I have long realized that I will never understand the British class system, with its social and educational corollaries, any more than I will understand cricket, and this was driven home to me by Daisy Hildyard’s story “Revision” (archived) in last week’s New Yorker. My problems begin with the very title, which comes up in the story when Petra barges in on the protagonist, Gabriel, who is too distracted to pay close attention to her self-absorbed chatter:
His eyes went to his laptop screen.
Petra followed his gaze. “How is your revision going?”
“Fine,” he said. “Great.”
There was a long silence that didn’t seem to bother her. She drank deeply, then sighed comfortably, like a tired pet, and settled her back against the wall.
“Actually, it’s a disaster,” he said. “I know I’m close to doing well, but I have this one paper on medieval literature that I just don’t get. I can’t get a first if I don’t do well in that paper.”
I had a feeling that the word was used differently across the pond, and the OED (entry revised 2010) told me the following:
I.3. Education. The action or process of going over a subject or work already learnt or done with the aim of reinforcing it, typically in preparation for an examination; an instance of this.
Not in North American use: cf. review n. I.8.
So it’s “studying for exams,” but with extra pressure? I know things are very different at Oxford than at American educational institutions, but despite having read Anthony Powell and watched every episode of Inspector Morse and Endeavour, I only have a hazy idea of how it works.
However, that’s not what drove me to post. Here’s the passage that requires explication:
Gabriel walked around the college, searching for June in the library, and then the common room, and then the canteen, and she was there, sitting alone at a long-top table with a paper cup of coffee, a library book, and an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits. Gabriel sat wordlessly beside her. June closed the book, opened the biscuits, and offered them to him; he took one and placed it on the table in front of him. She tapped the book cover, on which there was an image of James Joyce leaning on his cane. “Why do all the male critics lose their minds about the fact that Molly’s speech gives voice to the common woman, when in fact she is an avatar of Joyce’s barely literate wife, scripted by Joyce?”
This was not exactly a question. June spoke quietly and thoughtfully, staring out into the vacant dining hall before them, then looked sideways—seemingly registering Gabriel’s presence for the first time—and shook her head. “Never mind. You won’t get it.”
Gabriel picked up the biscuit and ate it slowly so that he did not need to reply. June often acted as if he had no sense of politics or identity or the bitter reality beyond the college walls, to which the undergraduates occasionally, with vague reverence, referred. In tutorials, she spoke over and around him, addressing their supervisor directly whenever matters of race, class, or gender, politics or justice, arose—which they did, when June was speaking. The punch line was that June herself had gone to private school. This joke was one that Gabriel had heard on repeat through the past three years, and it didn’t make him laugh anymore.
I know that “public school” in the UK is what we Yanks call “private school,” but I have no idea what “private school” implies, or why June’s having gone to private school is a joke. Any help gratefully etc.
The implication is just that June herself has had a privileged education, so her prolier-than-thou airs are unjustified.
UK private schools are typically very expensive, and only a fairly small proportion of children go there. The products of such schools have a vastly better chance of getting to Cambridge or Oxford. “Private school” in the UK suggests such an elite establishment, not a religious school, still less anything smacking of home-schooling (regarded here as deeply weird and unBritish.)
Oxbridge admissions tutors are occasionally accused by right-wingers of discriminating against candidates from private schools. This is (in a sense) actually true: the remit of admissions tutors is to select the candidates with the best academic prospects, and they (being neither fools nor ill-informed) know that the initial academic advantage of private-school hothouse products decays after their first year as undergraduates. Someone with equivalent school grades from a state (i.e. non-private) school is likely (all things being equal) to have greater potential in the longer run. Admissions tutors know this and make their decisions accordingly, though it still doesn’t even the balance.
It’s confusing for Brits too, especially those of us who only went to comps. More or less:
A private school is a school you pay to attend. It’s a private business.
Public schools are older. You still pay to attend, but unlike other schools of the the era, were open to all: that’s how they were public. (I’d guess the comparison is to schools run by churches or guilds, or charity schools for local communities).
A grammar is a selective school, which you need to pass an exam at 11 years old to attend. There are some state funded ones left.
A comp, or comprehensive, is what you’d call a public school: a local school, with no fees or selection, open to all, and paid for by local and central government.
That was the case in the 80s, anyway. Now there are also ‘academies’, run by private businesses, that compete with comprehensives.
—
Edit. And like everything here, class comes into it. Almost the entire ruling class and traditional upper class attend public schools.
The professional middle classes get educated at private schools, grammar schools, and selective academies.
The lower classes go to comps.
“Revision” in this sense is just normal UKanian for working for an exam after the formal teaching has finished. It’s not anything to do with Oxford in particular, or indeed with universities. You revise for school exams too. It doesn’t imply any more pressure than is entailed by the very nature of the situation; it’s quite neutral.
As so often, it never occurred to me that Americans don’t say that.
I’ve (as an American who may be missing things) been given the impression, possibly false but supported by wikipedia, that English public schools are, while private, a subset of all private schools in that other private schools might restricts admissions to, for example, a certain geographic area, while the public schools were nominally open to any student who wished to pay the fees and so forth. Of course, in practice, the public schools are elite so good luck getting in if you’re not elite, so to speak, but I suppose there can be other elite schools which don’t fill the ‘public school’ category intended.
David,
Hat‘s confusion is normal for Americans. A US “public school” = British “state school”. So we tend to think that US “private school” = British “public school”. However a US “private school” could be a British public, private or independent school. My understanding is that a British Public School really only means the very old elite schools like Eton and Harrow, not any private school.
AbbeylandsAlum: Thanks very much, that’s possibly the most concisely enlightening thing I’ve read on the subject! Now we’ll see how long I can remember it…
“Private school” in older UK usage actually meant what we hip young things now call a Prep School (i.e. a fee-paying private school for 5-11 year olds meant to get them into a Public School.)
I agree that “Public School” does suggest only an older subset of UK private schools. It wouldn’t include (for example) my own alma mater, which was only founded in 1124, and has (moreover) the overwhelming handicap of being in Scotland. Scots are not quite the thing.
The term actually has a quite specific history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Schools_Act_1868
Thank you!
I could happily go on, rant even, about the British education system at length. But in terms of the snobbery and humour of that excerpt, the joke is she is emphasising her progressive values and insights, but comes from a background of monied privilege.
