My intention in my previous picture of him had been to put John Stuart Mill in the clothes of a contemporary liberal philosopher, and when that turned out to be a suit I thought it worked quite well with Mill’s other job as a Liberal MP. But then someone said that he looked like a bank manager, and that didn’t sound quite right. So I consulted Wikipedia, and: at the age of fourteen Mill spent a year in France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham*. The mountain scenery he saw led to a lifelong taste for mountain landscapes.
*Jeremy Bentham’s younger brother, Samuel, was a noted English mechanical engineer, inventor and naval architect who was at one time employed by Catherine the Great.
Update: Thanks to modern technology, we can now see (as Martyn Cornell has pointed out below) that Mill is the spitting image of Anthony Barber, the late half-Danish Tory 1970s Chancellor of the Exchequer.
A Bad Guide 
jajajaja or “hahahaha” (so that you can understand me better)
But put a hat on that bald, he must be freezing !
(may be L.H. can lend him one of their own…)
AJP, you are cheating. That is the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin), which is not in France.
I suppose I ought to have found a picture of Mont Blanc. I thought the Alps was close enough. But well spotted.
Thank you for the jajajaja, which has another meaning completely in Norwegian, more like “Enough, already” in Jewish English (from German). Perhaps m-l or Language knows how to translate that into Spanish…
… No, wait. Isn’t it (almost) basta!
Well, in our Spanish (Río de la Plata’s) perhaps is “tatatatata” (from “basta, basta” that means “stop it!”) , but I’m sure m-l and LH should know better…
It’s a funny thing how the sound of laughing is written in different languages. In Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese at least) they write “rararara”.
It took us time to find that out when we read comics during our first holidays there.
In Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese at least)
Surely only in Brazilian Portuguese, where initial (and double) r sounds like a slightly fricative /h/. I have no idea how they represent laughter in the peninsular form of the language, however. (I might add that the two forms of Portuguese, which sound very different from each other, also sound very different from any other language on earth, and it has sometimes taken me a long period of eavesdropping to figure out people were speaking Portuguese. You’d think it was Kurdish or Armenian or some other obscure tongue.)
In writing, I’ve seen “ah! ah! ah!”, like in French.
I believe the almost /h/ is more restricted. I associate /hobertu/, etc. with Carioca, but not Paulista or Mineiro, though I admit I don’t know the actual map and Julia might be hearing Gaucho.
(Brazilian Portuguese — various dialects — is quite common on the subway, but it’s not hard to hear Armenian spoken around here, just go to the markets in Watertown.)
Yes, I can understand Brazilian Portuguese (from the South or from Río de Janeiro) but Peninsular Portuguese is really obscure, not as much as Armenian to me, of course!
MMcM, It’s true I’m more familiar with Gaucho Portuguese (from the Brasilian States of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, for example). But I’m talking about how they write “hahaha” in comic strips (“revistas de historietas”) printed for all the country, so I believe all Brazilians understand the same thing.
A J Ayer
VS Pritchett
VS Naipaul
AL Rowse
CS Forrester
RD Laing
JG Ballard
EP Thompson
DJ Enright
AP Herbert
GK Chesterton (someone may have said him already)
(GDH Cole)
(JBS Haldane)
JP Morgan
GE Moore (Principia Ethica)
JL Austin (How To Do Things With Words)
FH Bradley philosopher)
RL Moore (set theorist)
JR Ewing (oil baron)
IN Ri (rabble-rouser)
BHL (elite-rouser)
The mountain scenery he saw led to a lifelong taste for mountain landscapes.
But his skiing was never more than run of the Mill.
Well, alright, topologist would be more accurate than set theorist.
Thank you for correcting it on your own. I didn’t want to have to mention it.
his skiing was never more than run of the Mill.
A bit of a Mill stone around the neck for a mountain-landscape lover.
But J R R Tolkein
C H Rolph
E F Benson
W H Davies
E V Tullett
W G Hoskins
C R Benstead
W H Murray
P J O’Rourke.
By the by, to go with W Somerset Maugham, there’s C Northcote Parkinson.
Sorry to lower the tone, but
V I Lenin.
Russians are a whole different kettle. They routinely use “surname + two initials” for everyone; it’s like meat + two veg.
Yes, I know, but usually WE know them just as Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and so on. What I don’t know is why Lenin sometimes appears wth his two initials – which other Lenin might I have confused him with? Did this habit come about when so many western intellectuals were sucking up to the brute, or after his death?
Did Hitler have a middle name?
You mean Adolf Schicklgruber ? Nah, not so far as I can tell.
Well, perhaps that tells us something about the importance of giving our children proper middle names. Winston S. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph V. Stalin and … A. Hitler. Not even An Hitler.
Yes, I know, but usually WE know them just as Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and so on. What I don’t know is why Lenin sometimes appears wth his two initials
But surely he’s known just by his surname as often as the others. We talk about “Joseph Stalin” (or “Uncle Joe” if we’re particularly seduced by his friendly smile and jolly mustachios) and “Leon Trotsky” at least as often as “V.I. Lenin”; in fact, I think we talk about “Vladimir Lenin” more often than that.
Although it’s true that (unlike the Russians) we don’t talk about “I.V. Stalin” or “L.D. Trotsky.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him referred to as “Vladimir Lenin”.
Put it this way:
268,000 for “V. I. Lenin”
293,000 for “Vladimir Lenin”
8,210,000 for Lenin
17,400,000 for Lennon
19,200,000 for McCartney
and
83,100,000 for “Michael Jackson”.
