Jejune

I’m going to employ it in a post coming up.

Let’s get that word by its withers.

Kingsley Amis had a typically acerbic rant on this, imagining the transition of jej(e)une through three users:

Stage 1: A writes: “His arguments are unoriginal and jejune” (A knows that ‘jejune’ means ‘thin, unsatisfying’, a rare word, admittedly, but one with a nice ring to it).

Stage 2: B notices the nice ring. He doesn’t know what the word means and, of course, wouldn’t dream of consulting a dictionary even if he possessed one. There is something vaguely French as well as nice about the ring to ‘jejune’; in fact, now he comes to think of it, it reminds him of ‘jeune’, which he knows means ‘young’. Peering at the context, he sees that ‘jejune’ could mean, if not exactly ‘young’, then something like ‘un-grown-up, immature, callow’. Hooray! — he’s always needing words for that, and here’s a new one, one of superior quality, too.

Stage 3: B starts writing stuff like “much of the dialogue is jejune, in fact downright childish.” With the latest edition of OED giving ‘peurile’ as a sense of ‘jejune’, the story might be thought to be over, but there is one further stage.

Stage 4: Having ‘jeune’ in their heads, people who have never seen the word in print start pronouncing ‘jejune’ not as ‘djiJOON’ but ‘zherZHERN’, in the apparent belief that French people always give a tiny stutter when they say ‘jeune’. (I have heard ‘zherZHERN’ several times in the last few years). Finally C takes the inevitable step of writing ‘jejeune’ (I have seen several examples) or even, just that much better: “Although the actual arguments are a little jéjeune, the staging of the mass scenes are [sic] impressive.” Italics in original! – which, with the newly acquired acute accent in place set the seal on the deportation of an English word into French, surely a unique event.

That, pretty well, covers the waterfront.

Except …

Amis is self-evidently a boring old fart, protective of the language of , for and because of similar boring old farts.

For jejune is an early-seventeenth-century Anglicising of the Latin adjective, ieiunus [“having consumed no food or drink, fasting, hungry empty”].  No more, no less. Cicero, in his second letter to Atticus, is using it in a derived sense [“Deficient in goodness, meagre, starved”]. From there Cicero, elsewhere, makes simple metaphoric leaps and the term refers to unproductive land, and then to poor literary style.

In place of the Latinate term, we might supply, as the OED does:

dull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty, thin, poor; wanting in substance or solidity.

De haut en bas

An objection might be those terms, as a catalogue, are hardly a shorthand. Nor, singly or collectively, do they convincingly express the note of superior snootiness implied when we deploy jejune. For that we need to go to Shaw’s stage-direction in Act II of Arms and the Man, telling us more than we need to know of the Byronic Major Sergius Saranoff:

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

Which is why, in this intended post, it will be applied to David Cameron.

Methinks he doth protest too much 1

The two press pieces of the day should undoubtedly be:

• the neo-eugenicist claims on nature/nurture by Dominic Cummings;

and

• Paul Dacre’s spout, courtesy of The Guardian.

Both will be frisked in forensic detail by critics, bloggers and passing humanoids.

Cummings and goings

The former of those looks and reads like an extended late-night keyboard vamp, fuelled by too many shallow draughts, at too high an alcohol content, from the Pierian spring:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

What Cummings offers seems to involve a rag-tag of almost-formed notions, glossed over and poncified by a sweep of abstruse references.

Cut to the chase

If, as seems likely, what it all this highfalutin’ stuff amounts to is:

• the Ministry knows its place, and trusts its professional Inspectorate;
• the Inspectorate knows the Headteachers;
• both Ministry and Inspectorate respect, trust and interact with the local authorities;
• the local authorities are able properly to fund — especially from local funding (and so have local accountability and involvement) — their schools;
• the local authorities respect and involve parents;
• the Headteachers know their schools and their clientele;
• the teachers know their pupils (especially at primary), and enjoy and relish their subject disciplines (at post-primary);
• the students know their places, and how examination and testing is done (and the methodology of testing doesn’t change regularly at the whim of the Minister);
• the examination system is stable, structured, reliable and trustworthy;

and

• there is a decent, liberal ethos prevailing through the whole system and structure, not (as at present) an oppressive blame-culture,

— then Malcolm is all for it. [Those who wish to quibble should refer to Malcolm’s essential diagnosis of public education.]

