The passage compares the radically different worlds depicted by Orwell in his “1984” and by Aldous Huxley in his “Brave New World.” Both novels show an Earth whose inhabitants have been rendered helpless and brainwashed, and are considered the quintessential dystopian novels. The term Big Brother, after all, was coined by Orwell for his novel. Yet they depict a radically different approach to enslave humankind.

I’ll leave you to the word of Postman and to the wonderful, if not a little spine-chilling, imagery of McMillen.

What Orwell feared where those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one would want to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would reduced to passivity and egotism.

Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in “Brave New World Revisited”, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “Failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
In “Brave New World”, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that that what we love will ruin us.

It is worth noting that Huxley, 26 years after publishing his novel and with World War II having happened in between, wrote an essay entitled “Brave New World Revisited”, in which he analyzes how correct he was in his prior assumptions.

Both novels, and possibly also Huxley’s and Postman’s essays mentioned above, should be — in my humble opinion — read by anybody who has any interest in the future of humanity, even though it might mean having to deal with uncomfortable truths.

Technology is seen as something to be feared, rather than embraced. Something new comes along, and people of all ages — including part of the youth — will complain that it’s unnecessarily complicated, that things worked just as fine before, and that “back then” nobody was forced to learn anything new. I have wondered why people think this way for a few years now, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with history.

Even today, a hundred and fifty-one years after the unification of the country, most Italians don’t really feel like they are Italian. They are more likely to label themselves as coming from a certain region, city or even neighborhood. The North has been blabbering about independence for decades now, and the South is still stuck in the grip of organized crime, the mafia and its cousins sometimes being more popular and better-considered than the State. Indeed, the roots for such criminal organizations can be traced back to the bandits who fought against the forced “Northernization” of the peninsula — more specifically, the so-called Piemontesizzazione, as the first King of Italy just exported the bulk of Piemontese laws to the rest of the newborn country — immediately after the unification.

In a sense, that’s why Italians still today consider “the State” to be inherently evil and that it should leave people alone instead of meddling with their lives. You seldom find someone who thinks that s/he, as a citizen, is him/herself part of “the State”. Rather, most people will complain about “the State” and, why not?, rip it off if possible: after all, from their point of view it’s just reciprocation.

For this reason, each and every change is perceived as preposterous, required by the evil State for the sole reason of complicating the citizens’ life, not unlike the way a big, seemingly almighty cat plays with a tiny mouse solely for its own amusement.

But it’s with technology that Italians show their chronic opposition to change. Most people over 50 have no clue whatsoever about computers. Unless they are introduced to them by some younger member of the family, or through some mandatory course on their workplace, most senior citizens will be completely oblivious to computers. Even among those who do use them, most of them will remain antagonistic to the machine.
Even more worrying is the fact that many young people are virtually as uninterested to computers as such, save for the fields in which they are deemed useful from their point of view: (illegal) file sharing, homework (and plagiarism), social networking, porn and the like. The interesting thing here is that the same young people spend most of their time with a smartphone in their hands, yet refuse to learn the basics of computing. I personally know an eighteen-year-old who claims that she never really learned how to use a computer because she never found a use for them.

Most of my foreign readers are probably shocked at this point, but see, the sad truth is that in Italy the internet is not necessary to carry on with your daily life. Nobody expects you to have an email address, or to submit documents online. I know doctors who proudly take note of their appointments on a dear old paper calendar, rather than using a computer, an iPad, a smartphone or even a measly electronic “data bank” from the 90s. They are completely oblivious to the capabilities that a digital system can provide — such as keeping an easily searchable long-term log of appointments, or cross-referencing notes — because they are not familiar with the possibilities, and even if they were, they wouldn’t want to spend/waste any time learning how to use the system.

In this country, most companies don’t even have a one-page website. Those who do, seldom update it; it quickly turns into a stale flyer, but they don’t care. Who goes to the website, anyway? After all, if clients want some information they’d better just call: writing to a company’s e-mail address almost invariably results into never receiving a reply, or immediately receiving a notification that the recipient’s mailbox is full, a clear sign that it’s been left unchecked for the longest time.