But among the true elite, the public school educated Etonians, Harrovians, and Wykehamists studying PPE at Oxford, she would be treated with equal contempt. My dim recollection is that it’s those elites who came up with the insult NARG, not a real gentleman, but the internet tells me otherwise.
I knew a Wykehamist who was a L1 Welsh speaker once. He was a neurosurgeon*, though. So it all balances out in the end.
* They’re like orthopaedic surgeons, but with more self-esteem. If you can imagine it.
“Revising for exams” strikes me as a very common and normal expression on the European continent, used by many non-native English speakers probably regardless of what English variety their school courses were based on – or indeed by native US English speakers like myself who have been here for a long time.
I found AbbeylandsAlum’s post enlightening too. I was a grammar school boy in the pre-comprehensive era, when everyone took the 11+ exam; if you passed you went to a grammar school; if you failed you went to a secondary-modern. When comprehensive schools arrived (in time for my youngest brother), the division into sheep and goats was done away with.
I didn’t know that grammar schools of that sort still existed. Does it depend which part of the country you live in?
In addition, I was under the impression that public schools and private schools were the same thing, but if I understand correctly, the entrance requirements for a public school are (a) pass our exam, and (b) show us the money, whereas private schools dispense with the first step. Is that how it works?
Scotland, of course, is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
I think the issue here is that Americans like hat who are well aware that “public school” in the UK context means the very opposite of “public school” in AmEng are understandably taken aback when “private school” in the UK context means very much the same thing as :”private school” in AmEng. It’s a bait-and-switch of some sort.
The Elvis Costello song titled “Secondary Modern” is not really of the first rank of his work but it dates from the era (1980 specifically) when he was still so prolific and talented that even the rapidly-tossed-off second- and third-tier subsets of his oeuvre are really very very good.
From Perspective AI
Public schools in the UK are indeed a subset of private schools, which can be confusing given the terminology. Here’s a closer look at this relationship:
Public Schools as Elite Private Institutions
Public schools in the UK are actually among the most prestigious and exclusive private educational institutions. Despite their name, they are not public in the sense of being government-funded or open to all. Instead, they are fee-paying schools with a long and distinguished history5
. Key Characteristics:
They charge tuition fees, like other private schools
They are more selective in their admissions process
They often have a longer history and stronger traditions
They are strongly associated with the upper classes
Historical Context
The term “public school” in the UK has its roots in the 18th century. It became formalized with the Public Schools Act 1868, which investigated and reformed seven of the most prestigious schools of the time, including Eton, Harrow, and Rugby6
.
Distinction from Other Private Schools
While all public schools are private, not all private schools are public schools. The main differences lie in:
Prestige and History: Public schools are typically older and more renowned.
Selectivity: They often have more rigorous admission processes.
Governance: Many public schools are members of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, a distinction not all private schools share4
.
Confusion with Terminology
The term “public school” can be misleading, especially for those outside the UK:
In many countries, including the US, “public school” refers to government-funded schools.
In the UK, government-funded schools are called “state schools.”
The term “public” in this context refers to these schools being open to the public (as opposed to being restricted to a particular group), provided they can pay the fees6
.
Understanding this distinction is crucial when navigating the UK education system, as public schools represent a specific, elite subset within the broader category of private education.
I read some of the replies, above, to my British wife and asked for comments.
She mostly agreed with AbbeylandsAlum, but then started fulminating about
how a test at age 11 essentially condemned loads of kids to limited educational
options.
And then, of course, came the discussion of A levels and O levels and the class system
and I had to short circuit the diatribe with a dumb Merikan remark.
LH, it may help to think of revise as the English equivalent of repasar en español.
“Revision” in this sense is just normal UKanian for working for an exam after the formal teaching has finished. It’s not anything to do with Oxford in particular, or indeed with universities. You revise for school exams too. It doesn’t imply any more pressure than is entailed by the very nature of the situation; it’s quite neutral.
As so often, it never occurred to me that Americans don’t say that.
We study for exams. Revise would be… honestly, in a school context it would sound like somebody who likes to show off their vocabulary is telling you that you need to rewrite an essay.
That was the case in the 80s, anyway. Now there are also ‘academies’, run by private businesses, that compete with comprehensives.
Sounds like US Charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded and do not have the results they like to claim.
I hear the “study” sense of revise from foreign students all the time. My impression is that it is especially common among students from South Asia, whose English language instruction had a particularly British slant.
My idea of what a “public school” was wasn’t quite right either.
There’s always the legendary Ben Carson.
A nice illustration of two transatlantic differences:
1) UK is something to do with = US has something to do with (as in German and French; I suspect reanalysis after h-dropping in the UK)
2) university is a subset of school in the US but not elsewhere.
fulminating about how a test at age 11 essentially condemned loads of kids to limited educational options
Very true. It was always said (note the deliberate use of the passive voice) that if you went to a secondary modern and did better than expected, you could apply to be admitted to the grammar school. In principle, yes. In practice, never. Not to my knowledge, anyway.
In my town, the grammar school was just down the road from the secondary modern. I had to bike past, in my uniform, on the way there and back home. The two classes were even then in a state of cold war — sneering, jeering, occasional throwing of stones. It was a great system.
I didn’t discover until many years later that the 11+ was essentially an IQ test of the old Stanford-Binet design. We didn’t get a numerical score, though, just pass/fail.
Here, in the western U.S., I’ve never met anyone who went to a prep school, a thing which I hear exists on the East Coast. They are as exotic to me as English public schools.
Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language once confused her students by using “revision” in the not-specifically-British sense: “Earlier today, I left a message on a course website, instructing students to bring to the next session any questions they have about (among other things) ‘essay writing/revision’. This set off a panic in some that there might be an exam that they hadn’t yet known about.”
Not in North American use
It’s also not very old in British use: OED1 (1908) didn’t include this sense, so it must not have been very prominent yet, although the 2010 revision did find a couple of 19th-century examples. It was added in the 1982 Supplement, which neglected to make a note about region — they were less diligent about that in those days, and they still slip up sometimes, e.g. they have no regional label on “take a decision”.
you went to a secondary modern and did better than expected, you could apply to be admitted to the grammar school. In principle, yes. In practice, never. Not to my knowledge, anyway
I actually knew someone who did do this. Pretty exceptional, though, I agree.
