Nincompoop

A survey of more than 2000 Britons has revealed “nincompoop” to be the nation’s favourite word out of the 16,500 entries [so few?] in the Cambridge Dictionary. The survey found 13 percent of respondents chose “nincompoop” – believed to be derived from the Latin “non compos mentis”, meaning not of sound mind – as their favourite sounding English word, Britain’s The Daily Mail reported.

Britain’s top 20 words, according to the survey::
1. Nincompoop
2. Love
3. Mum
4. Discombobulated
5. Excellent
6. Happy
7. Squishy
8. Fabulous
9. Cool
10. Onomatopoeia
11. Weekend
12. Incandescent
13. Wicked
14. Lovely
15. Lush
16. Peace
17. Cosy
18. Bed
19. Freedom
20. Kiss

Needs must …

Needs must

Meaning – Necessity compels. In current usage this phrase is usually used to express something that is done unwillingly but with an acceptance that it can’t be avoided.

Origin – The phrase is old. In earlier texts it is almost always given in its fuller form – needs must when the devil drives. I.e. if the devil is driving you, you have no choice. This dates back to Middle English texts, for example Assembly of Gods, circa 1500:

“He must nedys go that the deuell dryues.”

Shakespeare used the phrase several times. For example, in All’s Well That Ends Well, 1602:

Countess: Tell me thy reason why thou wilt marry.
Clown: My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.

from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/needs-must.html

The Dismal Science

The dismal science and the wealth of nations

A credit squeeze evolving?

There is an interesting article in today’s Australian newspaper by economics editor Alan Wood titled “Nowhere to hide in global markets“, prompted by the continuing wobbles in world stock markets following problems with home loans in the USA ( sub-prime loans).

Wood writes:

A remarkably effective way to bring home the reach of modern global financial markets to ordinary Australians is to tell them their mortgage interest rates are going up because of a credit crisis in US mortgage markets.

That’s what happened on Monday, when low-doc home lender Bluestone raised its lending rates by up to 55 basis points, compared with the 25 basis point increase in official interest rates last Wednesday. It blamed higher funding costs caused by the fallout in world financial markets from the meltdown in sub-prime mortgages in the US.

Yesterday the RAMS Home Loan Group issued a profit warning, also related to an increase in borrowing costs from the sub-prime fallout. And it isn’t likely to stop there.

… It is helpful to recall what has been happening in the developed economies, including Australia, during the past 25 years.

Former RBA governor Ian Macfarlane explained this in his illuminating 2006 Boyer Lectures. As an economy becomes more developed, its financial sector grows much more rapidly than its real economy. The result, Macfarlane says, is that economic outcomes will depend more on what happens in (financial) asset markets and less on what happens in the real side of the economy, such as in the goods and labour markets.

Households and companies build up their holdings of financial assets, which grow faster than incomes. In Australia the stock of financial assets has increased from 100 per cent of gross domestic product in 1980 to more than 300 per cent now.

Another result has been a rapid growth in credit, with the ratio of credit to nominal GDP more than doubling during the past 20 years, to about 1.4 times. As part of this process there has also been a rapid rise in household debt and leverage, to record levels.

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Note:

The term dismal science is a derogatory alternative name for economics devised by Thomas Carlyle.

The full phrase “dismal science” first occurs in Carlyle’s 1849 tract entitled Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, in which he was arguing for the reintroduction of slavery as a means to regulate the labor market in the West Indies:

“Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science”

Developing a deliberately paradoxical position, Carlyle argued that slavery was actually morally superior to the market forces of supply and demand promoted by economists, since, in his view, the freeing up of the labor market by the liberation of slaves had actually led to a moral and economic decline in the lives of the former slaves themselves.

On the other hand, economists such as John Stuart Mill recognized that increased productivity, expansion of creative expression and worldwide peace would and could result from the liberation of humans,  i.e. the abolition of slavery.

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sources:
Wikipedia
The Australian newspaper
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Other good commentary - Terry McCrann … on the above …

Flânerie and flâneur

flâneur

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.

The term “Flâneur” comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. A flâneur is thus a person who walks the city in order to experience it. Because of the term’s usage and theorization by Charles Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the Flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus both played a role in city life and (in theory) remained a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the crowd. After the 1848 Revolution, after which the empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretentions to “order” and “morals”, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “a botanist of the sidewalk”. David Harvey asserts that “Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flaneur and dandy, a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other” (Paris: Capital of Modernity 14).

Because he coined the word to refer to Parisians, the “flâneur” (the one who strolls) and “flânerie” (the act of strolling) are associated with Paris. However, the critical stance of flânerie is now applied more generally to any kind of pedestrian environment that accommodates leisurely exploration of city streets, in particular commercial avenues where inhabitants of different classes mix. Indeed, diverse texts such as Baudrillard’s America, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road demonstrate the concept’s impact and flexible usage.

The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the Dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur\’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed and anonymity of modern life in the city.

The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open-up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists such as Georg Simmel began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a “blasé attitude,” and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man\’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. (The Metropolis and Mental Life)

The concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in architecture and urban planning. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, without precedent, parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published a short story called “Der Spaziergang“, or “The Walk“. It is a masterpiece of flâneur literature.

In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events for pedestrians.

from Wiki and French Family definition

The concept of the flâneur has been adapted to writing – for example, in Edmund White’s The Flâneur – a Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris.