Tea at Trianon: Working in Antarctica

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Working in Antarctica

From Open Culture:

The distinctiveness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s isolation. It’s probably no coincidence that, as almost every place in the world has become less isolated, accents have become less distinctive. In these days of vanishing forms of regional speech, if you wanted to hear a new one coming into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth — or one specific end of the Earth, anyway, as demonstrated not long ago by researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Taking and analyzing recordings made over the course of one winter, they discovered that a new accent has begun to take shape in English as spoken in Antarctica.

“Antarctica has no native population or permanent residents, but it does have a transitory community of scientists and support staff who live there for part of the year on a rotational basis,” writes Tom Hale at IFL Science. “In the summer months, there are typically around 5,000 people living in Antarctica, but that drops to just 1,000 in the winter.” It was from this group of the Antarctic “over-winterers” — and in particular, from those working on the British Antarctic Survey — that the linguistic researchers recruited their subjects, eight of whom were from England, one from the United States, one from Germany, and one from Iceland. (Read more.)