I never sat the eleven-plus. My younger brother, for reasons I can no longer remember, did so (successfully) twice. Thus the cosmic balance was preserved.
I can remember BrE “revise” because it’s a doublet of “review”.
We don’t sit tests in America. My students don’t write tests either; I do that.
Which brings us to the paper that Gabriel didn’t get. That’s some kind of test, not an essay that the students write
in advancethe night before, right?@Y: What’s your definition of a prep school? There seem to be selective private schools on the West Coast–heck, there’s at least one in New Mexico. Are you restricting it to boarding schools?
I was confused by the Doomed Heroine in the so-bad-it’s-terrible movie Love Story continually calling her not-terminal yet terminally-boring boyfriend “preppy.” In UK terms, this would have implied an extremely age-inappropriate relationship, though that could hardly have made it any worse, really. In fact, it might have made the film rather less saccharine …
JF: Don’t ask me! They are mythical creatures. I understand the boys wear polo shirts (something having to with horses? Or alligators?)
There are some long-established boarding schools of more or less the New-England-prep-school genre in California, although they are admittedly much thinner on the ground out there, esp. proportionate to population. I had a college classmate who had attended this posh place in Pebble Beach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_School. Although he was not a boarder but one of the day students, living as he did in nearby and less-posh Salinas.
am i right in my vague-as-to-source memory that the “public” in british “public school” was originally meant to mark the distinction from the kind of at-home education that the aristocracy generally used – “private” in the sense of “personal/household” – and so roughly parallel to the “public” in “public house”?
I got called “preppy boy” for a while in college, because I had a blue textured-weave jacket. It didn’t look like any private school blazer I’ve ever seen though. And particularly annoying was that one of the people who called me that was an actual preppy.
@rozele:
Yes, exactly. This is not “public” as an antonym of “private” as in “enterprise.” The opposite of that kind of “private” is “state”, not “public.”
“Privately educated” was essentially Classical Brit for “home schooled.” With governesses; probably Jane Eyre. Nice young ladies were privately educated. Rough boys (even of good family) could be publically educated.
What kind of schooling did posh boys receive before they were old enough for public school? E. R. Eddison and Arthur Ransome were privately educated together, before they were shipped off to Eton and Rugby. C. S. Lewis was also privately tutored before his horrible years at the Wynyard school, and J. R. R. Tolkien was homeschooled by his mother up until her death.
In Jane Eyre, Rochester intends to ship his ward Adèle off to school when things become romantic between her guardian and her governess. I thought that was pretty cold, although it subsequently turns out to be a necessity, after Jane departs, the house burns down, and Rochester goes blind.
What kind of schooling did posh boys receive before they were old enough for public school?
That would be a prep school, the age profile (7–12) being much younger than an American prep school.
UK public schools were till recently all-boys boarding schools; “independent school” is a modern term for a somewhat broader subset of private school. The neologism strikes me as attempting to avoid the elitism of the older label, plus any doubt as to whether a given school qualifies; the “independent schools” as a lobby group are taken seriously in a way the hopelessly toffish “public schools” no longer could.
AbbeylandsAlum, “The professional middle classes get educated at private schools, grammar schools, and selective academies. The lower classes go to comps.” is completely wrong in my experience.
There are very few grammar schools left, and none at all in Oxfordshire, where I live. They were abolished long ago by all-party consensus. So there are no ‘comps’, all state schools are just secondary schools.
All of the professional middle class parents that I know sent their children to the local secondary school. When you are early in your career, with a mortgage, it would be cripplingly expensive to do anything else unless you had rich parents.
These replies make private schools sound like “safety schools” — very expensive places for rich kids who aren’t smart enough for public schools? But that would seem to characterize June differently than the narrative.
@ David L:
Same here: I went to a comprehensive in the 1980s, and we used to fight (obviously) the kids who went to a Catholic school nearby.
@chuchuflete I read some of the replies, above, to my British wife and asked for comments.
She mostly agreed with AbbeylandsAlum, but then started fulminating about how a test at age 11 essentially condemned loads of kids to limited educational options.
This Brit (‘passed’ the 11-plus, went to grammar school then not-Oxbridge) would have fulminated similarly.
I’d also point out the condemning bright-but-not-academic kids who hated every minute at grammar school and left at the first opportunity with poor results that didn’t reflect their intellect but rather how they didn’t fit the class system. (They went on to either a life of crime or Real Estate Agent — same-same, having lost all opportunity for engineering.)
I actually knew someone who did do this. [secondary modern and did better than expected, you could apply to be admitted to the grammar school] Pretty exceptional, though, I agree.
I know someone too. The grammar school was already half a year ahead on the syllabus; then for subjects that build on prior material (like maths) there was a huge hole in their learning; so their ‘O’ level results were worse than if they’d stayed at secondary modern.
I failed the 11+ and was sent to a comprehensive school. There was no mention of transferring to a grammar school if one did well, so sadly my talent for staring out of the window went unrewarded.
My only experience of a grammar school was when I found myself in an inter-school quiz team. The afternoon foray into the world of the better educated was cut short when our team’s followers wrecked the host school’s lavatories. The inconveniences of class war, yer cud say.
@c baker, yes, academies and charter schools are very similar. Academies take schools out of local control. They’re not quite like US segregation academies (race works differently here, for one thing) but class does perhaps play a part in securing a place in one, and that indirectly links to race.
@jon, we should both take pride in our heritage of debating exactly where the lines of class lie. I was recollecting the broad situation 40 years ago. You’re right, with changes in property prices even many middle class families can’t afford private schools. And I think it is just Kent, perhaps, that still has grammars. But there’s still a clear hierarchy.
https://youtu.be/1E8mv6s6_fU?si=0u0oGu0_LoCkfIaj
@ryan, class sizes get smaller and facilities better the more you pay. Not always as much a safe option as you might think. In order to maintain high average grades, private, academy and selective schools will dissuade/bully kids out of taking exams if they aren’t going to get top marks.
On revision, I had wondered if it had something to do with the old medieval classical education, with its emphasis on memorising great chunks of classical texts. And that this wasn’t the case in the States, where the education system has more modern roots. ‘Revise’ suggests that memorising to me, while ‘study’, to me, includes reading lots of texts and synthesising your own ideas.
