Discussion today has focused on trying to understand why people don’t vote, the story of an impatient passenger using the emergency exit on a plane, and your family’s made-up words. We’re also looking at misappropriated Shakespeare “quotes”.
To join in you can click on the links in the comments below to expand and add your thoughts. We’ll continue to highlight more comments worth reading as the day goes on.
I knew that many people don’t vote. I should have asked why
Guardian columnist Rafael Behr wrote about how he wished he asked more questions about why nonvoters came out to vote during the EU referendum, the Scottish independence referendum and Labour’s 2015 leadership contest.
‘Ignoring nonvoters was worse than lazy’
It was a thing we noticed early in the indy ref. People going round the doors and finding not the usual apathy but an interest in participating from people who had never voted before, often not on the register or not even knowing there was a register.
So there’s two things: do people feel their vote will count? When they do, it seems they do want to vote. It was not indifference stopping them, it was thinking it pointless. But also, nobody had really asked why so many folk were never even registered.
Every vote matters, because every voice does - and if votes are not sought, their voices are dismissed. People can end up feeling it is not just that their vote makes no difference, but that they themselves don’t matter.
So Rafael is right that ignoring nonvoters was worse than lazy - it sent a powerful negative message, and campaigners learned a valuable lesson from the effort to counter it.
Tenthred
‘I’m going via the wing’: fed-up Ryanair passenger takes the emergency exit
Readers have been joining the discussion under the story about a passenger leaving through an emergency exit and sitting on the wing of the plane, after he became frustrated at having to wait.
‘Is the charge cheaper than sitting inside the plane?’
Anybody know what Ryanair charges for opening the over-wing emergency exit and sitting on the wing?
Is it cheaper than sitting inside the plane?
LemusLemus
‘Shnibble’, ‘gunzle’, ‘dolltalk’ – share your family’s invented words
Author and literary critic, Caroline Baum, has written about the made-up words that bid families and friends together, with many readers sharing their own experiences below the line.
‘We use the word ‘woozle’ to mean sleepy/tired’
Our family uses “woozle” as a noun (as in, “Are you a woozle?” to a small child needing a snooze), as a verb (as in “I’m woozling off here, need to get to bed”), and as an adjective (as in, “Are you feeling woozly? Time for a nap?”). I think there must be some A A Milne behind it all somewhere.
My son coined “sandy shrimp” for the kind you get in a basket in a pub, when he was four, and that has stuck too.
Susanna Singer
Alas, poor Owen Wilson, your TV ad Shakespeare quote is made up
More linguistic invention of sorts next, as theatre critic Mark Fisher writes a blog on a Shakespeare quote used in a TV advert over Chistmas. He calls it “pure bunkum”.
‘I always thought the top misattribution was “O what a tangled web we weave”’
Well, that’s bizarrely confidence-shaking. I’m 60 years old, I have a BA in English and a Masters in Shakespeare Studies, and I’m now doing a PhD in early modern drama – and this is not only the first time I have ever heard that quote attributed to Shakespeare, but also the first time I have ever heard anyone say it at all. I always thought the top mis-attribution was “O what a tangled web we weave”, which at least sounds vaguely Midsummer-Night’s-Dream-ish. But “People are usually the happiest at home”? Not even on his very worst day.
Holofernes
That comment provoked this response:
That’s where you’ve been going wrong. You’ve been studying what Shakespeare wrote, not what he didn’t write.
Nepthsolem
Comments have been edited for length. This article will be updated throughout the day with some of the most interesting ways readers have been participating across the site.