Retrospective

Oddly enough, that is what we had back before the imposition of Baker’s and Thatcher’s National Curriculum, and that is what the better schools were delivering. No need for all the bureaucratic apparatus imposed by each successive incoming (and “reforming”) Minister. Specify the outcomes — as the GCEs and School Certs did — and heads, teachers, students, parents and responsible authorities will deliver.

For all the perceived inadequacies between the 1944 Act and Callaghan’s Ruskin speech (October 1976), the schools delivered. Over a quarter of a century, the social structure of Britain adapted to a post-industrial future.

An Orwellian truth

In a historical moment, Britain went from being predominantly blue-collar working-class, to white-collar middle-class. OK: there were exceptions — one example, because the UK’s energy needs were predicated to coal, we kept the colliery districts in a kind of industrial semi-servitude (albeit, one generally well-rewarded) far too long. Then Thatcher callously broke them, without offering alternatives.

Why was there no “alternative” to going down t’pit?

The real “fail” was Britain’s inability to devise any credible technical and technological education.  As Malcolm has argued here on several occasions, that is a chronic failure, and one identified over a century ago by George Bernard Shaw, among others.

Why the “fail”? Arguably, because the “toff schools” didn’t mess with anything that involved dirty hands; and what the “toffs” could pay for, the lower orders aspired to. Hence, with the rarest exceptions, the absence of that third element, technical education, in the implementing of Butler’s 1944 Act.

Two words for Gove-ernment:

Butt out.

Cole Porter and other animals

Malcolm and family celebrate the New Year (actually, a day or two after, to allow sobering up to have been achieved) with Trevor Nunn’s production of  Kiss Me, Kate at the Old Vic. Now, in passing, is that the first occasion for a long while when the grammatical comma has been correctly present in the title?

That alone should have triggered a response in Macolm’s conscience during the cooking of that previous item. Particularly so when the phrase ‘professional co-respondent’ was invoked.

Back in 1932 Cole Porter added songs to an unproduced play script by John Hartley Manners. Since Malcolm affects an Irish connection, let him give Manners a run around.

J. Hartley Manners

Manners was born in 1870, a child of an Irish couple, then arrived in London. We might speculate about his political leanings (they become significant some way down this post *) when we realise those parents were Catholics, and his mother wished him to enter the priesthood. Instead he went into the Civil Service, which in turn took him to Australia, where by 1898 he found himself on the stage in Melbourne. A year later, and back in London, he was working with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s and George Alexander’s companies, notably as Laertes in a production of Hamlet — no small achievement for a neophyte.

His apprentice one-act effort, The Queen’s Messenger, later earned a place in media history:

In September 1928, W2XB (owned by General Electric’s WGY) in Schenectady, NY televised the  first dramatic program in the United States, The Queen’s Messenger, by J. Harley Manners, a blood and thunder play with guns, daggers, and poison. There were more technicians required for special effects than there were actors. In fact, technical limitations were so great and viewing screens so small, that only the actor’s individual hands or faces could be seen at one time. Three cameras were used, two for the characters and a third for obtaining images of gestures and appropriate stage props. Two assistant actors displayed their hands before this third camera whenever the occasion demanded. 

That was, in fact, the world’s first televised drama, beating the BBC’s adaptation of Pirandello’s L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca [“The Man with a Flower in his Mouth“] by some eighteen months.

The Queen’s Messenger, back at the turn of the century, had earned Manners a commission to write a star-vehicle, The Crossways, for (and, allegedly, with) Lily Langtree:

Mrs. Langtry opened last night in “The Crossways.” a new play which she has written in conjunction with her leading man. Mr. J. Hartley Manners. A large and hopeful audience greeted her pleasantly; but if it is a case of crossing the heart and hoping to die, it must be deposed that the occasion was not as a whole enlivening…

Their play is a geometric problem, the elements of which are the traditional triangle of husband, wife and lover, with certain projections in the shape of a runaway couple, a stolen necklace of pearls, a race at Acot, and such like. These materials are thrown together so as to make plenty of stage incidents and stage situations, and they lead in the end to the happiest Q.E.D.