But that doesn’t make sense if @ktschwarz is right that it only dates back 100 years or so.
@rozele, the public in ‘public house’ means a room, traditionally in the ground floor of the publican’s home, that is open to all. So yes, a similar meaning.
In a pub, there would once have been snugs, public bars, saloons, and lounges, and maybe more. Class again comes into which one you would drink in, and there’s a substantial dash of misogyny too: unaccompanied women, or those waiting to help their drunken husbands home, would be expected to hide in the snug, and couples wouldn’t drink in the public bar, but only eat in the saloon.
I am reminded of the following excerpt from a lengthy piece written in late ’77 by the late Lester Bangs (1948-1982) after the record label had flown him from NY over to the UK to spend time with their hot new property the Clash:
‘Right now, while we’re on the subject of politics. I would like to make a couple of things perfectly clear:
1. I do not know shit about the English class system.
2. I don’t care shit about the English class system.
‘I’ve heard about it, understand. I’ve heard it has something to do with why Rod Stewart now makes music for housewives, and why [Pete] Townshend is so screwed up. I guess it also has something to do with another NME writer sneering to me “Joe Strummer had a fucking middle class education, man!” I surmise further that this is supposed to indicate that he isn’t worth a shit, and that his songs are all fake street-graffiti. Which is fine by me: Joe Strummer is a fake. That only puts him in there with Dylan and Jagger and Townshend and most of the other great rock song writers, because almost all of them in one way or another were fakes. Townshend had a middle-class education.* Lou Reed went to Syracuse University before matriculating to the sidewalks of New York. Dylan faked his whole career; the only difference was that he used to be good at it and now he sucks.’
*Per wikipedia, Townsend and most but not all of his bandmates-to-be went to Acton County Grammar School, which subsequently became a comprehensive in 1967 after political winds had shifted. The future Joe Strummer, by contrast, was a boarder at the rather posher City of London Freemen’s School, whose wikipedia article (perhaps euphemistically?) does not use the label “public school” but instead variously calls it an “independent school” and “a co-educational private school for day and boarding pupils.” Bangs himself had attended El Cajon Valley High School, a perfectly normal American public school near San Diego.
In the U.S. “independent school” is in my experience generally a euphemism for a subset of private schools, which are distinguished from the wider range of such schools by being: (a) expensive; and (b) either (i) having no religious affiliation or (ii) one which has become nominal with the passage of time and is definitely not non-Protestant. Independent of both the local public-school bureaucracy and the Vatican (or even some Protestant form of more pervasively sectarian/clerical oversight).
AnneylandsAlum, I haven’t seen evidence that revision reflects a difference in end of term preparation, As Jerry Friedman alluded, Americans use review for your meaning of revise.
Mick Jagger was at LSE. I know someone from the year below him at LSE who remembers seeing him in the library a lot (“he had a very distinctive appearance”), though he didn’t know him personally (he did know his younger sister.)
My then-girlfriend got into Cambridge from the Bulgarian “National School for Ancient Languages and Cultures” (NGDEK) which is a very weird pseudo-elide communist-era-founded school — which none the less taught the classics quite well — Latin, Ancient Greek and Old Bulgarian. I was considering attending myself — I was friends with people attending it and some of the teachers at the time (still am), but their STEM curriculum was not up to par.
JWB: I still remember that Lester Bangs piece after all these years.
Of course, etymologically/derivationally revise and the American equivalent review are doing the same thing (and are near-doublets).
Actually, what these insufficiently-proletarian-background stories for UK pop stars truly reveal is that in a previous era, it was not at all unusual for people of working-class origin to become middle class by “bettering themselves.”* This is now becoming less and less possible, as public funding once earmarked for libraries, adult education and the like is now held to be more usefully spent in buying superyachts for the CEOs of outsourcing companies and asset-stripped once-public utilities.
* Story of my own family. I have four quarterings of sheep-farmers and coal miners, myself. I have no eminent forebears since Charlemagne. Me and Big Chaz, and that’s it.
How is a “long-top table” different from a long table?
Also, what kind of lunatic takes a cookie and puts it directly on the surface of a table in a public place, rather than just holding it until they’ve finished eating it (assuming there’s no plate or napkin available)?
Surely at Oxford all the long-top tables are immaculately clean.
Interestingly, when I google [“long-top table” Oxford] I get the Hildyard story and this post (along with a bunch of crap Google is promoting).
My mother used to call revising for exams ‘swotting’, but my generation didn’t.
Some previous discussion of British art schools, Lester Bangs, and the social mobility of punk rockers.
My mother used to call revising for exams ‘swotting’, but my generation didn’t.
My generation—born in the late 1940s—in the U.S. called it cramming.
In the UK, “swotting” need not imply any particular upcoming examinations. It’s just a vaguely derogatory word for “studying.” Hence the loathsome public-school-produced de Pfeffel’s description of the slightly less loathsome public-school-produced Cameron as a “girly swot.”
“Cramming” does imply exams, and also that the activity is pretty strenuous (perhaps with an implication that the revising should actually have started somewhat sooner.)
Same meaning of “cramming” for my American generation (born in the early 1960s), and I’d change “perhaps” to “probably”. I believe I’ve heard my students use it.
in an earlier generation, Stalky & Co. didn’t think much of “crammers’ pups”.
I am apparently repeating my anecdotes and quotations as I age, but I am pleased that Brett linked to my 2019 comment that I had forgotten so that I could see that it had brought enjoyment to the much-missed AJP Crown.
A long-top table is considerably longer than it is deep, say, three meters by a quarter meter.
https://www.google.com/search?q=long-top+table&client=firefox-b-1-e&sca_esv=1d501c5bd732877f&biw=861&bih=674&sxsrf=ADLYWIKm7Kaj-TFuRoQ_df7uo1XmaGLk9A%3A1735504119684&ei=97BxZ-m7KfiHptQPlt7RqQ0&ved=0ahUKEwipk73U6M2KAxX4g4kEHRZvNNUQ4dUDCA8&oq=long-top+table&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiDmxvbmctdG9wIHRhYmxlMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHMgoQABiwAxjWBBhHSNNIUABYAHABeAGQAQCYAQCgAQCqAQC4AQzIAQCYAgGgAhiYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwExoAcA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
I missed the earlier reference, but are we talking about a long-top table or a long top table? The top table, in Oxbridge parlance, is where the important personages sit in the dining hall. And a long one would be, um, a long one. Although the ones I know of were all much longer than than they were wide, so the ‘long’ seems superfluous.
