Linguistic time journey, has struggle stopped working, why smoking stopped being cool, Samuel Johnson on podcasts, South Korean child growth

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital!

The final winter version of the e-newsletter. I’ve spent the previous couple of months working tougher than I’ve ever labored in my life on ending the book. Now it’s all nearly over and the solar is (tentatively) popping out from behind the clouds. I really feel I’m returning blinking into the sunshine.

How far again in time are you able to perceive English?
This piece travels back in time through the history of the English language at the rate of one paragraph per century. So the primary paragraph is within the English of 2000 and the subsequent within the of 1900 and the subsequent within the English of 1800 and so on till you get to this within the language 1100:

And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on rent, and heo ƿæs ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿælfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah hƿæþere rent andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger.

Most readers lose monitor between 1300 and 1200:

Somewhere on this part — and in case you’re like most readers, it occurred round 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up so far, comprehension felt prefer it was dropping step by step, however now it’s fallen off a cliff. In one part, you would get by by squinting and guessing; within the subsequent you have been completely misplaced. You have hit the wall.⁴

There are two causes for this. The first is vocabulary. As you progress backwards in time, the French and Latin loanwords that make up an unlimited proportion of the Modern English vocabulary develop fewer and fewer. When you pass 1250, they drop off nearly altogether. Where a contemporary author would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era author should say that he suffered pinunge as a substitute.⁵

The farther again you go, the extra the acquainted Latinate layer of English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core beneath: a language that appears to trendy eyes extra like German or Icelandic than something we’d name English.

South Korea child bump
The birth rate has ticked up in South Korea (famous for its very low birth rate) for the second year in a row. But there are nonetheless solely a tiny variety of infants being born relative to the scale of the nation:

Korea’s whole fertility charge — the common variety of kids a lady is anticipated to have over her lifetime — climbed to 0.8 final yr, up from 0.75 in 2024 and an all-time low of 0.72 in 2023, official knowledge launched on Wednesday confirmed. The determine was higher than even the federal government’s most optimistic projections for 2025 however stays far beneath the two.1 threshold that demographers take into account obligatory to keep up a secure inhabitants, absent web immigration. Births climbed in 2025 to 254,500, up 6.8 per cent from the yr earlier than and the very best determine since 2021.

Is struggle over?
This is such an interesting piece Janan Ganesh in the FT arguing that land struggle is not efficient. It’s actually fairly mad to me what number of good column concepts he always has. He argues that the lesson of the fifty years is that land wars are usually inconclusive and ineffective. This might be partly due to Nuclear proliferation means no state is willingness to go all-out in a struggle. Technologies like drones additionally imply that even small and poor combatants can mission energy very successfully:

When did a serious state final unambiguously win a land struggle on a major scale? Desert Storm in 1991, maybe, however it was settled to a fantastic extent from the air. The Iran-Iraq struggle was inconclusive. The Soviets misplaced in Afghanistan earlier than the west did. France gave up on Operation Barkhane, its counterinsurgent mission within the Sahel, in 2022. You are left to quote Russia’s invasion of Georgia (inhabitants 4.4mn on the time), the still-evolving state of affairs in Gaza and the Falklands struggle, which occurred nearer to the second world struggle than to the current.

The world appears to be residing by way of a pattern that, if it holds, might scarcely be extra profound: the growing ineffectiveness of struggle. There is a sample of army failure, or a minimum of frustration, which covers democratic aggressors and autocratic ones, wars near residence and wars on distant continents, wars in opposition to different sovereign states and wars in opposition to irregular forces. Vietnam was once the reference level for the army humbling of a serious energy. It was such a singular shock as to tell a technology of somewhat good films and even a “syndrome”. Now it appears unexceptional.

James Wood on George Steiner
This is one of the greatest hatchet jobs of all time: James Wood takes down the pretentiousness of George Steiner. I’ve a obscure half-feeling I’ve learn it someplace earlier than however I noticed it pop up on Substack lately. It’s simply a tremendous piece of writing. How is that this for a gap paragraph:

George Steiner’s prose is a exceptional substance; it’s the sweat of a statue that needs to be a monument. Readers of his essays in The New Yorker can be acquainted with that prose’s laborious imprecisions and melodramas; the platoon-like massing of its adjectives, its cathedral hush across the nice works. Nabokov as soon as complained that one in every of Steiner’s essays was “built on solid abstractions and opaque generalisations”; however issues are worse than that, as this new ebook of essays exhibits.