So Manners is in New York, where other success persuaded him to concentrate on the writing rather than the acting.

In 1912 he hit the jack-pot with Peg o’ My Heart, the first part subtitled (and this is the element hinted at above *) —

The Romance of an Irish Agitator and an English Lady of Quality

This propelled Manners and the female lead, Laurette Taylor (whom he promptly married), into celebrity status; and the revenue continued with a musical adaptation (songs by Alfred Bryan and  Fred Fis[c]her), a novelisation and a silent movie.

The Manners legacy — and enter Cole Porter

In 1928, stomach cancer and an operation that went wrong finished Manners, but he left an unproduced script, The Adorable Adventure. This fell into the hands of Dwight Taylor (Manner’s step-son by Laurette’s first marriage) who polished it into the book for a musical, Gay Divorce, songs by Cole Porter.

Gay Divorce played on Broadway (248 performances), transferred to London (a run of 180 performances at the Palace Theatre), with Fred Astaire and Claire Luce as leads. It was, therefore, Astaire’s last Broadway musical, and the only one he didn’t have sister Adele as his partner (she had offed and married Lord Charles Cavendish).

When RKO filmed The Gay Divorcee more than grammatical changes were involved. Astaire wanted Luce as his partner. She, however, had suffered a fall in the London run, and that effectively ended her dancing days — though she persisted in dramatic roles into the 1950s. RKO insisted their contract player, Ginger Rogers, be cast as Astaire’s opposite. Most of Porter’s songs went the same way, retaining only Night and Day and adding The Continental.

Cultural significances?

All of that is interesting, to an extent, in itself.

What is probably of more substance is the material of the play and the plot.

First of all, the original story-line seems somewhat advanced for its day. In the wikipedia summary (which is as abbreviated as any):

Guy Holden, an American writer traveling in England, falls madly in love with a woman named Mimi, who disappears after their first encounter. To take his mind off his lost love, his friend Teddy Egbert, a British attorney, takes him to Brighton Beach, where Egbert has arranged for a “paid co-respondent” to assist his client in obtaining a divorce from her boring, aging, geologist husband Robert. What Holden does not know is that the client is none other than Mimi, who in turn mistakes him — because he is too ashamed of his occupation to say what it is, namely pseudonymously writing cheap “bodice ripper” romance novels — for the paid co-respondent.

At the end, when her husband appears, he is unconvinced by the faked adultery—but is then unwittingly revealed, by the waiter at the resort, to have been genuinely adulterous himself.

While elements of that go back to the flighty-but-gritty fin de siècle stuff (try Oscar Wilde and early Shaw, for examples), any grit is about to be subverted into froth by the strengthened Hayes Office code. Even the change of title suggests the new morality imposed by Joseph Breen:

The moralizing Hayes Office said a divorce couldn’t ever be a happy event, but conceded that a divorcee could be in a good mood.

We therefore have a sub-text to the movie: creative artists pushing the Hayes Code as far as possible. And that, folks, is a matter of social history that still persists, even after the Code went into abeyance, and across all arts.

University challenge?

Currently the Great London Met disaster is trending.

Malcolm admits to being torn over this one. The students, and potential students, have been sold a pup. They have been treated quite disgracefully by the whole government and institutional bureaucracy.

Yes, we need wider access to higher education.

Yes, we should encourage overseas students  — and lecturers, and distinguished academics — to find a place, however transitory, in London. Everyone benefits.

But…

… there is something badly, madly, sadly wrong with some of our weaker “universities”.

Once upon a time this was the reputable Northern Polytechnic, one of those fine institutions that George Bernard Shaw recommended to the nation in Man and Superman:

Tanner: A little moderation, Tavy, you observe. You would tell me to draw it mild. But this chap has been educated. What’s more, he knows that we haven’t. What was that Board School of yours, Straker?

