Sneakernet

Sneakernet is a term used to describe the physical transfer of electronic information, especially computer files.

The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to sneakers, as this way of moving information relies on a courier and removable media such as USB drive and compact discs.

Source: Osama bin Laden’s use of Technology, GeekwithLaptop

Big Society

“A political concept whereby a significant amount of responsibility for the running of a society’s services is devolved to local communities and volunteers.”

The phrase was coined by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said in July: “The big society ... is about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.” David Cameron spells out how his vision of a 'Big Society' could address Britain's problems.

David Cameron's big idea of the campaign is the "big society". This was launched with some fanfare at the end of March at an event in London, and made it into the Conservative manifesto. Three weeks later, it was being buried by Cameron's colleagues, one of whom said, "We need to turn Oliver Letwin's Hegelian dialectic into voter-friendly stuff." (Letwin, chairman of the Conservative Research Department, has a PhD in philosophy.)That shadow minister meant to dismiss the idea, but in doing so he revealed a finer appre­ciation of the philosophical antecedents of the "big society" than he might have wanted to admit to. For what Hegel called, in his Philosophy of Right, "civil society" - the stage "which intervenes between the family and the state" - looks very much like the network of voluntary organisations to which the Tories propose to "redistribute power" as they seek to weaken the power of Labour's big state.

Read also:

Do you speak Cameronese?

'Delivery's out, implementation'a in': The civil servant's essential guide to Davespeak

MPs told to mind their language

By Sean Curran

Parliamentary Correspondent, BBC News

Could the expenses scandal turn out to be good news for the English language?

A group of MPs has been having a bit of end-of-term fun by talking about the sort of language used by politicians and civil servants.
To help their plain English party go with a swing they invited along some star witnesses: Matthew Parris from The Times, The Guardian's political sketch-writer Simon Hoggart and Professor David Crystal, a linguistics expert from Bangor University.

Everyone agreed that a lot of political speeches are gobbledygook, full of words and phrases like "stakeholder", "multi-agency", "level playing field", "outsourcing" and "blue-sky thinking".
I could go on but that's part of the problem. Politicians do go on and on and on, inventing more and more gibberish.

David Crystal pointed out: "politicians could not be accused of lying if nobody understood what they had said".

Hung Parliament

Hung Parliament: lo scenario in cui, in un sistema bipolare come quello del Regno Unito, nessun partito ottiene la maggioranza assoluta per poter governare da solo.

In inglese, "hung parliament" è un’espressione idiomatica, tanto che molti dizionari inglesi la trattano come voce indipendente o comunque viene inserita sotto l’aggettivo hung e non è associata al participio passato del verbo hang. Il significato di hung infatti è metaforico e descrive una situazione di incertezza, “in sospeso”.
Molti media italiani non sembrano rendersene conto e probabilmente pensano a una collocazione (le singole parole che compongono l’espressione mantengono il significato che hanno al di fuori della collocazione stessa), tanto che la traduzione preferita è "parlamento appeso". Addirittura c’è chi parla anche di "parlamento impiccato", ignorando che il participio passato del verbo hang nell’accezione “impiccare” è hanged e non hung.
Più adeguata e' la scelta di chi ha mantenuto l’espressione inglese e l’ha spiegata con “parlamento paralizzato”, “parlamento bloccato” oppure con un più descrittivo “senza maggioranza assoluta”.

tratto da: Terminologia etc.

Bigots and nutters

published on: Guardian

Should politicians speak their mind, or mind how they speak?

Gordon Brown, who has apologised for calling a Rochdale woman 'bigoted'.
Whether or not this exciting and unpredictable election breaks the mould of British politics, it may be remembered as the campaign in which some leading politicians actually said what they thought: Tory Europhobes are in league with a bunch of nutters, and people who disparage immigrants are bigoted. I can't have been the only viewer to do a double take – did he really just say that? – when Nick Clegg used that particular N-word in the second TV debate. But after all the gibberish about "fairness" and empty rhetoric of the manifestos and party election broadcasts, it was refreshing to hear someone use language that had not been vetted into gaffe-proof blandness by the spin doctors. The excellent Tory blogger Iain Dale has pointed out that, as the party leaders had agreed with the charity Rethink not to use language likely to increase stigma against people with mental health problems, Clegg should have apologised. Dale added: "It may be a small thing to some people – and a case of political correctness gone mad for others – and of course people say many things in the heat of the moment, but a word of regret from Mr Clegg may be in order here. "Clegg doesn't need me to defend him – it would be inconsistent of me, given that the Guardian scrupulously avoids the use of offensive words such as "nutter" – but all the same: in an era when, if you say "isn't it a nice day?" to a politician, they will start evaluating how it will play in the tabloids before replying, he surely deserves some credit for being human, and not a permanently on-message android. The same argument might apply to Gordon Brown, had he not characteristically made a difficult situation worse today with his grovelling apologies over what, despite our best efforts to stamp out the automatic application of "gate" to anything remotely scandalous, some of my colleagues are calling "Bigotgate".In reply to the woman who asked "All these eastern Europeans – where are they coming from?" the prime minister might have settled for a simple reply: "Er … eastern Europe."Instead he let slip that he thought her a "bigoted woman". Given that she also said: "You can't say anything about immigrants," he may have had a point. Why shouldn't he speak his mind for a change? Better, surely, than following John Prescott's example and giving her a thump.

Little platoons

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society".

“Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation".
The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid.
The election campaign hasn’t been all surface effects. There’s been a bit of philosophy at times, too, as the Tories, borrowing from Burke and Hegel, have attempted to form a new kind of political language.


Modern politicians often sound as if they are speaking the same desiccated, drearily technocratic language. That has been true for much of this campaign, but, for all that, there have been some conceptual and rhetorical innovations, and even phrases that appear to be the freshly minted coinage of spin doctors and campaign managers turn out to be made of older metal than we might have expected.

published on: www.faqs.org