When it comes to money, Italians’ fear for change goes into overdrive. Given the incredible level of corruption in the country, there have been feeble attempts at reducing the maximum amount that can be paid in cash, forcing any higher-value transaction to be carried out through means that leave a trail. Recently, this limit has been lowered to a thousand euros. One would expect that the strongest opposition to this would come from lobbying entrepreneurs, but no: the ones who complained the most were retired senior citizens. The new limit would prevent those among them who make enough (and the numbers are getting fewer and fewer) from picking up their whole pension in cash in a single visit to the post office. Of course, having it deposited to a checking account would solve the problem immediately, but many people in Italy do not have a checking account altogether, in part due to the fact that they have the highest fees in all of Europe. Indeed, many people only open up one when they are required to, such as when their employers insist that they are paid with a direct deposit, or when they need to purchase a house and need a mortgage.
Credit card usage is also lower than most of Europe, as many people simply don’t trust them (or lack access to them, if they have no checking account). I know people who only use them at ATMs to withdraw cash, which — albeit useful in emergencies — is quite a silly thing: why not just use them directly to pay in stores?

When I read that Sweden is starting to consider the wholesale (pun intended) elimination of cash as most Swedes use other means of payments and micropayments, I was stunned. That will never happen here. The people, the commoners if you will, would object too strongly, failing to see that it would actually lead to a greater accountability that would reduce most of the corruption. It would not make it entirely impossible to use money for bribes, of course, but it would require more careful planning than just not releasing an invoice or a giving out a receipt to clients. That alone would be an immense improvement, but then again, it requires a paradigm shift that most people are simply not willing to take out of laziness, rather than out of genuine concerns about privacy and tracking.

About a month ago, my region switched off all analog TV transmissions, finally entering the all-digital era. This was supposed to happen two years ago, but it kept being postponed over and over, in part due to the political agenda, and in part due to the fear that people would not be able to survive — metaphorically speaking, of course — the switch. It’s not hard: if you have a new TV, you’re already set; if not, you need to get a cheap converter box that you connect between the antenna and the TV. In some cases, as ironically happened to my very own household, you may need to call and pay a technician to replace and/or re-aim your antenna to improve reception. The government, years ago, even started a controversial campaign that allowed people to buy converter boxes at a discount, effectively semi-subsidizing the purchase of these devices. Yet, even today, many people are incredibly confused about the whole matter, and the refrain is always the same: why does my grandma need to learn how to use a converter box with a different remote? why does my grandpa have to spend money to get his antenna replaced? And mind you, these are the same people who complain that there’s nothing on TV. They may have to shell out some cash in some cases (though for most households the expense is simply the cost of the digital receiver, which retails for prices as low as €15), but they would get many more channels to watch for free after that. In most cases, moreover, the switch would be so simple that any nephew or grand-daughter can explain the eldest how to proceed.
The people who complain about how “the government did this to make us spend more money” (without realizing that the money spent, if any, goes to private companies, such as stores and antenna technicians) also fail to realize that the frequencies that get released will be auctioned off for mobile broadband, which will improve the availability of Internet access in areas currently not covered by DSL.

But, then again, who needs the Internet in Italy? The “Internet use in households and by individuals in 2011” report by Eurostat tells a fairly discouraging tale. A note for non-Europeans: “EU27” refers to the whole European Union, which includes 27 Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) as opposed to “Eurozone”, which refers to the 17 Member States currently using the Euro as their currency.

Whereas 73% of the households in the EU27 had Internet access in 2011 and broadband availability was at 68%, only 62% of Italian households have Internet access and barely 52% have broadband. This is in stark contrast with other Western European countries such as France (76% and 70%, respectively), Belgium (77% and 74%), Germany (83% and 78%) or the Netherlands (94% and 83%.) What’s most amazing is that Greece jumped from 25% and 7% in 2007 to 50% and 45% in 2011, and Romania jumped from 22% and 8% to 47% and 31% during the same time span. Italy’s increase is still remarkable (43% and 25% to 62% and 52%), but we remain steadily behind the average.

