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Phrase of the day: How the other half lives
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Phrase of the day: How the other half lives
May has been a truly miserable month with the rain bucketing down day after day, the wind howling like it was the middle of March and temperatures more akin to November than the onset of summer. When will it all end? I had been hoping that one silver lining of cancelling our 2021 summer school was that I might have a bit more time to enjoy the sunshine and go walking all over London and beyond. Fat chance if things continue like this! Still, at least museums are open again now, which means we’ll have plenty of good places to go to and dodge the showers in.
One of those museums that I’m looking forward to visiting is the Geffrye Museum which is re-opening after a substantial refurbishment. The museum lies somewhat off the beaten track and can be described as ‘a museum of the home’. The original building was a set of alms houses – kind of retirement homes or supported housing for ex-workers from Geffrye’s industry who had fallen on hard times. You can visit one of these alms houses today, but the main part of the museum is actually more about how the other half lives as it provides reconstructions of the living rooms of the wealthy and upper-middle classes throughout the ages.
I say ‘how the other half lives’ here, because these days the phrase is only used to refer to those richer than us. If you hear the phrase nowadays, the image that probably pops into your head is of someone sunning themselves on the deck of their massive yacht. People like the ones featured in this programme, for instance. Or maybe it would be one of the ones being pampered and sucked up to in the world’s most amazing hotels. Apparently, wealthy people can’t get a good night’s sleep unless they can choose from a menu of upto 75 different types of pillow or have their towels folded in the shape of a swan! How the other half lives!
However, the phrase wasn’t always used like that. In fact, ‘how the other half lives’ originally derived from the title of a photo report from the 1890s which looked into extreme poverty. The ‘other half’ were the poor and destitute, living in slums that were hidden from view from the wealthier half of the population who bought and read newspapers. The photos of life in these slums aimed to shock the government into action and subsequently became known as ‘muckraking’ journalism. How things have changed! Nowadays, most programmes in the UK that are about the the poor tend to focus more on benefits cheats and illegal immigration rather than exposing slum landlords. And, interestingly, the idea of muckraking has followed a similar shift in meaning from investigative reporting that seeks social reform. These days muckraker is more likely to be applied as an insult to tabloid journalists who are trying to get an exclusive about some celebrity’s sexual affairs or failing marriage. And the muckraking involves using dodgy practices such as hacking people’s phones or stalking the celebrity and snapping them while they are off guard or otherwise tricking them into a compromising situation.
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Maybe one reason there has been this shift in meaning in the phrase how the other half lives is that people in the UK increasingly identify themselves as working class, even though the middle class has grown enormously over the years when measured in terms of wealth and education. A recent survey suggests that over 60% of Britons consider themselves to be working class and a lot of middle-class people are surprised to find out that earning £ 35, 000 a year puts them firmly in the wealthier half of the population! To be fair, the issue is that wealth inequality is widening most between those at the very top of society and the rest of us. Rising living costs, particularly housing, can mean that even those in the top half of society might not have any disposable income (a one-bedroom place in London could, after all, easily set you back at least half a million quid! ). So maybe the phrase shouldn’t be ‘how the other half lives’ but ‘how the other 1% lives’. . . . or maybe even ‘how the other 26 men live’, because according to an Oxfam report a few years ago, just twenty-six men owned the same amount as 3. 8 billion people in the poorest half of the world. Go figure!
Chunk of the day: a rite of passage
Generally speaking, I’m not one for complaining about people’s use of language, and certainly not those supposed transgressions of grammar rules such as using like when reporting speech, saying there were less people than expected, or that people are loving it. If you’ve ever seen Hugh’s comments on the English Questions Answered group on Facebook, you’ll know he shares this view as well. My attitude is basically that language seems to have a life of its own and changes in ways we can’t really control, so it’s best to just learn to live with it. Having said that, and at the risk of sounding like an old fogey, it is … um …. interesting to see how certain words and phrases seem to slip in their meaning to the point of becoming almost meaningless. Take, for instance, a rite of passage.
When I was at university, one of the options I took in my degree programme was a course in anthropology. On that course, I learnt about the concept of a rite of passage – where societies had certain ceremonies to mark a moment in a person’s life and through this, they changed their status – became a different person. The obvious ones, of course, are birth, marriage and death, but the ones we seemed to focus most on in our studies were the coming-of-age or initiation ceremonies that marked a child’s move into adulthood.
If you have ever watched the National Geographic channel or seen any of Bruce Parry’s series Tribe, you will be familiar with why this might be the case. Many of these ceremonies involve some kind of isolation, a dangerous journey, immense pain or mind-altering drugs – and often a combination of all four. With all that and a good party to top it off, it certainly makes for very good telly – and I guess back in the day, the mere thought of putting your hands in gloves full of stinging ants or having sensitive parts of your body lopped off was enough to stop us sleeping in lectures.
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Browsing the Internet now, though, it seems that rites of passage have become rather more diffuse and certainly less dramatic. A quick Google throws up the following examples:
summer internships have become a rite of passage for college students
regulatory maxes (whatever they are! ) have become a rite of passage for start-ups
instant sell-outs have become a rite of passage for big stars (It’s a hard life …)
school proms have become a rite of passage for teenagers
the ice bath has become a rite of passage for runners
orthodontic braces have become a rite of passage for many kids
owning a boat seems to have become a rite of passage within the past few years
writing your first email has become a rite of passage for Generation Z
double eyelid surgery has become a rite of passage for many South Korean youths
publishing a book has become a rite of passage for chefs
Rites of passage here seem to have been reduced to a bad experience; a somewhat painful stage you go through; the first time you do something (writing an email! ); a sign that you have made it; or simply something you bought (owning a boat?! ). In most cases, we seem to have also forgotten about the party altogether!
So what’s going on? Well, maybe one reason for all of this is that we are a rather more fragmented society these days compared to the tribal groups I studied in anthropology. Rather than everyone being uniform and doing the same things at the same moment in the same ways, people demand individuality. Additionally, we are also forming smaller groups (celebrity chefs, for example! ) which have their own rites for entry. Alongside that, we maybe don’t celebrate some of those more major steps in life as much, especially when people have lost their religion: people often don’t get married at all or if they do, they just pop into a registry office and tie the knot with as little fuss as possible; if you have a baby, you just get a few cards to congratulate you; someone dies – maybe you pull on your black suit or dress for the funeral and that’s more or less it. If we place less significance on these events, then perhaps it’s easier to see greater significance in others.
In a series for Channel 4, the artist Grayson Perry mourned this state of affairs and suggested we should try to re-imagine rites of passage around birth, coming-of-age, marriage and death and imbue them with more meaning. Perry drew on anthropology himself as one of the field’s great lessons is that there are many ways of celebrating these things and nothing has to be set in stone. Alternatively, perhaps we could make more of these newer rites of passage. Maybe those young people who have never written an email should have to walk barefoot down a corridor covered in drawing pins in order to get to their office. Their first message could then be to invite all their colleagues to a party paid for out of their first pay cheque! I can’t see it happening, but it would at least rate as a proper rite of passage.
Discuss
Can you think of any other words or phrases that have changed meaning or are becoming overused and meaningless?
Which of the Google examples are closest to the original idea of a rite of passage? In what way?
How much are the traditional rites of passage celebrated where you are? Have you celebrated any of them? How?
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