Straker: Sherbrooke Road.

Tanner: Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something: Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old school-fellow.

Straker: You don’t know nothing about it, Mr Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic.

Tanner: His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin, or Glasgow. Not even those Non-conformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy. Regent Street! Chelsea! the Borough!—I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you?

Straker: No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like.

Shaw, remember, had been on the London Schools Board. He knew of what he wrote. In a way, he could see where English technical education was failing. And Straker, the mechanic, is the Superman round these parts.

A disaster in the making

Let’s admit, the way London Met recruits has played straight into the hands of Damian Green.

So, let’s get that one out of the way immediately.

Green is an ambitious Mr Toad. He smoked his tyres in the run-up to Election 2010 over the immigration scare. He certainly left marks on the road.

Hence, he may have some reason to feel that the ConDem pact excluded him from a promised place at the Cabinet table.

It is re-shuffle time. Everyone in the second and third Tory ranks is feeling uncomfortable. Green needs to leave some more rubber on the carriageway.

London Met is in trouble

It consistently ranks at the bum-end of any league table. Only the University of East London keeps it off bottom spot. It has financial problems, which go back far beyond the present crisis.

Malcolm admits he has seen the joint from the inside. And is definitely not impressed.

Where to go?

Clearly something has gone awry with the way the UK has expanded higher education.

Once upon  a time there was a clear hierarchy: Oxbridge, Redbrick, concrete, lavatory tile. Unfair and silly. But we knew where we were when we (and our accepting institutions) made the choice. Nobody questioned that — say for engineering — a red-brick out-boasted any Oxbridge. Or if nukes were your thing, you went to Manchester. Or that concrete East Anglia’s creative writing beat anything else hands down. Even for accountancy, Wolverhampton was your thing.

Then it all went mad

Anywhere could have a “university”. One of the great arguments for Hull School of Art being translated (via the Humberside College of Higher Education and Humberside Polytechnic) into the University of Lincoln was that Lincolnshire was the last county of England to be denied its proper “university”. Lest we forget: it’s not one of the worst. Many of these “newest” universities are nothing of the sort: they teach undergraduates in a limited range of disciplines. Some might as well be specialist institutions — the Luton School of Computing, and the like.

Worse still, with the ConDem coalition, any joint — public, private (who cares?) can offer degrees. The market will decide — even though it might take ten years for the market value of a degree from Little Piddlebury International University of Chiropody to be valued in the public forum. So what? Several thousand students will have coughed up to £9,000 a year to test the market. Yes, the market will decide. Sigh.

Meanwhile degree mills will continue to churn out would-be lawyers, managers, social workers, health managers, information technologists and , of course, ready-coined apprentices in umpteen branches of the  media.

What’s to be done?

In the case of those unfortunate overseas students at London Met (and — one can but guess — in this xenophobic period, they are but the first of an annual swathe), not much. Some enterprising civil-rights lawyers will doubtless pursue their reasonable claims through the courts; and a settlement will be arrived at. Probably, and conveniently, after the next General Election.

However, Malcolm has a Modest Proposal.

In effect the universities have already created their own league table:

• The Russell Group

The Russell Group represents 24 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector.

• The 1994 Group

The universities of Durham, Exeter, York and Queen Mary, University of London, have joined the Russell Group, it has been announced.

The four universities have left the 1994 Group, which represents smaller, mainly campus-based, research-intensive universities, to join the Russell Group of elite universities.

It increases the membership of the Russell Group to 24 and reduces the 1994 Group’s membership to 15.

• Million+

We use rigorous research and evidence based policy to solve complex problems in higher education. We publish research reports and policy papers and we submit evidence to parliamentarians, government and other agencies. 

And little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite ’em. And so ad infinitum.

In effect we have a Premier League, a Championship , and a couple of lower divisions.

Promotion and demotion

This we sadly lack, as yet.

So, here’s a wonderful opportunity for “open government” and the “big society”.