@J.W. Brewer: I remembered you had quoted the behinning of that Lester Bangs review before, but when I searched out the old thread, I wasn’t sure that there was enough directly relevant content to be worth linking to. It was seeing the comments by AJP Crown (an art school guy himself) that I convinced me it I should go ahead and post the link.
Jerry Friedman: Professor Moriarty’s day job was training candidates for British Army exams. His title was “army coach.”
Some post-war St. Louis businessmen decided that their sons needed a public school education (snobbery and class consciousness included) there in the American Midwest. So they sent off to Ampleforth (because Catholic) for monks, whom they gave a Gyo Obata designed chapel. This first generation of masters were mostly Oxbridge men, though by now I gather they’ve been replaced by native-born.
the paper that Gabriel didn’t get. That’s some kind of test, not an essay that the students write in advance the night before, right?
Yes, I think that’s another Britishism. The Cambridge Dictionary has this definition, labeled “UK”: “a set of printed questions for an exam: Candidates must answer two questions from each paper. The geography paper is not till next week.” I don’t think either of those examples works in US English.
There are a few shouldered chips being exposed here.
“Bettering oneself” involved working class kids getting into grammar schools, which have been described as being in their time a great agent of social mobility. They largely succumbed to the left’s hatred of diversity and independence in education.
“a set of printed questions for an exam: Candidates must answer two questions from each paper. The geography paper is not till next week.”
Ah, that’s more or less what Russians call a билет (#3 at Russian Wiktionary; the English version doesn’t include the sense).
In the story, this quote from Chaucer (translating Boethius) has a key role:
I had to refresh my memory on why the last letter of “wonen” (which means ‘dwell’, ‘stay’) is italicized: it indicates that a manuscript abbreviation was expanded (and reproducing the italics outside of a critical edition of the text is pointless, imho; even academic articles don’t do it). But on looking it up, I also found that the quotation is not “be bones” (which makes no sense), it’s “þe bones”, i.e. “Where dwell now the bones of faithful Fabricius?” Somebody mistook a thorn for a b — how ironic, in a story about not having the cultural background to comprehend Chaucer. And I doubt it was the author, who *did* get the first at Oxford that the character is struggling for; in the audio of her reading the story, at 27:00, she reads the quotation correctly, and in Middle English phonology to boot, with “now” pronounced /nu/ and “bones” with two syllables. I bet this is the New Yorker’s boo-boo, despite their self-congratulation about being able to print thorns.
Ha! How are the mighty fallen!
And the weapons of class war perished.
@ktschwarz: Thank you. I think I misunderstood “I have this one paper on medieval literature that I just don’t get.” What he doesn’t get is the literature, not the paper. He doesn’t think he’ll do well on the paper.
“wonen” (which means ‘dwell’, ‘stay’)
German wohnen “dwell, live (in the sense of “having one’s residence)”.
Translates nicely into French as habiter as opposed to vivre – though there seem to be places in Germany where wohnen isn’t used.
there seem to be places in Germany where wohnen isn’t used.
Seem ? Places ? Could you be more specific ?
When my grandfather retired from teaching Latin, he learned Greek and spent the rest of his life — 30-odd years — on his own translation of the Septuagint, scrupulously weighing every variant reading in every codex and papyrus. In the family, we referred to this as “cramming for finals.”
I’m sure this is discussed somewhere in the Hattery Archives but George Orwell’s account of boarding school life compares pretty coherently with Robert Musil’s :
The rich boys had milk and biscuits in the middle of the morning, they were given riding lessons once or twice a week, Flip mothered them and called them by their Christian names, and above all they were never caned. Apart from the South Americans, whose parents were safely distant, I doubt whether Sambo ever caned any boy whose father’s income was much above £2,000 a year…
… At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys
see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confusions_of_Young_T%C3%B6rless
The mention of both Joe Strummer and Mick Jagger in this thread reminded me of a comment that Barry Miles made in one of his memoirs about his time in music journalism: Strummer had “a slurred working-class London accent even less authentic than that of Mick Jagger”. Perhaps it has become a stock phrase in English to say that someone’s accent is faker than Jagger’s.
wonen…wohnen…habiter as opposed to vivre
af yidish, “voynen” as opposed to “lebn”, with an institutionalized pun about litvaks, whose vowel shifts leave them with “veynen”, a distinctly lachrymose interpretation of habitation.
There seems to be some question that St Cyprian’s may not in fact have been quite so awful as Orwell makes out.
His account made me think of Roger Cooper’s “Anyone like me who has been educated at an English public school and then served in the ranks of the British army is quite at home in a Third World prison.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-03-mn-1655-story.html
No. I’ve often read the usage “lebt in“, but I’m not sure I’ve heard it, so I can’t narrow it down. It’s definitely too widespread to be an Anglicism, though, and it hasn’t been accused of being one AFAIK.
I’ve often read the usage “lebt in“, but I’m not sure I’ve heard it
Er wohnt in Hamburg und lebt in Armut.
Er lebt in Armut in Hamburg.
For me, both leben and wohnen work with names of villages / towns / city quarters / cities; for bigger areas like regions or countries, leben is the default (er wohnt in Deutschland is fine when it’s e.g. contrasted with und arbeitet in Belgien). OTOH, with streets and concrete addresses, wohnen is the default; here, leben works when it’s about more than residence, like “spending (a part of) one’s life”. I don’t know any varieties of Standard German where leben is used exclusively.
“Live in” a place is a rather odd idiom, once you stop to think about it. Byw in Welsh is used in the same way, but that may be English influence: it doesn’t seem to have that sense in the 1588 Bible. But then, I don’t think English “live in” was used for “inhabit” back then either. (It still isn’t, in Scotland.)
(You just “exist” in a place in Kusaal.)
Russian seems to have the idiom, though.
In Sydney, Australia, in 1892 a bunch of the most elite private schools got together to form a club for sporting competition purposes. Naturally they called themselves the “great public schools” .
Apart from this odd throwback, in Oz “public school” always means “state-operated primary school” (“primary” means for ages about 6 to 11).
