Posted by Jock on January 05, 2006 at 10:49:13 from 84.64.131.122 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Oh, blow the lot of you! posted by Andy Clayton on January 04, 2006 at 23:06:23:
The same thought struck me. It's not all that long ago that on entering the UK there were two queues - one for the holders of British passports and the other for 'aliens'. (These days there are still two queues, but they are labelled differently.) A great deal of Britain's current language, culture, economics and politics still reflects its imperial past. Somewhere I read that the very activities indulged in by the Swallows and Amazons such as sailing, mapping, signing treaties and so on reflect an imperial bias. Yet as we know from his letters to Tabitha AR was no imperialist.
I feel very strongly that rather trying to rewrite the past we should concentrate on creating the present and building a better future. If we survive the next hundred years historians looking back on the start of the 21st C will accuse us of being racist and imperialist, but it won't be AR's use of 'n' that they will be referring to.
[Ian, are such indirect references to nasty stuff going on in other parts of the world OK?]