"[S]ince around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective."

"From around 1850 on, [researchers] found, the frequency of words such as 'technology,' 'result,' 'assuming,' 'pressure,' 'math,' 'medicine,' 'percent,' 'unit' and 'fact' has gone down while the frequency of words such as 'spirit,' 'imagine,' 'hunch,' 'smell,' 'soul,' 'believe,' 'feel,' 'fear' and 'sense' has gone up. The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant 'thinking fast' as opposed to the more deliberative 'thinking slow.' In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as 'we' and 'they' has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals — the subjective — than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect."

Writes John McWhorter, in "Don’t, Like, Overanalyze Language" (NYT), discussing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to detect a "surge of post-truth political argumentation" and a "historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional.” 

McWhorter thinks the authors of the study are overdoing it, because, he says, often "the process by which language changes is that something starts out being about objective observation and drifts into being, as it were, all about me." He focuses on the question: "Why would this have happened to such an unusual extent since 1980?"  

And he guesses that it's a matter of increasing informality, which naturally entails being "more open about the self, less withholding about the personal, more inclined to the intimate." In that light, it's hard to believe the researchers think they've shown a move from individualism to collectivism. 

Something McWhorter doesn't talk about is that some people adopt a rationalistic tone for rhetorical purposes. They're not actually more rational, just trying persuade other people by posing as reasonable and unemotional. Ironically, that's an emotional move, and it can work if we respect the speaker's sincerity and good will, but it can stimulate wariness and irritation if we mistrust the speaker. And it's entirely rational to mistrust all speakers in the American political discourse that's developed in the last 40 years. In that light, it's not surprising that speakers have been abandoning the less effective rhetorical strategy.

"Any suggestion that there isn’t gratitude for the institution, anything that could lead anyone in the public to think that senior members of the royal family aren’t grateful for their position, [William thinks] is really dangerous."

Said a source close to Prince William, quoted in "It wasn’t just the Queen: the whole royal family knifed Prince Andrew/After years of indecision, the Firm finally acted against the duke — and all his siblings were involved" (London Times).

Friends of Andrew say he has been doing “a lot of thinking and work on himself”.... There is much more thinking to be done as Andrew, who once described himself as “an ideas factory”, contemplates a permanent retirement devoid of flummery. Some in royal circles believe a safe option would be for him to run one of the Queen’s estates. Others, including the royal historian Hugo Vickers, think he should devote himself to a life of charitable rehabilitation.

“Prince Andrew needs to start up an animal sanctuary and work there, Profumo-style,” Vickers said. “The British love animals.”

Retirement devoid of flummery... "Flummery" is one of those words that gets my attention. Oddly enough, I have a tag for "flummery." I'm not sure how that happened. My favorite word is "flummox," as I've mentioned a few times on this blog. And yet I don't have a tag for "flummox," only for "flummery." It makes you wonder, what is flum? Is it like phlegm?

As I've discussed before — here — the OED calls the word "flummox" colloquial or vulgar and suggests it's onomatopoeic, "expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily." 

But what about "flummery"? That's not connected to "flummox." According to the OED, "flummery" originates as the name of a food — a "coagulation of wheatflour or oatmeal." From there, it got figurative: "Mere flattery or empty compliment; nonsense, humbug, empty trifling" or "Trifles, useless trappings or ornaments."

Yes, we don't need any of that from Andrew.

"China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe or India."

"Through the centuries, waves of revolutionary iconoclasts have tried to smash everything old; the Red Guards, in the nineteen-sixties, were following an ancient tradition. The Chinese seldom built anything for eternity, anyway, nothing like the cathedrals of Europe. And what survived from the past was often treated with neglect.... As Jing Tsu, a scholar of Chinese at Yale, observes... China had long equated writing 'with authority, a symbol of reverence for the past and a talisman of legitimacy.' This is why mastery of classical Chinese used to be so important. To become an official in imperial China, one had to compose precise scholarly essays on Confucian philosophy, an arduous task that very few could complete. Even Chairman Mao, who incited his followers to destroy every vestige of tradition, proudly displayed his prowess as a calligrapher, establishing himself as the bearer of Chinese civilization.... The classical style of the language, elliptical and complex, was practiced by only a small number of highly educated people.... A linguist, Qian Xuantong, famously argued that Confucian thought could be abolished only if Chinese characters were eradicated. 'And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking,' he went on, 'the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.'... Dictatorships shape the way we write and talk and, in many cases, think.... I still shudder at the memory of reading, as a student in the early nineteen-seventies, Maoist publications in Chinese, with their deadwood language, heavy Soviet sarcasm, and endless sentences that sounded like literal translations from Marxist German—the exact opposite of the compressed poeticism of the classical style."

From "How the Chinese Language Got ModernizedFaced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive," by Ian Buruma (The New Yorker).

"The Pope has criticised 'cancel culture,' claiming it suffocates freedom of expression, rewrites the past and eliminates 'all sense of identity.'"

"In a strongly worded speech yesterday to diplomats gathered at the Vatican, the Pope said 'a kind of one-track thinking is taking shape, one constrained to deny history or, worse yet, to rewrite it.'... The Pope said the trend was influencing diplomacy, creating 'a mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity and the cultural roots that constitute the identity of many peoples.' The result, he said, was 'a form of ideological colonisation, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the "cancel culture" invading many circles and public institutions.'... 'Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up cancelling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions that defend a respectful and balanced understanding of various sensibilities.'"

From "Cancel culture is rewriting the past, warns Pope Francis" (London Times).

The Pope's words are translated from the Italian, but he said "cancel culture" in English.

Doesn't the Pope have to oppose cancel culture? Whether he says so outright or not, he must defend the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is a very conspicuous target of the culture.

Here's the full text of the speech.

ADDED: I'd trust the Pope when he identifies "ideological colonization." It takes one to know one!