I think I’ve mentioned that my wife and I are rereading Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (after a decade, we’ve entirely forgotten most of the events described), and oddly enough just tonight we got to this passage (the belligerent Quiggin, a student from Oop North, is walking with the narrator):
@David Eddyshaw Are you contrasting English “live in” with Kusaal “exist in”, or am I missing some other point? “Live in” and “exist in” seem to me to be pretty exact synonyms for living things (if not, say, rocks), and “living in” a place doesn’t strike me as an odd idiom. But it’s been a long day, & I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m missing something.
“Live in” and “exist in” seem to me to be pretty exact synonyms for living things …
Hmm? “exist in” [in English] of a human suggests an impoverished experience — like a refugee in a camp or impermanent lodgings. (I’d use it of trying to survive within Gaza at the moment, for example.) “live in” would indicate some sort of security and creature comforts, if not so much as a place to call “home”.
@AntC Ok, I agree with that about English as actually spoken. I was thinking the Kusaal “exist in” was something more neutral. I hope so, actually, that would be rough if the basic way to say where you’re from implied lack of security and struggling to survive.
Edited to add: I meant that the differences in basic glosses between “exist in” and “live in” seem negligible to me for living things. There are definitely differences in connotation in actual English
As someone with some experience translating a dead language into English, my general feeling is that connotations like this kinda go by the wayside. But as someone with no experience of translating a living language that’s not in the top ten most spoken or so, I have no idea how this should be gone about in that context
The comments seem to reflect the feeling that the British public and private schools are seen as superior and a way to a better future. They aren’t necessarily any more. Often in business, the feeling now is rather that if you’ve had a private education you’ve started off on an unfair playing field so you aren’t any better than someone who was educated in the state system and often a private education can count against you career-wise. Yes, it can also propel you to the top job where you are with like-minded peers, but I think this is decreasingly the case.
When I left one job in London in the 70s, my Oxbridge boss going through several applications for my replacement, made comments like, “oh, no – she’s from the provinces” (a red-brick university like Manchester, Exeter or Glasgow etc – unthinkable), or “we could see her – she’s from London (university); or “yes – definitely – Oxbridge. Put her on the list.” How I ever got the job I do not know – I was from the “colonies” which in the view of the time was one worse than the “provinces” and certainly nothing to do with private education or privilege.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/starmers-state-schooled-cabinet-is-unusually-reflective-of-britain
This article makes the point that two of the 25 cabinet members were privately schooled for most of their schooling, which is close (small sample!) to the national average of 6%, but “It stands in stark contrast to the 23 per cent of current parliamentarians overall who attended private schools, and the over 30 per cent seen in every single post-war cabinet to date.”
@Matt Anderson:
What I was getting at was that in most languages, saying that you “lived in” a place would only make sense if you were making the specific point that you were not, in fact, dead. The fact that it seems so natural in the English of England (not Scotland) is because it’s an idiom, and it doesn’t even seem to be a particularly ancient one. In early modern English, you “dwell” in a place, for example.
It’s like that in Kusaal: M vʋe nɛ Bɔk is perfectly grammatical, but it means “I’m alive in Bawku”, not “I live in Bawku”, for which the neutral expression is just M bɛ nɛ Bɔk, using the verb bɛ “be in a location/exist.”
In this case it’s English which is in the minority of languages, though many seem to have a specific equivalent of “dwell”, like “habiter” in French or “wohnen” in German, which Kusaal does not. Kusaal does have its own idioms for that kind of thing, though: to say “I live in that house”, for example, you’d say M kpɛn’ɛd nɛ dɔkaŋa la “I habitually go into that house”, and to say that you were in a place temporarily, you’d say that you were “sitting” there: M zin’i nɛ Bɔk “I’m living in Bawku”, with zin’i “be sitting.”
@ Eliza
That’s interesting to read what you say. It’s clear my ideas about England are frozen in the past as I left decades ago. I hadn’t thought about the 11+ for years until it was mentioned in this thread and when I think about it now it seems more extraordinary than ever that a system was put in place where someone’s future could be affected so radically by how they performed on a particular day when they were eleven years old, especially given the difficult home lives of some of the children. It’s good to hear things are changing.
vivir: “5. intr. Habitar o morar en un lugar o país.”
@ DE,
Perhaps my post was intemperate; I sent it having just seen `Wicked’ (the film) and was in a state of acute distress.
By comparison to PlasticPaddy’s figures re the U.K. Parliament, a census of the U.S. Congress as of maybe a decade ago had just over 25% as graduates of private high schools (not digging into their pre-high-school years).
That’s to some degree an apples/oranges comparison, since the total percentage of high school students in the U.S. in private schools may be higher to start with (maybe around 9%), but also some U.S. private schools wouldn’t be private in the U.K., due to, for example, the U.K. tendency (due to differences of historical circumstance, tradition, and law) to provide full state funding for certain overtly sectarian schools which (because that’s not the Done Thing here) are necessarily on the “private” side of the line in the U.S.
The most recent U.S. president to have attended public high school was Bill Clinton. The most recent unsuccessful major-party-nominee to have attended a U.S. public high school was Hillary Clinton; Kamala Harris spent her teenage years in Quebec where she attended what wikipedia tells me is a public high school, yet it was controlled at the time by an entity called the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (Commission des écoles protestantes du Grand Montréal), in another reminder that foreigners often draw lines in different places than we do.
In 1968 I interviewed for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship with a panel of highly intimidating University of Virginia professors, the closest the American South had to Oxbridge. The very last question I was asked–almost in the way out the door–was, “What prep school did you go to?” Nonplussed, I simply told the truth, that I’d gone to my town high school. Only later did I realize that they surely had that information and were springing this on me to test my truthfulness. (I got the fellowship.)
@Rodger C.: Poor Sewanee and a few other Very Southern places try so hard for that Oxbridge vibe yet you’re probably right that they can’t quite pull it off with the gravitas that Charlottesville (then, although perhaps no longer) could.
when I think about it now it seems more extraordinary than ever that a system was put in place where someone’s future could be affected so radically by how they performed on a particular day when they were eleven years old
Depending on how you weigh factors, the traditional German system was even worse; whether you went on to (in descending order of academicity/prestige) Gymnasium, Realschule or Hauptschule depended on a recommendation from your Elementary school, without any exam. On the plus side, that recommendation was based on a more holistic picture than one exam, on the minus side, this could be totally subjective and be influenced by teacher likes and dislikes and by the status of the parents.
