Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...laity is vociferous and in some cases violent. Is this the Episcopal Church with its modern-language prayer book in 1979? No. This first happened when Cranmer introduced his then modern-language prayer book in 1549. All the reasons given against the 1979 book-"it's poor English, it's not traditional, it's poor theology"-were first used in opposition to Cranmer's book. Plus ça change, plus c'est la méme chose...
...John F. Leavitt is named after a maritime writer whose book Wake of the Coasters first inspired Ackerman's notion that the era of the wooden sailing ship might again be at hand. Ackerman gave up the pursuit of a doctorate in Middle English, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman French at the University of Pennsylvania to build his ship. There is enough romance in the hard-nosed seaman that he sought out John Leavitt's widow, Virginia, and invited her to break the obligatory bottle of champagne over the ship's prow at the christening...
...They scramble for a precarious living by scalping movie tickets, acting as brokers for unused ration coupons, or earning commissions on the black-market sale of scarce local products. The more ambitious among them seek out Western consumer items to hawk illegally; popular items include movie-sound track albums, English-language books or clothing patterns laboriously traced from tattered copies of women's magazines. Says one youth who illegally returned to Shanghai from a commune in Yunnan: "The basic rule is that anything Western sells. What do you want for those bell-bottoms...
Sympathy for China's unemployed young people is not universal. The Sichuan (Szechuan) Communist Youth League recently complained that "some young people lack great and far-reaching revolutionary ideas, and some even pursue the decadent way of life of the bourgeoisie." Shu Xun, an English teacher at the Xiang Ming Middle School, worries about the materialism of many students, whose main concern is "getting an automobile or a color TV." Others have taken a revolutionary step further and even dared criticize the regime itself. "I think conditions must be far better in the Soviet Union than they are here...
...like a runner dashing for third without having touched second base. Magazine writers, or the authors of books about current affairs, often find themselves gratefully surprised by how much remains unexplored and untold about major events that the daily press and television once swarmed all over, then abandoned. An English historian, when asked how valuable newspapers are to his own work, didn't express the usual misgivings about their accuracy. Newspapers would be more useful to historians, he said, if they devoted more space to the immediate past and less to the immediate future. More useful to readers...