It gets worse when the actual usage of the Internet, rather than its bare availability in households, is taken into account. An average of 71% of EU27 citizens used the Internet within the 3 months before the survey, 73% used the Internet within the 12 months before the survey, and 24% never used the Internet. The report doesn’t state whether this means never used it at all, or never used it within the past 12 months; in any case, this is only marginally relevant for the sake of the analysis.
In Italy, only 54% used the Internet within the last 3 months and 57% within the last 12 months, while 39% never did. Comparatively, in France these values are 78%, 80% and 19% respectively, in Germany they are 81%, 83% and 16%. Scandinavian countries lead the chart, with Sweden chiming in at 93%, 94% and 5%, and Norway at 93%, 94% and 5%. Iceland shows an even higher Internet penetration, but I’m concentrating on mainland Europe here.

The important fact here is the number of people who never used the Internet. Italy’s value is 39%, the highest in Western Europe after Greece (45%) and Portugal (41%), while the EU27 average is 24%. That’s almost half as much.
Moreover, only 51% of Italians access the Internet at least once a week and only 49% do so daily, while in Germany these values are 77% and 63% respectively. Unsurprisingly, 82% of Norwegian users access the Internet daily, and 91% do so weekly.

Italians are also not very keen on purchasing goods or services over the Internet. Compared to an EU27 average of 43% over the past 12 months, only 15% of Italians carried out economic transactions over the web. This is an incredibly lower value compared to France’s 53%, Germany’s 64%, the Netherlands’ 69% and Norway’s 73%.
The report doesn’t tell the reasons for this negative achievement, but I think I can elaborate a little bit on that. As I’ve said in the first part of this article, Italians are somewhat afraid of change and are particularly opposed to payment methods other than cash. However, while you can enter a store and pay with notes and coins, you cannot do so over the Internet unless you choose cash-on-delivery options, which are normally more expensive. This, together with the ancestral fear of frauds, lack of widespread Internet access — Italy had one of the strictest law on public wi-fi that simply killed the so-called “Internet cafés” —, generalized computer illiteracy, very high shipping costs and incredibly complicated bureaucracy, effectively hinders any possibility of widespread adoption of electronic commerce. This is not to say that e-shops cannot thrive in Italy; many of them do (and I have first-hand experience of this, because in 2008 and 2009 I worked in a small store that also sold its products online), but most of the buyers are usually returning customers. It’s hard to make a company grow in such an environment, and online businesses shut down daily.

All of this unfortunately triggers a chain reaction: since few people use the Internet and therefore few people will buy online, few companies will be eager to make business online (and the few public authorities will invest in letting users deal with them over the web, given the investment required and the current state of the economy.)

In the EU27, 41% of people interacted with public authorities over the Internet in the last 12 months, but only 22% did so in Italy. The pattern repeats again: France chimes in at 57%, the Netherlands at 62% and Norway at 74%.
Italy’s percentage is only about half of the average, and that’s frankly not surprising. Our bureaucracy is so heavy and complex that moving even if new material were handled digitally, old certificates will probably never be transposed to the 21st century.

Again, I can provide first-hand experience: my parents live in Chieti but they married in my mother’s town, Vasto, which is located about 75 kilometers away. They need a marriage certificate, and the only way to have it is to go to the city hall in Vasto and request it there. There is simply no way to request it at the local city hall and have them get it via fax or something like that, let alone obtaining it directly online. Moreover, since it’s a semi-private act, the request cannot be delegated to some relative who lives there, so they have to be there in person. The most ironic part of this is that not only this will take the better part of a day and money to pay for gas and highway tolls, but the certificate itself will not even be free. But, once again, since very few people would request this kind of data online, there is no reason for public authorities to invest into a massive digital upgrade.

This whole chain reaction leads to an unpleasant conclusion: one of the reasons for Italy’s economy downfall is this country’s inability to change and become modern by embracing technology. What’s even sadder is seeing hordes of youths, the same youths who fiddle with their parents-funded smartphones all day long, puzzled in front of a computer screen. How can we expect things to improve if our future doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs are confused by paragraph styles in word processors?