Starting from ca. the early 70s, that system has been modified in different ways by different states (schools are a state responsibility in Germany). Most states have moved the decision by two years via the introduction of a comprehensive stage in grades 5 and 6 (called Orientierungsstufe in Lower Saxony where I went to school), others have introduced comprehensive schools as an alternative or replacement to the trifurcated school system. These changes were fought with tooth and nails by parents who wanted their children into Gymnasium as early as possible and not to have them dragged down by the lower standards in the comprehensive stages / schools.
The original context of those high-stakes exams like the eleven-plus was typically class-stratified societies where historically children without family wealth or political connections had no practical access to any post-elementary education and were instead expected (whether at ten or twelve or fifteen) to go out and work in factory or field or apprentice themselves to a skilled tradesman or what have you. To ameliorate that at the margins you would get proposals like Thomas Jefferson (in 1784): “By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.” As social and historical conditions change, it begins to seem natural for public funds to spent for a much higher number of years of instruction for all children, all of whom are now deemed above average, and the mechanisms first innovated to give the unusually promising children of the non-elite something rather than nothing begin to seem awkward for sorting among children who are now all believed to be entitled to quite a lot.
In the U.S. it is typically only large cities that can afford to maintain some freestanding separate public high schools with selective admissions and solely offering a “Gymnasium-style” curriculum, and there are often local political controversies about such schools and how they choose their students. In more typical American communities there’s a single “comprehensive” public high school theoretically taking all comers, but it’s reasonably common for it to de facto offer both a gymnasium-style curriculum and a less-academically-rigorous curriculum under the same roof, with variation in the age at which most students de facto get clearly put onto one track or the other and the opacity of the processes via which that happens.
FWIW, in Danish (and Swedish) you bo in a place. Trond once quoted a lot about how that verb (also at the root of bonde = ‘farmer’ because present participle) would seem to be derived from the paradigm of *bHuH (to be) that also supplies D ich bin/du bist, L fio but synchronically it’s its very own thing.
I realize that a sample of one is not statistically significant, but I did know of one case in the1960s of someone who was quite brilliant in an idiosyncratic way but had failed her 11+ (probably because she didn’t take it seriously) and went to a secondary modern school. There her brilliance was too obvious to be ignored, and she was moved to a grammar school. I wondered at the time why her parents didn’t send her to a private school, as they coud very easily afford it.
following JWB:
if you want a nightmare ride, dig deep into any given year of new york city “Regents*”/”exam schools” controversy! standard elements include “but if we make the tests less racist** the Wrong People will get in!”; “but if we eliminate the tests the Wrong People will get in!”; “but if we make the tests less racist or eliminate the tests, we’ll have to make all the schools better, because then any school could theoretically have a rich white student”; “but if we make the tests less racist or eliminate the tests, My Own highschool diploma won’t mean as much!”; “what about Reverse Racism?!?”; “do The Humanities matter anymore?”; “just close them and make more charter schools!”; and simply barrels more fun.
all, of course, ignoring the ways that the de facto race/class differentiation baked into the u.s. standard non-single-exam-based educational track systems accomplishes most of the same goals*** with much less visible fuss.
(full disclosure: one of my (white; wealthy) first cousins went to Stuyvesant [public “exam school”] in the 1990s and had a fine time; i’ve always assumed his sister ended up at Fieldston [formerly-progressive private prep school] because she didn’t do as well on the Regents)
.
* the name of the nyc exam, theoretically administered by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, who theoretically run the state’s educational system.
** see labov’s bunny paper.
*** the main exception, i think, being providing a recognizable brand name to simplify things for college admissions officers.
FWIW, in Danish (and Swedish) you bo in a place
Obviously cognate with Farefare/Gurenne boe, used in exactly the same way. One of the many secure proto-Scandi-Congo etymologies.
No one likes to think that they owe their successes to considerations like that, but I fear that in practice that’s how it works. In 1970 I applied very tardily from Berkeley for a job in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Birmingham. They appointed me almost immediately without an interview. Afterwards I commented to a new colleague, appointed the year earlier, that I had been lucky to be appointed so quickly, at a moment when most positions had been filled. Not at all, he said, an Oxford graduate previously educated at one of the schools named in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (not one of those mentioned above), how could thy refuse? Probably he was right.
In this case it’s English which is in the minority of languages, though many seem to have a specific equivalent of “dwell”
Russian shares the same idiom as modern English here, though there is a verb проживать that is used in more formal registers for the specific “dwell” sense.
Hebrew has a specialized “dwell” verb: לגור (lagur), as in אני גר בלונדון (ani gar be-london) “I live in London”.
No one likes to think that they owe their successes to considerations like that, but I fear that in practice that’s how it works.
I got my first proofreading job in 1981 in part because I’d done some graduate work at Yale, and that’s where the daughter of the woman who ran the department was going to college. (I had also aced the test, but I’m sure there were others who were able to do that.)
I first heard of Stuyvesant from the dickweed who called me from MIT to encourage me to attend. I was furious that the only contact I got from the Institute was some undergrad who thought the way to sell MIT was to tell me about how many people from his high school had opted to go there.
I think it’s worth noting that academic failure can have an upside, in my case it led to a vartiety of jobs that are sometimes looked down on; door-to-door salesman, ditch digger… jobs I found interesting due to the characters I worked with. I managed to be free of existential doubts most of the time though being employed as a baboon attendant in Windsor Safari Park certainly gave pause (and paws, and claws). My boss was called Captain Fayre, he knew less about baboons than I did, which was quite a feat, but I suppose his military title helped him secure an office job, ie sitting in a Portakabin keeping a eye on various human and non-human primates and any potential monkey business.
Lars M: FWIW, in Danish (and Swedish) you bo in a place.
Nynorsk bu with regular West Scandinavian correspondence. ko ~ ku “cow”, bro ~ bru “bridge”, tro ~ tru “believe” — but dukke ~ dokke “doll”, hugge ~ hogge “cut, strike as with an axe”, Norw. Bokmål picks East and West forms at random.
