Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deal with. An old wooden shrimp boat, billowing black smoke, pulls into an isolated bayou near the mouth of the river. Laughingly pushing his cousin aside, Phuoc Nguyen, 11, grabs the tie line and loops two half hitches around a stake on the bank. Phuoc, who has picked up English in the three years he has been in the U.S., translates for his uncle as a white-haired mechanic explains the problem with the carburetor. "How much we owe you?" asks the boy. The mechanic shakes his head, refusing payment. Like many others, he is embarrassed...
Those who know that English public schools are in fact private may go to the head of the class. You are clearly ready for a longer lesson in paradox. Open your copies of The Old School Tie and begin studying a system of education that has been bullying and beloved, tyrannical and anarchic, rigorous and howlingly inept. Memorize the ways in which a relatively insignificant number of masters and students created an ethos that spread, via the British Empire, worldwide. Questions will be asked later, and laggards can expect a caning...
Social Historian Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is interested in how his countrymen got to be the way they are, i.e., typically British. His previous look at this process, The Unnatural History of the English Nanny, uncovered early influences on the children of the upper and middle classes. What happened to the boys when they left home is a more complicated subject, because the schools to which they were exiled at around age eight have a history dating back some 14 centuries. That is a daunting span for any single book to cover, but the author attacks it with zest...
...Ustinov, not to mention generations of statesmen, artists and thinkers, somehow emerged with originality unchecked. There is scarcely a field of public endeavor in the English-speaking world that does not bear traces of the public school imprint. Fighting oppressions as youths may have strengthened the graduates for the larger trials provided by life. Above all, the schools seem to have given their charges a sense of belonging together, a memory of childhood that they shared with their peers and never forgot. - Paul Gray
There is material here for comedy, but laughing at the wretchedness of boarding schools is, as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy indicates, an English literary tradition. Good writing by Americans about prep schools-The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss and A Separate Peace by John Knowles-is very serious indeed, perhaps because Americans are less comfortable with the idea of a separate, elitist education for the upper middle class. It is this sober-faced genre that Yates follows, at a distance. The tone of his novel is that of a man looking back wearily from middle age and thinking, "Ah well...