If, after reading this post, you decide to purchase a Kindle, please do so using the links at the bottom; that way, you support this blog’s costs and expenses.

I cannot provide side-by-side comparisons because I sold the Opus before receiving the Kindle, but I used it for the last year and a half, so I am very familiar with its merits and its shortcomings.

The first thing I noticed is the screen. In addition to being slightly bigger, six inches versus the Opus’s five, the e-ink technology is – not surprisingly – better. The Kindle supports 16 shades of grey rather than the Opus’s 4, and the background looks brighter and the text darker. It is worth pointing out that while the Kindle’s screen is bigger, it is theoretically less sharp because the resolution is the same (800 x 600 pixels). In practice, however, the Kindle still appears better due to the improved technology, dubbed “e-ink pearl.” Amazon shows it off to great effect by employing detailed (and no doubt optimized) pictures as screensavers when the reader is not in use.

A big difference between the Opus (and I imagine most “third-party” readers) and the Kindle lies in the file handling. The Opus acted essentially as a file manager, listing the actual folders on the flash storage and the files therein. The Kindle, on the other hand, has a stronger “iTunes-y” attitude: it indexes the files and shows them all together, but it does allow for the creation of “collections” which are akin to playlists rather than bookshelves, as the same book can be placed in more than one collection.

Adjusting to the reading experience required a little bit of effort for me. Whereas the Opus allows to move through the pages using the two buttons on the side or the left/right buttons of the d-pad, the Kindle has two sets of buttons on the sides (which are easier to press than the Opus’s, but also easier to press by mistake), and the left/right buttons of the d-pad move through chapters. This was somewhat unsettling at first, since I found the buttons on the side of the Opus to be quite stiff and often just used the d-pad.

Having a set of buttons on each side, however, makes it easier. I wound up finding that the most comfortable position for me is holding it with my left hand, so that I can also press the forward page button with my left thumb (once again proving that nobody is completely left- or right handed!) One thing to notice: holding the button down does not trigger continuous page-turning. Given that it’s easy to accidentally press them, this is actually a good thing.

At any moment, as shown in the picture above, it’s possible to show a cursor by pressing up or down on the d-pad, and then browsing to any word. This shows a dictionary entry for the word in question (the Kindle comes preloaded with dictionaries in English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and German) and, by simply pressing the center button, it’s possible to obtain a full definition, create a note or highlight some text.

The dictionaries are top quality, and do not require an internet connection since they are local to the device. As an extra bonus, the dictionaries are not only searchalbe using the on-screen keyboard (which is brought up using the dedicated button, and is the only frustrating trait of an otherwise wonderful device), but it’s possible to use the cursor to follow links or, recursively, look any other word up. It’s pretty neat.

Visual settings can be tweaked as necessary. While the Opus allowed the usage of any TrueType font and provided a dazzling 12 different font sizes, the Kindle aims for a standard experience with only three fonts (and no possibility to use custom ones) and 8 font sizes. The default font is quite thick and increases the awesomeness of the screen even further, but there’s a condensed version of it and a sans-serif typeface for those who prefer it. It is also possible to change the line spacing and, by operating on the “words per line” setting, the side margins. I suppose that this is for those who prefer to have a side grip on the device and risk eclipsing part of the text with their thumbs. Four different screen rotation positions are available, but there is no accelerometer so it has to be changed manually.

Highlights, notes and bookmarks can be quickly accessed using the relevant function while reading a book. Highlights and notes from all books are also kept in a special “book” called “My clippings”, which contains all of them in a slightly confusing syntax that vaguely appears to be following an unspecified style manual.

A very interesting feature is the ability to purchase magazines. While I haven’t attempted to subscribe to any, these are supposed to be delivered wirelessly to your device (more on that later). An example can be had by using Instapaper’s Kindle Wireless Delivery extra (free), which shows how articles are divided in sections, though only one in this case. Since the Kindle is an internet-aware device, it’s particularly well suited to reading contents archived on Instapaper, since the “archive” link at the end of each article can be followed easily to let the website know that the article should be taken out of the way.

