Snowcap

I was interested in Adam's comment on my blog a couple of days ago, about how there was a change in accents between where he lived before in Iowa and where he and Lisa live now, in Wisconsin. Accents are strange indicators. I get annoyed with people here for referring to my 'British' accent. Ok, my accent is British, but first and foremost it is bog standard RP English. If someone has a Welsh or Scottish accent then others don't remark on their British accent, so I feel that it is equivalent to ignoring the other parts of Britain and the UK to simply equate a British accent with an RP English one.

Irish accents are interesting, because most people can tell the difference between Northern and Southern Irish accents, and it is a very big difference. Fewer, I feel, can tell the difference between a Canadian accent and many US American ones. Sure we can all hear a 'Bronx' accent or a 'Southern' US one. And if everyone in the mid-west actually spoke like Frances McDormand in 'Fargo' then I think we'd all be able to pick that out too. Incidentally, I'd swear that the picture on her imdb page is really Juliet Stevenson.

But when you are accustomed to the accents of a country or region you can really narrow down where someone is from to a small area, just as Adam was saying. When I first went to Portsmouth, I was astonished that there was such a strong accent in the city. It has a west country sound to it. And yet if you even go across the bridge to the suburbs, the accent is rarer and beginning to fade, and go past Bedhampton and it's gone.

I can understand the mechanism by which different accents develop, that doesn't seem too onerous, and yet I like to think that there's something about the geography of a place that holds an accent. As though over the years, a place gets soaked, steeped in the accent of the people who live there so that, even if they all went away and then new ones came in, the ground would give the accent back to the people. Too romantic, too fanciful? You'll be telling me next that Ents aren't real. No, seriously, please don't tell me that.

Away, far away from the subject of how people speak is how they die. In today's Guardian is a piece written by a man who helped his wife to kill herself. When I used to teach Philosophy A-Level, as part of the Ethics module, we would discuss some applied moral questions. I noticed over the time that there was less discussion. At first when we would talk about abortion and euthanasia, people would argue. But I taught this subject for twelve years and towards the end, no-one, at least no-one studying the subject to that level, was expressing views against either.
I believe and firmly hope, that Euthanasia will become legal. As the man in this article says, it causes more distress and obviously expense, for a family to have to go to Switzerland to do what they need to do. And compared with the earlier attempt when his wife self-medicated and it just didn't work and caused more suffering, to be able to do this in consultation with an expert is so much more civilised.
This was of course, a clear-cut case, they were no grey areas, no moments of indecision on the part of the man's wife, but to argue that people could be coerced into euthanasia is not an argument against it, it is an argument for having it discussed and debated and clarified to the n-th degree by our top minds. And then to have that debate on-going while we work with the system.

I know I have mentioned the notion of men who are feminists before on the blog and had some quite strong reactions, but I bring it up again because I feel that men who do consider themselves feminists are vital to the cause. If it remains a fight purely for women, then it is divisive. Of course the point of equality isn't to make everyone the same, it is to give everyone the same rights and whenever there are rights there are responsibilities.
Men have daughters, men have sisters, men have mothers and men have partners some of whom are women. And men have friends who are women. There is something so deeply, deeply flawed about a man who doesn't think that women should have the same rights as them. There is something scary about a man who still makes jokes about women being inferior. This is the stuff for psychiatry to deal with. And unless you have people 'on the inside', challenging stereotypes, whether put as jokes or real opinions, the battle will take oh so much longer.
It scares me when the opinion is expressed, 'The US isn't yet ready for a woman President,' because it begs one big old well-defined question, 'WHY?'

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin was working with a colleague, an engineer as he is, who said to him that as she was a woman, she could never be as good at her job as a man. She is not Canadian by birth. I think his immediate and instinctual reaction of basically, 'that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life,' whilst it may not have broken down thirty plus years of brain-washing, was certainly the best possible start to breaking down that barrier, because an inner barrier must be what years of tosh like that has created within this woman.

How much sheer bloody talent and skill is lost to any society who devalues half its population ? And how much richness is gained by getting the best from everyone? Oops, sorry, I nearly bumped into Plato again, and I know how I failed to endear him to anyone before. Top banana Plato, at least he fought against the ingrained misogyny of his time. Good man.