Sommaire pour N. 488 de Speak Up Italia

Non c’è alcun dubbio sulla qualità letteraria di Jane Austen né sull’importanza sociale dei suoi romanzi, dolcemente legati ai costumi dell’epoca e sottilmente sovversivi. Sono, per parafrasarla, due verità universalmente riconosciute. Esiste, tuttavia, un piccolo enigma ai margini del mondo accademico, in quel terreno insidioso tra la letteratura comparata e gli studi biografici, dove si specula sulle motivazioni dell’autrice stessa: fino a che punto le sue storie, i personaggi, le idee e le azioni delle sue eroine riflettono la sua personale visione del mondo? Questo terreno scivoloso è noto come ‘intentional fallacy’: la convinzione errata che nella biografia dell’autore si possa trovare la chiave per comprendere pienamente un’opera artistica. Nel caso di Jane Austen, contribuisce in modo decisivo a questa bolla speculativa il fatto che morì molto giovane, a soli…

HOW DO YOU SAY…? Ridurre in poltiglia, pestare a sangue. To beat someone to a pulp. Bruce Lee is considered one of the most influential martial artists in the history of film. Sadly, Lee, who was also an actor and filmmaker died of a brain oedema at the age of thirty-two. This November, the world is celebrating him and his lasting1 influence on martial arts, filmmaking, and popular culture on what would have been his 85th birthday. FORMATIVE YEARS Born in San Francisco, California, Lee was raised2 in Hong Kong, which was then under British rule3. He appeared in his first film, The Beginning of a Boy (1946), at the age of six and had been in twenty films by the time he was eighteen. He also began studying martial…

EXERCISES IN Work It Out! It was Valentine’s Day 2005 when three ex-Paypal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, founded YouTube. The world quickly fell in love with the platform, and just over a year later, Google acquired it for $1.65 billion. FIVE BILLION VIDEOS Headquartered in San Bruno, Ca, YouTube is now the world’s second-most-visited website, after Google Search. It has over five billion1 videos, in almost every imaginable category, and about 2.5 billion users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of video a day. Today, the video-sharing platform has considerable power over what many believe to be the truth. As its influence over popular culture and global trends has grown, so have concerns over its content policies2, copyright issues and handling3 of misinformation and…

Norwich Castle: Royal Palace Reborn is an ambitious €32-million renovation project to restore the city’s historic Norman palace to its 12th-century glory. Original rooms, walls, floors and roofs have been restored to reconstruct the building, which was begun by William the Conqueror and completed by his son, King Henry I of England, who visited here in 1121. To make way for the structure, almost one hundred Anglo-Saxon houses, entire streets and churches existing at the time, were demolished. To find out more, Speak Up spoke with two of the experts involved from start to finish. Dr. Tim Pestell is senior curator of archaeology at Norfolk Museums Service and interpretation lead for the project. Dr. Pestell explained why the castle, one of the largest Norman keeps1 in England, was built in…

Built over five hundred years ago, the house now known as Jane Austen’s House began as a farmhouse1 and later served as a coaching inn2 (a place where horses are changed on long journeys by horse-drawn carriage3.) In 1809, Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen Knight, offered the house to his mother and sisters, providing them with a permanent residence on his Chawton estate4. It was here that Austen revised her earlier novels and wrote new ones, including Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, the latter published posthumously in December 1817, five months after her death. Since opening to the public as Jane Austen’s House Museum in 1949, the site, informally called Chawton Cottage5, has been dedicated to preserving the legacy of the author. The museum holds a collection of personal artefacts,…

London’s Caledonian Road, known as the ‘Cally’ by locals, runs north-south through Islington, a residential borough1 in the north of the inner city2. The street is the setting and name of Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, an ambitious social satire that’s more than six hundred pages long and includes nearly sixty characters. Inspired by the work of Charles Dickens, as well as Tom Wolfe’s more recent New York City-set epic Bonfire3 of the Vanities, O’Hagan gives voice to a diverse cast of characters who live on or around Caledonian Road. He reveals how people from very different social backgrounds can be interconnected by hidden networks of power. BETWEEN WORLDS O’Hagan has published nine novels since his debut, Mayflies4, in 2000, and has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times. He has…

Naomi Klein was born in 1970 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her Jewish family had a history of peace activism; her parents were war resisters to the Vietnam War and emigrated from the United States in 1967. As a teenager, Klein received two significant wakeup calls1 that opened her mind to social activism. The first was when her mother suffered a stroke2 and she was forced to postpone her education to help take care of her. The second was the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, where an antifeminist shooter murdered fourteen women and injured fourteen people. THE VARSITY Klein studied at the University of Toronto, where she made her first contributions to journalism with the student newspaper The Varsity3. At only twenty-nine, she hadn’t been out of university long when…