Indeed, a very neat function that is only possible thanks to the data infrastructure Amazon has is that virtually anything can be delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. When registering the device, you are given an email address to which you can send files (unencrypted mobi ebooks, PDFs, etc.) which are bounced back to your Kindle via wireless within 10-15 minutes. Moreover, every other Kindle device you have registered under the same account – and that also includes the Kindle for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac / PC apps – are able to download the same contents and synchronize highlights, notes, and the last read page.

Perhaps the “killer app” for the Kindle is the huge bookstore that’s available not just on Amazon’s site, but from the device itself. It’s literally two button taps away, and at the time of writing the Italian store has 17,504 books in Italian and 992,470 books in other languages, and from what I can see, all of them let you download a short sample to help you decide whether you want to spend money on it or not. It’s incredible. It is true that you end up locking yourself into Amazon’s DRM cage, but it’s also true that you can read these books on any Kindle device, including mobile phones and computers, and you get all the synchronization goodies I mentioned before (though they are available on any file, provided it’s sent to the personal Kindle address assigned to you; files loaded via USB will not support such features because they are not “known” by the Amazon synchronization servers.)

Indeed, I can’t even describe how elated the “furthest page read” synchronization makes me. I can read a book at home on my Kindle, then pick it up on my iPhone when I’m somewhere else just where I had left it. And when I get back to my actual Kindle, I can resume my reading from wherever I had arrived on the iPhone. It’s very, very, very neat.

All in all, I am extremely satisfied by the Kindle. The only missing thing is a cover, but that’s something that can be purchased separately and I definitely plan to get one after the holidays. Would I go back to the Opus or another “third-party” reader? Not at this stage. While it’s true that you find more material in epub format, the free software Calibre does a great job of converting unencrypted epub to mobi. Moreover, most DRM-free stores also provide mobi files directly, and the huge assortment from the Kindle Store makes it a non-issue anyway.

If you are interested in purchasing a Kindle, please do so by using the relevant link for your country:

First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it”. I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create Universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second – every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods, if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on – get over me. I did.

God

(I didn’t write this; I found on the web, but I wholeheartedly agree.)

Latin, for instance, is usually deemed to be a dead language, but this is not the case. To begin with, Latin is still the official language of the Vatican, and while catholic functions have been in local languages since 1964, papal documents continue to be redacted in Latin to this day. Moreover, while there are no native Latin speakers, there are hundreds of millions of people whose native language is directly derived from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian; these are usually called “romance” or “neo-latin” languages. The word romance has unfortunately nothing to do with feelings, and is rather a reference to roman. Ancient Romans did, in fact, spread the usage of Latin around the world.

The evolution of languages is usually caused by their speakers’ movement across the globe: as populations mix, so do their languages. The best example of this is probably Romanian, whose name betrays a Latin origin even though it’s geographically distant from the area where its cousins are spoken. Indeed, the novice might find it surprising that Romanian is indeed a romance language, considering how the Balkan area separates its speakers’ pool from Western Europe, but linguistic evolution, like any other cultural trait, requires taking into account the bigger picture. The area then known as Dacia was inglobated by the Roman empire in 106 CE, but stayed a Roman province until until 271 CE, when the Goths conquered it. During those 165 years, vulgar Latin set its roots in the area, but was then polluted by subsequent linguistic interferences. Modern Romanian shows a striking mix of Latin and Slavic traits, the most immediate of which are postfix articles: EN lake, ES/PT/IT lago, FR lac, RO lac — EN the lake, ES el lago, PT o lago, IT il lago, FR le lac, RO lacul.

The more a geographic area is conquered by different populations, the more intermixed the local language will become, as it draws from all of them. Even more fascinating than Romanian is Maltese, which inherits from Italian, Sicilian, English and Arabic. Written Maltese can look to the untrained eye like a mishmash of random letters. This is how the first article of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights looks like in Maltese:

Il-bnedmin kollha jitwieldu ħielsa u ugwali fid-dinjità u d-drittijiet. Huma mogħnija bir-raġuni u bil-kuxjenza u għandhom igibu ruħhom ma’ xulxin bi spirtu ta’ aħwa.