Micky Gove at the Department of Education would have to nominate these league tables — though with around a hundred institutions, it might work best if we had five divisions of twenty teams a league. OK: that might mean half a dozen have to go to the wall, or down into the Totesport Combination, where London Met is already. It might be more humane to arrange a few shotgun “mergers” to save Vice-Chancellor faces (and pensions).

Job done, we formalise an annual competition with promotion and emotion. We might award points, exactly as now, on a basis similar to that of the Times Higher Education Supplement:

Our rankings of the top universities across the globe employ 13 separate performance indicators designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer. These 13 elements are brought together into five headline categories, which are:

• Teaching — the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)
• Research — volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)
• Citations — research influence (worth 30 per cent)
• Industry income — innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)
• International outlook — staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).

Indeed, the proposal gets better and better. Introducing a commercial element — each university could rebrand itself with sponsorship on the shirts: Adidas Liverpool, Honda Reading, Barkers Leisure Parks Aberystwyth — should appeal to those weirdo free-marketeers like ex-Times man, Micky Gove.

The THES comes from the belly of the News Corp beast. That’s the Murdoch octopus. Which has its own television arm in Sky. Were Murdoch in one form or another to sponsor the league, all we need to add is a swimsuit round — and the annual ceremonial promotion and demotion is ripe for primetime viewing:

Hello, Sky Center!

Here are the votes of the International Outlook panel:

FeetBiche Boat Cam’ Brig-tonne, douze points. FitBitch Boot Camp Brighton, twelve points …

Redfellow on ConHome

Back to the Future, starring Micky Gove, is the retro-movie of the week, as we are whipped back to the golden age of selective education and “tough” exams. Except it all looks like just another round in the Great ConDem coalition break-up.

Malcolm, who “passed” GCE General Science back around 1956, and was teaching English as early as the mid-’60s, doesn’t remember GCE with quite Govian enthusiasm. Then, as now, 16+ examinations were little more than barking at text: many routine questions were taught, and answered by rote. Intelligence and insight were not required.

So Malcolm is wholly cynical about the whole business.

The boy farm

Hence this ConHome exchange (which long-term readers of Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service will find horribly familiar — but what else can be done in those comment boxes?):

 Malcolm Redfellow

Academic schooling does us proud (even more so when government leaves teachers to get on with it). The chronic failure is with technical education: when will government do something about that?

 Gunnerbear

Technical education is hard work, very expensive and the changes and improvements are only seen in tiny, tiny steps. 

All sorts of SoSs have ‘looked into’ technical education and most of the time it comes down to the difficulty (and it is a real difficulty) of getting decent instructors, full facilities and a mechanism to judge the ability of the students.

I’ve long argued that for TE to be truly effective the various Chartered Institutes must set the the standards as they know what employers and industry in general needs e.g. the IEEE, IoM3, IMechE and so on. 

Such a move would mean handing real control to a non-political body. The institutes under the UK-SPEC / Eng. Council umbrella would be difficult for a politician to browbeat when it came to awarding grades and such like. Naturally, this adds to the politicians distaste for proper thus expensive technical education. 

Perhaps as well, the terms Engineer and Technican should be legally protected just like the title Doctor and Solicitor is so that if you want to be an Engineer or Technician you have to be a member of an approved Chartered Institute.

 Malcolm Redfellow

All true and worthy. 

Now let us refer to “Man and Superman”: 

TANNER. … this chap has been educated. What’s more, he knows that we haven’t. What was that board school of yours, Straker? 

STRAKER. Sherbrooke Road. 

TANNER. Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something; Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old schoolfellow. 

STRAKER. You don’t know nothing about it, Mr. Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic. 

TANNER. His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin or Glasgow. Not even those Nonconformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy. Regent Street, Chelsea, the Borough—I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you? 

STRAKER. No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See? 

TANNER. Sarcasm, Tavy, sarcasm! Oh, if you could only see into Enry’s soul, the depth of his contempt for a gentleman, the arrogance of his pride in being an engineer, would appal you. He positively likes the car to break down because it brings out my gentlemanly helplessness and his workmanlike skill and resource. 

We are no further forward than 1903.

That, folks, is the root cause of why Britain is now a technological disaster area.