Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:30 am, in reply to "Part 13: The English job" One day in class, one of them told me an interesting thing. The lesson in the book talked about the different movie ratings, and asked them to explain the way the movie ratings were in their country. They told me the theaters there have a system similar to the one in the United States, but the trouble is, it’s never enforced. The theaters probably wouldn’t sell children tickets for blatantly pornographic movies (which they showed there), but other than that, they would never turn anyone down who wanted to pay to watch a movie. They explained to me that in their country, the movie industry is owned by one of the wealthy families, and they just rip off all the American movies, charge people about the equivalent of a dollar for admission, show them in English with subtitles in their language, and the wealthy family just keeps all the profits from it, and Hollywood doesn’t get a penny. (Once I saw in the window of a box-office a little sign that said, “We are sorry, movie passes from the United States are not accepted here. This theater is not affiliated with Hollywood.” But the movies they were showing there were.) It began as just a session teaching about the difference between American and British spelling and usage. “Isn’t the English word for the place where you see movies ‘cinema’?” someone asked me. “Yes, in England they call it a ‘cinema.’ In the U.S. we say ‘movie theater’ or just ‘theater,’ and many movie theaters in the U.S. have the word ‘Cinema’ or ‘Cinemas’ as part of their name.” “In the United States it is spelled with an ‘-er’ at the end?” “Well, that’s one very unusual case. Yes, normally words spelled with ‘-re’ in England are spelled with ‘-er’ in the U.S., but in the field of the dramatic arts in the U.S., some people have an affinity for the spelling ‘theatre,’ so that’s the way they spell it.” “Which way is correct?” “In the difference between American and British spelling, we can’t say one is ‘correct’ and the other is ‘incorrect’; only American or British. It used to be that both spellings were used in both countries, but the ‘-er’ and ‘-or’ endings, as in ‘center’ and ‘color,’ were used more often in both countries than the ‘-re’ and ‘-our’ endings. When Noah Webster began standardizing the spelling in the U.S., he just chose the more common forms. In those days Britain was a larger, more powerful and more developed country than the U.S. was, and they didn’t want it said that a little insignificant country like the U.S. set any of their standards, so after the U.S. standardized theirs, Britain standardized theirs the opposite way, with the forms ‘centre’ and ‘colour,’ just for that reason. But in the U.S. many theaters had already spent lots of money building their big signs with it spelled ‘Theatre,’ and they didn’t want to spend the money to get new ones made, so in the field of dramatic arts, the ‘theatre’ spelling became a tradition—but even so, many American theaters still prefer the ‘-er’ spelling. You can’t really say either is right or wrong.” When we talked about the different kinds of movie ratings and the reasons for them, I explained about some of them containing nudity and sex scenes, and how parents didn’t want their children at certain ages to be exposed to that kind of thing. One of the executives shook his head and said, “To most of the people of our country, the mentality is, ‘Life is cheap.’ Sure, parents would like for their children to be protected against... impure influences... but for most people, they just have to worry about making a living and getting food for their family for the next day. A thing like that is a luxury. The children see whatever they see out in the streets and wherever, but life is full of much more urgent things that the parents have to spend their time and energy worrying about.” That was an interesting thing for him to explain. So because of poverty, priorities are different there. In the United States, the people of the extra-wealthy classes can spend their time being concerned and getting all upset about all kinds of tiny little things the middleclass American people just accept as part of life, because they can afford to. I remember hearing someone from California once tell me, when he had lived in a lower-middleclass town that was near Indian Wells, which is a community of all millionaires (who, in spite of the town’s name, are mostly white people, originally from nearby Palm Springs, who decided to set up a millionaire community in the town that just happened to be called that), he once saw on the news that the people of Indian Wells were complaining that they always had to wait a whole minute or two at the stoplights, while they sat there in their Mercedes-Benzes, Lincoln Town Cars, BMW’s and Rolls-Royces. “Oh,” he bemoaned sarcastically, “isn’t life just rough when you’re a millionaire? You have to wait a whole minute at the stoplights!” (It really was on the news that the town’s residents really were officially making that complaint.) As far as the lower-middleclass people in some of the towns nearby, Coachella, Indio, La Quinta, were concerned, if the stoplights were making them get to work late, they’d just leave for work earlier, that was all. Standards of life just weren’t high enough to expect something to be done about that. (And work? The people of Indian Wells were probably worried about how long it was taking them to get to their golf game or the dinner party or whatever they were going to.) Likewise. Parents in the country where I was probably didn’t particularly approve of the idea of penises getting pulled out in front of their daughters when they were outside somewhere going on an errand, or coming home from school or something. But standards of life just weren’t high enough for them to expect something to be done about little things like that. They saw that about the same way we think of the people of Indian Wells complaining about the stoplights. It was just up to their daughters not to look when that happened. (And sometimes some of them didn’t.) “Life is cheap.”
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(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 6:59 pm) 
