Viewing profile — tpholland

And the word "suspenders" in British English means what Americans would call a garter belt, hence it sounding particularly odd over here.

Hi! It sounds like you may have misunderstood the TV license as you seem to be describing it as a recent thing whereas it was introduced 80 years ago in 1946. The point of the lice…

OK, you probably have a point. As they say, once you've seen the La Tène cultural package....

I quite agree. It's a diversity of peoples who have developed an umbrella identity that dates back a long time. And it's been very successful! They have a successful federal struct…

Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change

Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.

Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and ma…

Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This…

What did you mean when you said homogenous, given the reality of Switzerland, its history, its civil structure, its languages, and its culture?

Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that th…

But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it ha…

Switzerland does not have a homogenous population, and to a reasonable person who has travelled in Switzerland I think this is an insane thing to be defending. A significant propor…

> Karrimor Jaguar Nice. Karrimor backpacks (or rucksacks/daypacks as we called them back then) were the high water mark--I worked in the industry in the 80s and, in the tone of the…

...but you're often lucky to travel even a metre or so on the M25 in two seconds when it looks like that!

I read all Baudrillard's books, back when he was relevant in the day. You've not missed much. In fact you seem more insightful than those who do have them all to set.

Don't worry, that one has the energy of the guy that was fired for buying IBM

Thanks a lot for the feedback--we'll change the rather lame screenshot at the bottom into something that does a better job of showing off the different showcase templates as a quic…

I take the London-Edinburgh sleeper fairly regularly, and have only ever had good experiences. That said, although in theory standard-class passengers have to share, this has only …

An interesting post looking in detail at the methodology and implications of this study on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715