It's good to know stuff.

Did you know that there is no direct translation of the word 'geek' in French, German or Spanish? At least to my knowledge. I know that in French you can describe "quelqu'un qui n'est pas branche" (e acute - where are those special characters...?) which hits the uncool bit of the word, but misses the element of anti-intellectualism implied in 'geek'. In German the word 'nerd', which has very smilar connotations, is translated as 'Fachidiot' which is interesting. 'Fach' is a subject, the rest is obvious.

(As an aside, I found this page which attributes all these 'stoopid' insults to German. Hmm. Not sure I go along with any of them - seems like several steps too far. For a start I don't recognise any of the original so-called German insults... http://ursine.ca/Talk:Nerd )

However, I'm not raising this as a linguistic complaint about a gap in other lexicons, but an illustration of a particular attitude prevalent in British society which has, in my opinion, MASSIVE knock-on negative effects on our national life. In most arenas of British life it is not now cool to be intelligent, academic, studious, hardworking, to deviate too much from the media-generated, cheeky-chappie, 'fun' identikit persona, or actually to know stuff. To engage in meaningful conversation about politics, religion, historical perspective, cause and effect or anything else is at best embarrassing, and at worst antagonistic. I think the Brits have always had this tendency. Witness the phrase "too clever by half" - I wonder how many other languages have an equivalent put-down.

Even faced with a national crisis such as all the aspects of the fall-out of 911; the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the London bombings, the fulminating of the fundamentalist Mullahs, the fulminating of the fundamentalist American President; political and social analysis isn't coloured with any kind of subtlety. Sledgehammer comments lobbed from all sides, but God forbid that we actually sit down and discuss it rationally, to see shades of grey in the black and white. Cherie Blair tried that when she observed how desperate people must be to blow themselves up, and the media howled and shot her down in flames.

And of course that means that we get what we deserve, and most of our public figures are not as intelligent as they should be, considering they are 'leading' our country. They're not though. Given that the media have the power they have, they dsound out ideas in the media, rather than using the power of their astonishingly potent brains to work out through careful analysis of facts and conditions what is the RIGHT thing to do given the short, medium and long term.

[This rant is not over, but I have to break because, troublesomely, I have to go to work...]