SpeakUp 488 UNIT 1 Page 8 B1 LEVEL Hi Hello! SOLUTIONS PAGE 74 1.1 VOCABULARY ▶ Read the article and match the verbs (1-7) with their meanings (a-g). USEFUL EXPRESSIONS until well into the 19th century fino a buona parte del XIX secolo 1.2 READING COMPREHENSION ▶ Read the article and answer the questions choosing from the options. 1) What were common greetings in English in the 19th century? a “Holla”. b “Good day” or “How do you do?”. c “Whoa there”. 2) Who suggested the use of “Hello!” to answer a telephone call? 3) When did the word “Hi” first appear in written English? 4) Where is the greeting “Hiya” especially popular? 5) Where did the “Hello icon” appear in 1984? UNIT 2 Page 14 B2 LEVEL Margaret Thatcher…

The concept of using technology as a learning tool1 has a history spanning2 over a century. Educational films and mechanical devices3 known as ‘teaching machines’ that asked simple multiple choice questions, were the first tools to put technology in classrooms. Gradually, television and computers complemented academic books. The founding of the UK’s Open University in 1969 was a turning point4. By the late 20th century, the internet expanded access to information, and online courses and digital learning resources became more common. DIGITAL AGE By the 2000s, personal computers, projectors and interactive whiteboards5 had infiltrated classrooms, promising a future of more interactive and multimedia-driven learning. The e-learning platform Moodle, an open-source learning management system (LMS), was introduced in 2002, potentially breaking down geographic barriers. PERSONALISED The 2010s brought massive open online…

Twentieth-century fashion-photography icon, Cecil Beaton (born in 1904 who died in 1980) was enigmatic, flamboyant1 and controversial; both a misfit2 and a social climber3 with a talent for self-promotion. Openly bisexual, through his decades-long career he captured the essence of various eras on camera: from the 1920s Jazz Age to the high fashion of the 50s to the 1960s glamour of the movie My Fair Lady — for which he designed the set and created the costumes4. As a royal photographer, Beaton played a pivotal role5 in adapting the British monarchy to the modern age. He also photographed, and to a degree curated6, the hardships7 of World War Two. VOGUE CONTROVERSY Beaton was born in London in 1904, the son of a timber merchant8 and an actress. Mesmerised9 by his…

How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language EXERCISES IN Work It Out! Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge1 content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their "seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.” Lots of similarly inventive workarounds2 have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called ‘Algospeak’ (a portmanteau3 of ‘algorithm’ and ‘speak’ that Aleksic invented), and it has yielded4 terms like ‘cornucopia’ for homophobia and ‘unalive’, a euphemism for ‘suicide’ that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary. These words roll off5 the tongue for Aleksic, a twenty-four-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as…

Very little is known about Jane Austen’s life, including what she looked like. The only portrait of the writer that is considered authentic is a simple pencil and watercolour sketch1 made by her sister Cassandra around 1810 and now held in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Although there have been many adaptations of her novels, only a few films and TV shows try to explore Jane Austen’s personal life. Becoming Jane (2007), directed by Julian Jarrold and starring American actor Anne Hathaway as Austen, moves between reality and fiction to present the author as the heroine of a romantic love story, almost as one of the characters of her novels. TOM LEFROY In the film, Jane is an aspiring writer who refuses to marry Mr. Wisley, nephew2 and only…

London is infamous1 for being the poorest and the richest city in the UK. Many of its districts are socially, economically and culturally diverse, with the area around Caledonian Road in Islington an archetypal example. Houses worth millions stand metres from run-down2 social housing; families who have lived there for generations live side-by-side with a significant proportion of newcomers3, many born outside the UK. The area has a personal resonance for Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, whose recent book Caledonian Road is set in the borough. Caledonia was the Roman name for Scotland, and Caledonian Road dates back to 1826 and was named after an orphanage called the Royal Caledonia Asylum, established in 1815 to house Scottish orphans. In 1952, King’s Cross train station was built at the south end of…

What was better: fifteen years of prison or fifteen years of unconsciousness? That was what Samson was trying to decide with his lawyer, Jared. Had he been sentenced to prison years ago, he would not have had this decision to make. He would have gone to prison for fifteen years, simple as that. But in 2055, the UK had introduced the option of No Time, where prisoners were placed in an AI-induced coma for the duration of their sentence, instead of in a traditional prison. It had its pros and cons, which Samson had been considering since he’d been arrested on multiple charges1 of fraud. He had defrauded hundreds of vulnerable and desperate people, often taking every penny2 they had. He didn’t regret3 his crimes, but he did regret getting…