Now that I’ve a ebook popping out I discover myself more and more morally against hatchet jobs. But I do suppose a extremely unsparing hatchet job (particularly one by James Wood) can educate you a large number about writing. Often excessive un-generosity can get at a reality about writing it is arduous to precise in any other case. I feel hostile biographies are someday the very best and most revealing. It’s for that reason I like Andrew Motion on Philip Larkin and Anne Stevenson on Sylvia Plath (each clearly controversial books in their very own methods).

Ed West in America and Ukraine
I like Ed West’s journey writing — he’s all the time very sharp on cultural variations. Here he is on America. I agree with him that going to America makes you realise how European you’re. He’s additionally very attention-grabbing on how residing in a rustic that’s simply so massive impacts the best way Americans behave:

The nation’s huge measurement additionally permits individuals to separate themselves from individuals whose worldview they disagree with, one other driver of intolerance, whereas the primary perform of British life – something reflected in our comedy – is the necessity to hold quiet about how a lot you possibly can’t stand everybody round you. Our nation is way too densely populated to do in any other case; the concept of promoting your political views in your automotive goes in opposition to that unstated social rule, though it’s cracking within the face of American affect.

He’s also been in Ukraine and summons the strangeness of the ambiance of being in a contemporary nation that’s at struggle:

Certain issues perform as regular. Our nearest grocery store was very nicely stocked, fancy even, like a Waitrose or a type of posh regional supermarkets like Booths. Tucker could be very impressed. But the corridors of the procuring centre by which it sits are all darkish, as are most buildings.

Other elements of life aren’t any totally different to western cities. On one event I used to be strolling again from the station, alongside a kind of city A-road the place individuals drive at loopy speeds, and noticed an Uber supply driver struggling up a hill on his moped by way of blankets of snow. This is why neoliberalism will win – as a result of we love comfort greater than they love demise.

The secret historical past of smoking
Will Storr may be very attention-grabbing on the psychology of social standing. Here is on how smoking became low status. He argues that smoking shedding its social cachet has been way more highly effective to its decline than warnings about illness and demise. The packages ought to have footage of loners on them not diseased organs:

For years, campaigners and legislators tried to sort out the big downside of smoking with appeals to survival. Despite analysis that discovered individuals have been extra prone to stop when advised it causes others to ‘reel back in disgust from the smoker’s putrid odour’ than when studying about its well being impacts, they coated packets with warnings about habit and demise and images of diseased organs. They didn’t perceive what the unbelievable persistence of individuals taking over smoking was clearly telling them: that people within the story-world can simply worth id greater than life. The strategy to make it cease, then, was to not scare individuals about dying, however to vary the story smoking advised by dismantling its capability to offer standing.

Are dragons actual?
This is a great piece by Katherine Dee on the conspiracy theories across the unfold of AI generated pictures of dragons and different legendary creatures. She writes:

TikTok is flooded with dragon sighting movies, for instance—dragons within the clouds, AI-generated dragons, dragons lurking on the blurry edges of pictures—and the individuals posting them aren’t joking or grifting. Same goes for the mermaid movies that flow into each few months. Scroll by way of the feedback and also you’ll discover hundreds of people that do imagine it. Plus, tens of thousands and thousands of Americans are younger earth creationists, which, sure, features a perception in what we’d ordinarily take into account “cryptids.” But the feel of perception, the best way the fabric circulates, the texture of it, has additionally modified.

Dee says a number of these “conspiracies” have an odd mixture of believing/not believing about them. People don’t suppose this stuff are “literally true, but it’s a type of true, a truth that a lot of people are increasingly willing to accept”.

I keep in mind anyone as soon as telling me a few research of perception in hunter gatherer tribes which apparently has this identical high quality of ambiguity. It’s fairly attainable to suppose the shaman is a little bit of a fraud but in addition suppose nicely, possibly he’s onto one thing.

I feel there’s an argument that the understanding we are likely to affiliate with “belief” is a top quality of a written tradition — that is an argument lots of people have made about printing. The thought is print made info “hard”. Religions of the ebook are usually extra dogmatic than conventional polytheisms. Perhaps this bizarre perception/unbelief is a symptom of post-literacy. Facts are getting gentle once more. But then maybe I simply suppose every part is a symptom of post-literacy.

Samuel Johnson on podcasts
Evidence that Dr Johnson would have disapproved of podcasts from Boswell’s life:

[Johnson] then took event to enlarge on the benefits of studying, and combated the idle superficial notion, that data sufficient could also be acquired in dialog. ‘The basis (mentioned he,) have to be laid by studying. General rules have to be had from books . . . In dialog you by no means get a system . . . The components of a reality, which a person will get thus, are at such a distance from one another that he by no means attains to a full view.’

Until subsequent week!

James