The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel - The Tory leadership elections

There's always something dickish about blokes who go for the crushing handshake

Now reminded of the 'great porn parody names' - An Orifice and a Gentleman - can also be used to caption any number of photos of two (or one) tories.

the CH definition of what fortifying oneself with swigs from a bottle is, is doing it totally wrong.

Can’t believe Tory leadership candidates take in fluid, truly unbelievable

Johnson falling back on the old racist 'immigrants must speak English within our earshot at all times' gibberish now.

xp it's an evian bottle but it's full of replenishing reptile serum made from the crushed dreams of poor people

Truly no language has ever been threatened as much as the English language.

xp

It's not so much that the English language is threatened but that paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them so they can't tell if they're talking about them - and that's our next Prime Minister.

He added, in a wry reference to his name, that perhaps one of his ancestors hunted.

^thus speaks a man from a noble lineage of plumbers

"can't even speak the language" a classic trope of racist cunt Jack Straw iirc

paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them

Tbf the only time this happened to me so far involved a couple of American tourists seated at the table next to ours at a pub in London, 'subtly' mocking my French wife's typical pronunciation of certain anglophone actors' names. It can indeed be amusing, and neither of us has any qualms with it in a friendly setting, but in this instance it was clearly intended to demean. The upside, of course, is that once you catch on to it you can openly discuss their idiocy in the very language they are belittling. Anyhow, my sole xenophobic run-ins with Brits have been of the 'racist unbeknownst to themselves' variety, such as utterly tanked students asking for my name in addition to a light and immediately expressing bewilderment at my 'lack of accent', which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

worth a read 4 years on
http://theconversation.com/theresa-mays-hidden-british-value-monolingualism-39258

I'll probably regret this, but what should I search to find this view of Boris's?

I was in Paris waiting in the queue for the Eurostar and there was an American family in front of me, and one of the Eurostar employees asked them which train they had tickets for (in order to make sure they were in the right queue) and they couldn't understand him at first and had to ask him to repeat, and once they did understand, and after he had started moving away, they smirked to each other and began mimicking the guy's accent and rolling their eyes, all very much "can you believe how bad this guy's English is" and I'm just boiling inside. DO YOU REALISE YOU'RE IN PARIS RIGHT NOW MOTHERFUCKERS? HOW'S YOUR FRENCH???

which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

lol the NA accent can be quite scathing when it needs to be, although I concede that its Canadian variant further dulls the edge.

Yeah but you don’t have the scathing rolled R though, francophone version is no substitute.

I speak English with a standard Canadian anglophone accent and Romanian with a standard Romanian accent but I can't, for the life of me, even when I'm sloshed, combine the two. I can do an English accent in French and a French accent in English but I am utterly unable to sound Romanian in any language other than Romanian. The beauty of ILX, however, is that you can still choose to hear that arch-scathing Eastern European accent in your head – I'm all for it.

Anyway, sorry for hijacking this thread again, I just wanted to say: fuck off, Boris.

To make matters worse, his French is semi-decent for an occasional speaker. He's not fluent by any stretch of the imagination and he makes some amusing mistakes, but he seemingly understands the value of speaking more than one language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEGtpSvGXEA

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Also this video of TM speaking French is awful
https://youtu.be/0dbvZJqgp0A like even the Queen made more of an effort speaking Irish

Bercow makes me angrier than Gove in that clip.

Bercow is always like this but he and Gove hate each other & genuinely cant think of a situation where I’d side with Gove.

Yeah, it's just the "well we're all just mates having a laugh here" vibe of it. Endemic to parliament I know.

Jesus fuck have we really got another two weeks of this?

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels. It's just the bare minimum enabling you to get by, ie typical Boris

Again wondering out loud if any of BJ’s Eton fees were paid as part of an expat employee package that went with Daddy’s EC job, because wouldn’t that be *delicious*?

but Johnson is more immune to shame than most Tories, even. i think he'd be comfortable benefiting from something he intends to deny to other people.

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels.

Tbf it's a lot easier to live in Brussels (a bilingual, even trilingual city) with a bare-bones grasp of French than it is in Paris. By the same token, there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's, alas.

Regardless, I’d love to see him answer a question about it on telly. The waffling would befit Belgium.

lol

xpost you're no doubt right about Brussels although all the British people I know there speak French a damn sight better than Johnson!

Will never forget taking a train from Brussels to Brugge and at a certain point they just abruptly stopped doing announcements on the train in French.

there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's

A random example of this: Steven Pinker, who spent the first 20+ years of his life in Montreal, gave a conference at the École normale supérieure in Paris and wasn't even arsed to take QUESTIONS in French. The amount of anglophones who don't bother learning foreign languages even in contexts where you'd expect it is absurdly high, and it's not even entirely their fault. This is simply how linguae francae work: language is power, etc.

all the British people I know there speak French a damn sight better than Johnson

I assume they want to be there, though, whereas Brussels appears to have been Johnson's In Bruges.

tbf pinker is a massive twat in other areas of his life also

Will never forget taking a train from Brussels to Brugge and at a certain point they just abruptly stopped doing announcements on the train in French

yeah when we were in Bruges the other week I had to explain to my son why his attempts at French weren't necessarily appreciated

tbf pinker is a massive twat in other areas of his life also

Can't argue with that.

Mind you the francophone bruxellois don't bother to learn Flemish, although they're literally surrounded by Flanders

Yeah, there's a clear hierarchy. Regional languages in France have also been systematically quashed. My wife's grandfather, who was German-Alsatian, decided not to teach his children either German or Alsatian after WW2, although he himself continued speaking them as needed (in Strasbourg).

my father, a South American immigrant to the USA, didn’t teach us Spanish because he thought it would slow our assimilation. We learned it anyway.

I don’t know anything about pinker (some popular scientist? not gonna bother) but people at the ENS pride themselves on doing everything public in English. Of course internal ENS power (all ENS people *really* care about) is carried out in French. Pinker just showed himself uninterested in that, which is fine, for the locals as well.

Most francophones wouldn't go out of their way to give a talk in English at the ENS for the sake of showboating. And no bilingual Montrealer would ever consider such a thing, in such a context. I'm not taking issue with the ENS's openness to English here, I'm just saying that given the environment in which Pinker grew up, it's fair to expect some amount of linguistic sensitivity. Same goes for Naomi Klein, who comes from a similar background, and whose politics are far removed from Pinker's.

No, I meant he probably asked what language to speak and was told English (maybe with relief). Unless the entire audience is francophone an academic talk in Paris will be given in English. At least that is the norm ime

he probably asked what language to speak

What I'm saying is this certainly didn't happen.

It’s probably the least of his problems today...

but what about Steven Pinker pic.twitter.com/YNwqNZ0SRM

— Matt Hammington (@MattHammington) July 7, 2019