The twentieth century in Europe was an urban century: it was shaped by life in, and the view from, the street.
Women were not liberated in legislatures, claims Leif Jerram, but liberated themselves in factories, homes, nightclubs, and shops. Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini made themselves powerful by making cities ungovernable with riots rampaging through streets, bars occupied one-by-one. New forms of privacy and isolation were not simply a by-product of prosperity, but because people planned new ways of living, new forms of housing in suburbs and estates across the continent. Our proudest cultural achievements lie not in our galleries or state theatres, but in our suburban TV sets, the dance halls, pop music played in garages, and hip hop sung on our estates.
In Streetlife, Leif Jerram presents a totally new history of the twentieth century, with the city at its heart, showing how everything distinctive about the century, from revolution and dictatorship to sexual liberation, was fundamentally shaped by the great urban centres which defined it. Below are three videos in which Leif talks about women’s rights, sexual liberation, and the anonymous history changers.
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Leif Jerram was born in Woolwich in south-east London in 1971, and lived there until he went to study history at university. After having lived in San Diego, Bremen, Munich, and Paris, he settled in Manchester to do his PhD – the first industrial city. There he has remained, barring a brief stint as a fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is currently a lecturer in urban history in the School of Arts at Manchester University, as well as being involved in community politics and activism. He has published widely in the field of cultural and urban history, including most recently Streetlife: How Cities Made Modern Europe. You can read Leif’s previous OUPblog post here.
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By Anatoly Liberman
I notice that my posts on usage, including spelling, invite livelier comments than those on word origins, and most questions I receive also concern usage. This is natural, and, as always, I am grateful for questions, suggestions, and criticism. Today I will take care of about half of my backlog but will try to get rid of the other half in May.
Wh- spelling. How can we reform spelling if some people are unable to hear such an obvious difference as allegedly exists between ware and where? This would be a fateful question if we had to adapt the Roman alphabet to the needs of a totally different phonetic system, as happened when Anglo-Saxon England, with its illiterate population, was converted to Christianity (nowadays, some cautious anthropologists say “preliterate,” as though literacy were like puberty: a natural state coming at a certain age). But we are already literate and hope to renovate an old building, not to demolish it or erect a new one. For any version of spelling reform to be accepted, it should, I believe, be moderate and progress in several steps over a rather long period. (A theme for creative writing: “The Portrait of a Spelling Reformer as a Cunctator.”) For example, abolish the letter h that no one pronounces in wh-, unless swayed by the word’s written image (that is, in whist, wherry, and so forth) but preserve it in while, what, and their likes. In similar fashion, get rid of sc- (sk- is enough), because the difference between skate and scathe is arbitrary and even silly. In such cases it may be wise to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
Born versus borne. This is another (unbearable) vagary of English spelling. No one doubts that from an etymological point of view born is the same word as borne. The OED (bear, verb, 44) gives exhaustive information on borne. In the earlier part of the 17th century, borne was the prevalent spelling of the past participle, but by approximately 1660 born became the norm, joining torn and worn. A century later, final e was reinstated, so that now we have the privilege of distinguishing in writing between airborne and air-born.
W in answer. The explanation of such oddities is nearly always the same: traditional spelling. The Old English for answer (noun) was andswaru, and the verb was andswarian. The prefix and- in those words means “opposite, against,” and the root is the same as in Modern Engl. swear. Later w was lost in all words if it followed a consonant. Therefore, the plant name grundeswylige became groundsel, and boatswain turned into boson ~ bosun ~ bos’n. Today’s spelling reflects their pronunciation. But in place names ending in -wick, the old spelling prevailed (hence Warwick, pronounced Warrick), and the same, unfortunately, happened in answer. Old Frisian had onser centuries ago, but we won’t let the past go away.
Are Aryan and Iran related? Indeed, they are. The proper meaning of Aryan, compromised for all times by the Nazis, is “Indo-European” (it was a common term in older books on linguistics) or sometimes “Indo-Iranian” and has nothing to do with the “Nordic race.” The word goes back to Sanskrit aryas “noble,” applied earlier as a national name. Iran has the same root.
Are hall and salon related? No, they are not. S