83,100,000 for “Michael Jackson” is a hell of a lot for a general.
C Northcote Parkinson
My father had several of his books. I read them as a wee lad. They belong to the spirit of growing up in the 50s. I remember and cite them to this day.
I have to say that I have had trouble conveying the spirit of Parkinson’s dicta to Germans. For instance, I haven’t been able to work out a zippy German formulation equivalent to: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. I think the problem is due primarily to the fact that general learning is not worn lightly here in Deutschland.
general learning is not worn lightly here in Deutschland.
What do you mean by that, Stu?
I mean that general knowledge is usually regarded as something only people with the Abitur or a university degree have, or are entitled to have.
Whatever else these people have mastered, they have usually also mastered the art of demonstrating superiority by the way they speak about their given area of knowledge. They do not wear their learning lightly, and would not want you to think they do.
For reasons of amour-propre, they are not likely to appreciate cross-disciplinary jokey-poos.
There’s certainly a type of German Professor with a weakness for laying down the law on any subject under the sun with the sort of wrong-headed, fatuous certainty that we in Britain are used to hearing only from…. Climate Scientists? Dr J Gordon Brown? American Economists?
Happily, the Germans with whom I’ve worked most closely have been a pleasure to know.
There must be something to be made of the fact that only the German and Esperanto Wikipedias highlight a formula for Parkinson’s Law. The first reluctantly concedes humorvoll, which the second dispenses with altogether.
And either there’s a constant factor mistake or they used a different version, since I have it here as:
x =\frac{2k ^ m + l}{n}
Even better is:
x =\frac{m^o(a – d)}{y + P\sqrt{b}}
for effective membership at meetings, taking outside influence, age, table size, history of the committee, patience, and blood pressure into account.
Just so. That’s why I stay in Tchoimany.
But they are such serious little dears. It’s good to have plenty of that on call, so long as I can read Firbank in my free time.
The German WiPe gives Parkinson’s Law as
This doesn’t sound like Boyle’s law, or any physical law, but like a civil servant memorandum. The superfluity of genau in in genau dem Maß, and of “Erledigung” and “zur Verfügung steht”, give the game away. “Concedes humorvoll” is exactly right, MMcM.
Here’s more lumbering scholarly-bear caution from that article:
“Wird oft angegeführt”, for God’s sake ! Thus the author hopes to avoids the question of his sources. But as I remember very well, the old lady was precisely Parkinson’s example.
“Wird oft angeführt”
Quite so. The American edition I have (25¢ from library sale) has a Robert C. Osborn illustration of cobwebby aunt with quill in hand.
Now that you mention the drawings, I suppose that must have been the edition my father had – or at least one illustrated by Osborn.
It must be the same Osborn who provided the illustrations to several other Parkinson books, or no ? I remember their all having the same spirit of trenchant lightheartedness.
It’s good to have him identified now. At that age I think I didn’t pay much attention to the names of illustrators or translators. The first ones to stick in my mind were possibly Boz, Ungerer and Constance Garnett. I remember the Oz book illustrations vividly, but not who did them.
Cyril, or C. Northcote Parkinson goes on the first pile with John Stuart Mill & Co. Parkinson’s Law tells us that we should really be calling it Northcote Parkinson’s Law, if not C. Northcote Parkinson’s Law.
Are there any jokes in Esperanto (besides translated ones, I mean)?
One funny thing about German academic snobbery (still marginally preferable, in my opinion, to other kinds of social snobbery), is that the architects I worked with in Germany had an inversely proportional knowledge of the subject relative to their years of academic training. They may have studied something very obscure (possibly about city planning) but in general the Herr & Frau Doktors were not much more knowledgeable than the cleaning staff, who had no interest in architecture at all. They (the Doktors) made child-like drawings using magic markers.
Sorry, off off topic:
I need a little help from my friends to name the newest member of our family. Please come visit my blog and make a choice by seeing the pictures.
http://www.melioralatent.blogspot.com
Thanks!!
I made a comment, but I didn’t see it come up so just in case I’ll make it again here:
Thank you AJP! I just copy your comment there. I don’t know why it didn’t come up
O/T but:-
I suppose they think that’s funny.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/27/sacha-baron-cohen-paramount-goat
Deadline quoted an insider: “This actually shows where the bar is for A-talent to get something done. That it used to be, if an A-talent was interested in a project, that would get the movie going. Now, you have to have the combination of an A-level star and a well-known goat.”
We’ve had offers recently, believe me.
Hah, I found you! Look out!
Uh-oh.
Don’t worry chaps, it’s only his wife.
I was trying to think who JS Mill reminded me of, and I finally realised – Anthony Barber, former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Of all th0se Michael Jacksons on the interwebs, many will be the beer writer
Dearie’s right, you’re not the well-known Amazon reviewer. Do you rhyme your surname with the biblical fruit? With refrigerators?
Yes, and don’t forget if we need a lawyer, we can recall Mill from Afghanistan at a moment’s notice. Not that he is a lawyer, but he probably knows one.
So Mill is Anthony Barber, is he? You are right that the resemblance is very great. That would make Edward Heath Immanuel Kant, and Harold Wilson Søren Kierkegård.
Perhaps a young Margaret Thatcher is Nietzsche. Which means Wittgenstein is Tony Blair … and Gordon Brown is, in fact, Martin Heidegger.