Cancel Culture Nonsense, Giles Coren

Lionel Shriver has described her capitulation to cancel culture, admitting that for a forthcoming book she agreed to remove dialogue she was told was "othering"...

She said: "In my upcoming book I had a little bit of an African accent in a very small dialogue.Touches of it. I was discouraged from using it because it was othering. Because it did not really hurt the book artistically I complied."

She said that she hated the word, which is defined by the British linguists professor Lynne Murphy as "treating people from another group as less human than one's own group"...

Raving Madness
Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700)
Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC]

The rise of cancel culture and the accompanying boycotts and threats to those who opine "in the wrong way" on topics ranging from sexuality to racial politics has become a fraught subject in the arts. One side asserts that it is putting free speech at risk, while the other says it is making elites accountable.

A letter last year signed by more than 150 leading authors and academics, including JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky, warned that the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted".

"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes," read the letter published in Harper's magazine. 

Shriver said there was an "Old Testament severity" to the "cancel culture movement" and argued that "free speech is not partisan but had tragically been taken over as a cause of the right"...

She added: "Liberalism has become neurotic. Because the big battles have been won and if you are a warrior... you pick pettier and pettier fights. I'm afraid that's what we have seen."

(David Sanderson, The Times, 2021)

Cancel Culture

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
unknown artist
Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC_ND] 

There has been no teaching at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School in San Francisco for almost a year... When students do eventually go back to classes in the city's Sunset district one of the things they'll have to learn will be an imminent change of the school's title. It's one of 44 that the local education authority recently voted to rename... they have decided  urgent action is needed to remove from schools the names of those who had "engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

What, you might ask, did the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped do to diminish the opportunities of San Franciscans to the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? His offence, according to the official record, was to have written a poem called Foreign Children... It was described as "cringeworthy" by the authority not on literary grounds but because of its white privileged voice and the use of demeaning ethnic terms such as "little frosty Eskimo".

You might agree that a school that honours a children's author with a Victorian view of the world does irreparable harm to the lives of young Californians, but how about Abraham Lincoln? His name is another of those slated to be removed from a school on the grounds that his policies were "detrimental to...Native peoples of the United States". That whole freeing the slaves thing evidently didn't make the cut. 

(Gerard Baker, The Times, 2021)

Giles Coren

I had my Covid vaccination on Wednesday, becoming the first person in Britain to go to his local health centre, roll up his sleeve and accept a small prick in the arm without getting a photo of the moment and putting it on social media.

A Cow Named 'Vaccination'
Matthew Dubourg (active 1786-1838)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

They were so grateful. The nurse said, "Thank you, Mr Coren, I can't tell you what a drain on resources it has been having to stop and pose, mid-injection, for a photograph of literally every single jab so that these virtue-signalling nobodies can post it on social with a soppy platitude about how much they love the NHS. Do you know, if people could just come in here without having to stop everything for a stupid picture of their ugly fat arm, we could have vaccinated the whole world thrice over by now and would all be down the pub with a pint of Guinness and a packet of nuts."...

They are rejecting this vaccine in Europe because they are timid, risk-averse little turds with no stomach for the fight. We know about their hypochondria. You only have to walk out of the Gare du Nord and see four giant pharmacies at every crossroads, each one with its blaring cross of green, to know that this is a continent that falls to its knees in the face of the merest summer cold...

And, of course, there is their racism. They absolutely hate us British and just as a Jew or a Muslim will shy from a vaccine with a pork derivative in it, so the French or the Belgian will squirm and puke at the thought of anything British running through his veins... Imagine being tied to those pathetic, superstitious, needle-shy, medieval death bunnies at a time like this! Even when they do get a vaccine they're prepared to take - no doubt a suppository - the red tape around it will be so complex they'll all be dead before the rollout begins.

And they certainly won't be forming orderly queues like my neighbours did on Wednesday because Europeans don't know how to queue. They'll all be gathered in a great, roiling, garlicky mass around the hospital doors, clawing at each other's eyes and screaming 'Moi! Moi! Moi!'...

(Giles Coren, The Times, 2021)

*... But if the French are once again expelling our English words from their soil ("vintage", "fast fashion" and even "designer" were given their marching orders last night and ferried across the Channel at gunpoint), then I am calling for a suitable diplomatic response, in the form of tit-for-tat expulsions of French words from English.

La falaise a Fecamp, France
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Photo Credit: Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums [CC BY-NC]

... I've had enough of  "bonhomie" too, which only means "drunkenness", about which there is nothing bon at all. Oh, and "bon viveur" which only ever meant a fat, handsy, old lech who wouldn't live past 60. It is a typically French concept and totally irrelevant in the Britain of 2020, where we've all got to lose weight, get sober, stay in and shut up.

And they can have back "jus" too. It's bloody gravy, mate. And I'm bored with feeling compelled by the gods of comedy, every time a waiter comes to the table and says, "Jus?", to reply, "Yes I am, but not practising, and I'm OK for gravy, thanks."

On my watch "entrepreneur" will be handed back... "je ne sais quoi", because if you don't know, shut up; "chic", because I'm not and don't want to be; "avant garde" because art was fine how it was; "cinéaste" because they're only movies, mon ami, and nobody cares; "salon", because a load of failed artists sliming up to an oligarch's wife doesn't deserve a word of its own, and "trompe l'oeil" because painting a pretend garden on a kitchen wall and calling it something French does not distract from its fundamental dishonesty. In fact, it adds to it.

I'm also sending back "déjà vu" (or have I already said that?), "voilà!" because we've already got the perfectly good English word, "eureka!", "deja vu", and "le coq sportif", because it's just rude.

I'd also like to do away with "roué", which is French for "old groper" I cannot believe there is a rouè left out there without a #MeToo case pending...

I actually quite liked "idiot savant" until we elected one for our prime minister, who then turned out not to "savoir" anything...

(Giles Coren, The Times, 2020)