Hello!’ is a common way to greet1 someone, and for many of us is the first word that we learned in English. In fact, ‘Hello’ didn’t start out as a greeting at all2: in the early 1800s, the word was used to call attention to something or to express surprise (or some other emotion) such as in the phrase, “Hello, what’s going on here?” ‘Hello’ was related to older words, such as ‘holla’ or ‘holà’ from the French phrase meaning something like ‘Whoa there!3’ or to Germanic terms like ‘halōn’ or ‘halen’ meaning ‘to fetch4’ or ‘call’. TECHNOLOGY Until well into the 19th century, common greetings in English were the formal-sounding ‘Good day’ or ‘How do you do?’ But such phrasing was too slow for the speed of technological change…

EXERCISES IN Work It Out! Margaret Thatcher (born in 1925 and who died in 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. The first woman to hold the office1, her tenure2 was marked by radical economic and social reforms, a strong foreign policy and highly-conservative principles. Thatcher’s promotion of free markets, privatisation and deregulation, an ideology known as neoliberalism, left an indelible imprint3 on Britain and the world. CONSENSUS POLITICS From 1945 to the late 1970s, Britain had an economic order and social model called the ‘post-war consensus’. Parties agreed on policies4 such as full employment, heavy government regulation, high taxes, a welfare state5, nationalisation and strong trade unions6. Thatcher led the Conservative Party to a decisive electoral victory in May 1979 following the Winter of…

The capital city of Norfolk, Norwich, is a UNESCO1 City of Literature. Located in East Anglia, England, it is one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Britain. It is also home to the magnificent Norwich Castle, which stands at the top of a large mound2 in the city centre, overlooking3 the market and Castle Quarter shops. CONQUEST Norwich Castle dates back to4 1067 and was built soon after the Norman invasion of Britain. Symbolic of the conquest and authority of the country’s new rulers5, the castle served as a defensive structure, royal palace and centre for legal and financial rule. Built adjacent to the Norman cathedral, near the River Wensum, the castle changed life in Norwich forever. DESIGNED TO IMPRESS The impact on the city’s Anglo-Saxon population (living and dead)…

The quintessentially English author Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the small village of Steventon, North Hampshire, in the south of England. The daughter of village vicar1 Reverend George Austen, she spent the early part of her life in Steventon Rectory. As the seventh of eight children, Austen was used to the hubbub2 of a busy home, and the comings and goings of her many siblings4. But she also enjoyed the peace and quiet of the rural surroundings, and found it a bit of a shock when her father suddenly announced they were moving 50 miles (or 80 km) away, to spa town Bath. TO SOUTHAMPTON After her father died in 1805, Jane then accompanied her mother, her sister Cassandra, and friend Martha Lloyd to Southampton, approximately…

Robert Redford, who died on 16 September aged aged eightynine, was the golden boy of American cinema for more than fifty years. Redford, who was always ill at ease1 about his looks, was described by Sydney Pollack, for whom the actor made seven films, as “an interesting metaphor for America, a golden boy with a darkness in him.” To many of his characterisations, he added a wry wit2, able to hint3, via subtle nuance4, at a more complex psychology hidden beneath the surface. Romantically flawed and fallen heroes were his forte, so he was perfectly cast in the title role of The Great Gatsby (1974). “I wanted Gatsby badly,” he commented. “He is not fleshed out5 in the book and the implied parts are fascinating.” Charles Robert Redford Jr. was…

I’m lovin’ it! EXERCISES IN Work It Out! Getting1 the cultural reference behind an expression feels great, right? And a surprising number of expressions enter the English language from advertising campaigns: think of the US firm McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” or Nike’s “Just do it!”. In some cases, even native speakers end up2 using the expression without thinking about the product it was originally advertising. In the UK there are many advertising slogans (memorable phrases) or straplines (short, snappy3 slogans) that have captured the public imagination so successfully that they’ve become integrated into everyday English. TIN TRUTH In the mid-1990s, the marketing department of Ronseal, the manufacturers of wood stain4, decided that instead of trying to make wood stain glamorous, they would emphasise the boring, predictable nature of their product…

Hey, I was thinking we could do something meaningful1 as a team. How about a charity drive? That’s a great idea! What cause did you have in mind? How about the food bank down the road2? Sounds perfect. Do you know what kind of donations they accept? Tinned food and other non-perishable items, but also clothes and toys. We could collect things over the next two weeks. OK, let’s do it! Who should we talk to about making it official? Probably the office manager. She’ll know how to get permission and spread the word. OK, I’ll speak to her this afternoon, but let’s start planning now. Should we set up3 collection boxes around the office? Yes. One on each floor would be ideal. We’ ll need to communicate it —…