Trond once quoted a lot about how that verb (also at the root of bonde = ‘farmer’ because present participle) would seem to be derived from the paradigm of *bHuH (to be) that also supplies D ich bin/du bist, L fio but synchronically it’s its very own thing.
Oh, yeah. An interesting mess involving laryngeal reflexes and whatnot, I think. Forgotten most of it by now.
I’ve heard about a university professor who had only one question for any graduate program applicant, namely, whether they played basketball. Probably, apocryphal.
I was asked what position I played in at Rugby when I was interviewed for Mary’s (this actually makes sense, in context):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Hospital_Medical_School
(They were my fifth choice, and I went elsewhere. In retrospect, they probably felt obliged to interview me on the grounds that I fit the demographic so well …)
I think it’s worth noting that academic failure can have an upside, in my case it led to a vartiety of jobs that are sometimes looked down on
Same here.
[Do you play basketball? What position do you play in Rugby?]
On the other hand, one of my students, an excellent tennis player who did very well in my physics class, was told when he transferred to a university that if he wanted to be on the tennis team he couldn’t major in physics. Priorities, apparently. He didn’t join the tennis team and now has a tenure-track position in physics.
Starts here and continues for a while; the laryngeals only show up after a gap of four years, though.
Don’t bother clicking on the link to the PDF that is scanned sideways and the wrong way around at that.
That subthread is a good example of how my degree of research and involvement in discussions correlates with holidays and (in summer, probably) with precipitation. I didn’t really respond to your additions in 2023, but that was a busy month elsewhere.
The head of biochemistry at Birmingham who appointed me in 1970 had not been to a fancy school before Cambridge, but he had played rugby for England in 1947 and 1948, and that was surely more important. The original version of the Wikipedia article paid vastly more attention to his not particularly distinguished career as a rugby international than it did to his subsequent academic career. However, I fixed that, adding, as a comment,
That subthread is a good example of how my degree of research and involvement in discussions correlates with holidays and (in summer, probably) with precipitation.
When it rains, you jump the gun ?
Something like that. But maybe the opposite. I can delve deep into a subject on a long, rainy day (or week) only to disappear when real life and weather conspire to pull me out if it.
(Much of what I write here is fluff and half-thoughts, but occasionally I see old comments that I can’t imagine how I managed to write, much less think out. Those are often dated in July or around the new year.)
@Athel: When I added the second sentence to the Wikiparticle on Franklin Knight Lane, it was ‘He became better known posthumously by being quoted in [[Vladimir Nabokov]]’s novel ”[[Pale Fire]]”.’ I suspect that annoyed someone, because the article now has a detailed discussion of his long and distinguished career in politics and no mention at all of Pale Fire, even though it has a Legacy section. I occasionally consider putting Nabokov back in, hoping that editor may be over their annoyance.
I had to go all the way back to the beginning of the article’s history to find your Nabokov addition, which is here (December 3, 2004). It lasted for over four years, its last appearance being here (January 26, 2009). It was lost in the wholesale reorganization and expansion of the article by Wehwalt, who seems to be one of those obsessive types (pages and pages of the history are taken up with minute changes by that one editor); I suspect if you added it back in under Legacy it would remain.
academic failure can have an upside, in my case it led to a vartiety of jobs that are sometimes looked down on
Or academic success at the wrong historical moment. I defended my dissertation in 1978 and spent six years at such adventurous jobs before finding a teaching position. An invaluable part of my education; I sometimes call it my second grad school.
My most recent doctoral advisee finished his dissertation in the summer but only just graduated last month. In the interim, he was doing securities trading in Texas. He lost that job just before commencement, but then got a post-doc position, like he really wanted, in Rochester.
@Jerry. I think you should certainly reinstate your Nabokov comment. Like Hat, I didn’t immediately find it, as it didn’t occur to me to go all the way back to 2004!
In the same edit, you corrected “from [[1913]]-[[1920]]” to “from [[1913]] to [[1920]]”. Quite right too: that’s one of my pet peeves.
@Hat and Athel: Sorry, if I’d realized you’d have been interested in those details, I’d have provided them. Sometime soon I’ll add the Nabokov reference with a better sense of perspective.
But one Joesty Nestorius anticipated me.
Interesting. I wonder if Jnestorius frequents the Hattery under a different name. Otherwise it’s quite a coincidence that he chose 2nd January 2025 to make this edit.
It is indeed. In any case, it was convincingly added and I imagine will stick.
Good grief. I’ve don’t think I’ve ever seen such a torrent of edits to one article made by one editor. As you say, pages and pages of the history.
I’ve never edited an article that much, but in my case, when I’ve made a lot of consecutive edits, carelessness has had a lot to do with it.
I’m going to guess that the addition of the Nabokov reference today wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe Jnestorius lurks here or happened on this thread somehow.
Yeah, I’m frequently surprised by how many people read LH without commenting.
It’s a useful place to learn things, and can be an intimidating place to comment!
Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Long life is the reward of the righteous; gray hair is a glorious crown.
Please do not spit on the floor.
Can I still call the cat a bastard?
A couple years back (not sure exactly when but a little bit pre-pandemic) I was at a social get-together where I bumped into a guy I’d known back in my college years but hadn’t actually seen face-to-face in quite some time. We were having a nice catch-up conversation and then out of the blue he asked whether I was the person who commented at this location under the intialized shortening of my full name (others could have the same initials, of course). I fessed up and he claimed to be a long-time lurker but never-commenter. And since that time (not that I’ve spent a lot of time consciously focused on it) I haven’t noticed any pseudonymous commenters who seem from interests and/or miscellaneously revealed minor life details to seem likely to be that fellow. Although one never knows, do one?
A few regular commenters here also comment on Charlie Stross’ blog, which is three years older than this one, where I’ve never commented to the best of my recollection.
There are seven websites that were started in 2003 or earlier that I still regularly visit and those are two of them. And Charlie’s the one that I have never commented at. Two of them shut down comments/fora through the years, as Charlie is planning to this March.
> the paper that Gabriel didn’t get. That’s some kind of test, not an essay that the students write in advance the night before, right?
I think that, in this _particular_ (I think somewhat exclusively oxbridge) context, a ‘paper’ is indeed an exam, yes, but also metonymically the course that leads up to it. Thus ‘I have this one paper on medieval literature that I just don’t get’ seems to me to be referring to a course that the character is struggling with.