Onlooker

Seeds of content
English as she is spoke
Under the weather

Seeds of content

It is universally agreed that we live in a stressful society. Yet the stress, or much of it at least, is of our own making. We are in so much of a hurry, trying to do one thing before we have finished another, or trying to get one step in advance of some fancied rival. We are conditioned to demand so many things, trying to keep up with the notorious Joneses, and develop a mind set in which we feel we cannot live without them because other folks apparently cannot.

This is a stupid attitude which is greatly abetted by our economic pacesetters, who constantly exhort us to be more competitive. Indeed, competition, whether organised from above or hinted at from below, is an idea which has taken over most of the civilised world and robbed us of much of its benefits. We no longer seek to achieve some useful purpose, but must win prizes, in sport, in commerce, rather than do an excellent job for the simple reason that it needs doing.

What we achieve from taking the more-and-faster attitude to our daily living is a high degree of stress, a factor which distorts both body and mind. We talk of rat races, but rats usually have more sense than we have in respect of speed. It is helpful to consider habits which are calculated to diminish the impact of stress on our lives. We can resort to more primitive occupations in our spare moments than playing with electronic gadgets and watching screens that flicker and lurch.

The really helpful occupations are those which cannot be speeded and which demand attention. Among the antidotes to stress I would include ironing, hand knitting, embroidery, drawing and painting and performing music. It is quite impossible to hasten any of these pursuits. Add to them reading, and you will find no time to worry about stress. The other virtue all of them hold is that to indulge in them you cannot pass the buck to anyone else. You have taken the task into your own hands, and hold personal responsibility for the outcome. If well done you feel pride; if less well done you are prompted to do better. And you will develop the gentle mind visualised by Edmund Spenser in his ‘Faerie Queene’ (1596): ‘‘The gentle mind by gentle deeds is known / For man by nothing is so well bewrayed / As by his manners.”

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English as she is spoke

It is intriguing for a pharmacist to learn that a charitable organisation called the Queen’s English Society, formerly the Society for the Protection of the Queen’s English, was founded in 1972 by an information scientist working in the pharmaceutical industry, Joe Clifton. It aimed at maintaining a high standard of good English.

The term King’s or Queen’s English, dating from the 16th century, has in recent years lost much of the respect it once commanded. Although it is applauded when applied to written language, it has lost prestige when applied to the spoken word. Today we are protective towards our local dialects and accents, holding them to be part of our heritage.

The truth is that languages change over time, and a fascinating glimpse of this tendency in our own time has been provided by a group of language scientists from Macquarie university in Australia, writing in Nature for December 21/28, 2000. It is acknowledged that pronunciation alters over the years, mainly through the influence of younger members of the community, but it is not known with any certainty how older people modify their pronunciation in accordance with social changes.

The authors analysed the vowel sounds from records of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts between 1950 and 1980, in view of the idea that “received pronunciation” has been modified by changing attitudes towards social class and that English accents that mark social class have become blurred with social boundaries, largely by younger people who wish to dissociate themselves from the Establishment.

Acoustic analysis of BBC women broadcasters and the Queen have shown vowel movements tending towards the standard southern British accent as used by younger individuals lower in the social hierarchy. The Queen no longer speaks the standard English of the 1950s, but has not yet adopted the southern standard pronunciation. It is concluded that the preservation of any particular pronunciation in the face of community changes cannot be achieved by academic means, and that to continue to talk of “Queen’s English” as indicating standard vowel sounds no longer makes sense.

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Under the weather

It was recognised decades ago, as related by Clarence Mills in his book ‘Medical climatology’ (1939), that mental instability seems to be influenced by the weather prevalent at the time, and the frequency and abruptness with which storms affect a region. Indeed, it has been recorded that in the United States, as storms sweep over the plains and turn back along the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio towards the gulf of St Lawrence, they are followed by increased incidence of appendicitis, respiratory disorders and suicides.

A centre of low atmospheric pressure approaching us provokes a feeling of futility, a decrease in usual mental efficiency, with increased inability to perform difficult tasks, as the pressure falls and the temperature rises. Children become more difficult and irritable, adults more pessimistic and quarrelsome. As pressure rises and temperature falls, bringing clearer and cooler weather, tasks requiring mental concentration, such as musical and artistic activities, become more agreeable and their performance is facilitated. Depression with a sense of futility encourages thoughts of suicide, while uncontrollable irritation provokes homicidal tendencies.

Of all the weather factors that produce mental instability, the most potent appears to be falling barometric pressure. If to this influence we add the effects of reduced sunshine hours during the autumn and winter period, we have a scenario where ill-health becomes, for the time, commoner, irrespective of the infections which spread in cold atmospheres alternating with overheated and underventilated interiors of homes, offices, shops, and places of entertainment.

Depression during the darker winter months was first described by Kraepelin in 1921. Since then an atypical form of depression at that time of year has been called “seasonal affective disorder” (SAD) and has been treated experimentally by means of bright light. The disorder has been attributed to melatonin abnormalities which may occur in winter though not in summer. The existence of this syndrome is not universally accepted by psychiatrists. Nevertheless, a long spell of rain, floods, gales and dark mornings and evenings undoubtedly contributes in some fashion to a sense of futility, despair, irritability and a desire for more carbohydrate.

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