lists so they could be aware of individuals who were violent threats to the community. So the lists went on line.
But once they went on-line the bureaucrats and politicians started expanding the categories of people who had to be listed. Now a very larger percentage of "offenders" are not violent and not a threat to anyone. But the ignorant public doesn't know that. The mob's logic is: "If they weren't a threat they wouldn't be on the list." Some only wake up to the reality when they, or their kids, or some relative ends up on the list.
I listened to the lament of one man who is grappling with the way his brother has been treated. The brother had an affair with a teenager, a teen who was considered able to consent in most of the states in the US, but not in this particular state. The relationship was entire consensual. There was no force, no violence. But the brother was arrested almost ten years ago and is still in prison.
The family of this "offender" lives in the heart of the Bible Belt. They seem your typical conservative, Bible-belt family. This man couldn't understand what the state had done to his brother. "I don't approve of his life-style," he would tell me, "but he didn't deserve this." The "offender's" nephew couldn't understand what they had done to his uncle. The mother and grandmother were emotionally wrecked by the case. And it is clear that prison has had emotionally destroyed the man convicted of this offense. He will never adjust to a normal life and the consensus is that he will either be murdered in jail or kill himself -- he has tried once already.
These were not people who gave these "sex offender" laws any thought prior to the arrest of their loved one. Across the country there are families who are learning, with horror, that instead of protecting families from crime, these sex offender laws are destroying families. When a credit card theft becomes a "sex offense" you know things have gone completely out of control. These laws need reform. Most of the laws passed in the last decade or two need to be repealed. The laws against rape and similar offenses were adequate but each new piece of legislation created more victims of the sex hysteria. It has to stop.
The GOS is not so sure that this insane bit of behaviour on the part of the American legal system really is politically motivated. He thinks it's motivated by deep, mind-numbing stupidity, and he sees the same sort of thing happening in the UK every day.
It comes back to our original idea: people just don't understand English, and therefore can't think clearly. They really, sincerely believe that the mere mention of a word is enough to shape or colour our perception of behaviour. Remember the Welshman who was charged and convicted of a racially-motivated crime because he had a row with his next-door neighbour and called her an "English bitch"?
Now it's very insulting to call someone a bitch, and he deserves to be called to account for this rudeness. But the woman was English, so to call her "English bitch" is no more insulting than to call her "fat bitch" or "Chelsea-supporting bitch" - rather less, in fact. It's the "bitch" that's the problem, not her nationality - that was simply a statement of fact.
The current row about something Prince Harry did (three years ago, I believe) is another case in point. He mentioned that one of his colleagues was "a Paki". Apparently this is deeply insulting to Pakistanis.
Why?
Are they ashamed of being from Pakistan? Do they want to keep it a secret?
Or is it the abbreviation that's the problem? Would it have made a difference if he'd used the whole word?
And yet it's OK, apparently, to call us "Brits". I can think of a lot of people who'd be quite annoyed to be called "a Brit" - many English, most Welsh and all Scots, for a start. It's only in Northern Ireland that they'd positively welcome it, and only half of them. Yet the expression "Brits" is in common use, especially in the cheaper kind of television, and that's apparently all right.
There was a similar fuss some time ago about calling Japanese people "Nips", despite the fact that "Nippon" is a word they apply to themselves every day - every second commercial company is called "Nippon this" or "Nippon that". So one must assume that it really is the abbreviation that's insulting. Unless you're a Brit, of course.
The same ignorance can be seen in many other cases where "insult" is perceived. Someone seriously demanded after 9/11 that the film of J.R.R.Tolkien's second book should not be called "The Two Towers" - even though that's the book's title. It's offensive to do an item about car crashes on TV - according to families who have recently lost someone in a car crash. People leap to find offence at the mere mention of a word, however innocent the context. Use the word "Jew" in public, and there'll be trouble; yet Jews exist, they live and thrive in every British city, they marry, have children, die, run businesses (rather successfully, usually) and take part in public life. They keep themselves to themselves, often, mix socially with other Jews, go to Jewish synagogues, some of them buy stuff in Jewish shops. But it's offensive to mention the fact. I've probably upset hundreds of people with this paragraph alone, though I'm prepared to bet none of them are Jewish; they're far too intelligent.
It's the same with disabled people. Except we're not supposed to call them that, are we? We're probably supposed to call them "special" or something - it changes every few months. There are constant demands for "special" people to be given "special" consideration, with "special" ramps in shops and cinemas, and "special" access to jobs and training. It's even illegal to exclude them from any activity for which they are unsuited. We eagerly await the first court case to be brought against a premier league football club because they won't take a paraplegic onto the squad.
But although we all have to take special steps to cater for disabled people, be specially considerate, take their needs into account in every facet of human life (and I'm not complaining: why shouldn't we?) we mustn't talk about them. We mustn't use a word to classify them, because "they're all individuals".
Well, hopalong, so are we all. Every single Chelsea supporter is an individual, but that doesn't stop you calling them "Chelsea supporters". Every musician is an individual with individual skills and individual style, but they don't mind being called "musicians". Every child is an individual, yet we prate on and on about "children". Every man is an individual, and every woman. Does that mean we should take the signs off the toilet doors?
So I come back to it: it's all about understanding English. If you really understand the language and the functions that words play in it, you'll know that just using two words in the same sentence doesn't join them indissolubly together. "Steal" and "sex" together don't add up to a sex crime, "fat" and "Lithuanian" doth not a racist incident make, and "I'd like to have sex with you, but you're not Jewish" may be a disappointment but it's not the deepest insult a man has ever received.
Unless you're a Muslim, I suppose. If you are, all bets are off.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2008 The GOS
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