Tuesday 7 July 2015

Not Enough Information

Naming the nation-state of any EU person quoted in the news would be enormously helpful.  Then it's easier to understand where they're coming from.  At the moment readers are having to guess, from the name, or be bothered to google the speaker, to find out who they are.  If the national press can give the age, and house-value of everyone mentioned in the news so that we're all oriented, failing to provide the nationality of an EU speaker seems part of an orchestrated 'approach' to presenting the official, EU progressive stance.

Identifying the Greeks is relatively easy, with their extraordinarily beautiful names, but Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese (to name the larger nation-states with those kinds of surnames) are difficult, and the Baltics, the Balkans, eastern European nations, the Irish and Scottish names all  present irritating  effort to work out who these people are.  It isn't helpful to be told that Merkel is  German - we know that - and at a pinch we can probably manage Holland not being Dutch; but the unspeakable (unspellable?) real Dutchman who sounds like a German, the bastard from the Baltic who keeps creeping to powerful northern European countries' leaders and condemning Greece's 'attitude',  most of the Austro-Hungarians who can sound anything from Venetian to Russian?

Readers need name, gender (given or adopted), age, nationality and (where appropriate) where you were  and what were you doing before 1989, or 1956, or 1945.  The value and whereabouts of main (or highest value) residence would be interesting too.

Thank you.

2 comments:

lilith said...

Excellent post. OT How much do we LOVE Federer?

hatfield girl said...

Well, if we like muscular, forceful (and skilled) play it was always Kim, (or Nadal if we prefer) not the grimacing, clumsy scary Scot. But Federer is forever (except for Pat Rafter though).