A recording can be found here (courtesy of Omniglot.) It definitely sounds more Arabic than anything else.

The fact that languages differ over time as the distance increases can be proven by Portuguese, specifically its Brazilian variety. Whereas European Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, to the point that they are almost mutually intelligible in writing, its South American counterpart is so different that some consider it to be an entirely different language, much more so than American English is to British English. The most striking structural distinction is that most Brazilian Portuguese dialects lost the second singular pronoun tu in favor of você (originally vossa mercê, ie. “your grace”, akin to Spanish usted), which is conjugated with third singular person verbs but is used informally. Interestingly, a similar pronoun, vos, is also used in several South American varieties of Spanish, especially those in areas geographically close to Brazil.

Languages generally evolve by simplification, as can easily be seen comparing the complex case system of Latin with modern romance languages, none of which use cases other than for pronouns. Moreover, language evolve under one’s own eyes. When I went to elementary school twenty years ago, the informal yet very common construction a me mi, as in a me mi piace was considered a serious mistake because it implied repeating the same thing twice. While it is not something that one would use in writing, it has become accepted in all but the most formal settings. (Note that the correspondent Spanish construction, a mí me gusta, actually requires the repetition.) A similar thing has happened in English: until a few decades ago, substituting whom (accusative) with who (nominative) in phrases such as I don’t know was considered bad practice; nowadays, it is standard English. Of course, phrases usually used as “whole blocks,” such as for whom the bell tolls or to whom it may concern, are likely to retain the original inflection for much longer. Sometimes the simplification is done by law, usually in the form of spelling reforms. This has recently happened with Greek in 1982 to drop its ancient polytonic orthography, and to German in 1996; the latter wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Many reforms have been suggested for English, but none has ever been attempted. It is worth to remember this satyrical piece, attributed to Mark Twain, about how such a reform could be carried out over the course of at least two decades:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

In some cases, languages do however indeed die without evolving, but a more correct term in this case is “extinction.” Most scholars consider a language to be extinct when it’s no longer used and there are no direct derivatives. Language extinction is closely linked with the story of populations as a whole, and almost always to catastrophic events such as genocide. For instance, Many Native American languages are now extinct, as the people who spoke them were killed during the colonization. The few survivors eventually stopped using them (or were too young and were never taught to speak them) and began using the language of the colonists. In some cases, if the pool of speakers is already small, there may be no push to teach it to other people and they may eventually die and take the language with them. This is the reason behind the attempt, in the recent years, to revive languages and dialects at a concrete risk of disappearing.

As we have seen, language defines culture and identity. When a language becomes extinct, the loss for humanity as a whole is much bigger than a set of grammar rules.

I have already said that language is the foundation of human culture. It is, however, more than that. Language is one of the very few “inner traits” that define the different ethnic groups, that is traits not immediately visually discernible when seeing someone new. Everybody can tell if somebody has a similar ethnic background: Caucasian people look different than African people, or Asian people. Yet, while is it true that a Swedish will probably look different than an Italian, it will be virtually impossible to discern a Spanish and a Portuguese just by looking at them.

Groups defined by a common language

In such cases, and especially when populations mix due to varying borders over the course of history, language effectively define the identity of populations. Not surprising, many stereotypes are based on making fun of how a foreign language sounds and how immigrants speak the local language: in Italy, Asians are often mocked by replacing /r/ with /l/, an obvious reference to the Japanese liquid consonant. More often than not, this is done in good spirit, as is the inevitable attempt to have foreigners pronounce words that contain sounds that they are not familiar with. When in the UK, my group caused immense frustration in the activity leader who tried to pronounce “biglietto.” This is all usually done in good spirit today, yet in war times a similar technique has been used as a way to detect potential spies.

Sometimes, even in the modern day, a language is used as a common trait by a group and used to differentiate given group by others. Such is the case of Catalunya, which succeeded in having a top-level domain, .cat, to be made available for websites in Catalan. While this is not uncommon nowadays, with “content-based” top-level domains such as .museum and .aero, it is the first time that a language has been awarded one.

Another case for political unrest that is mostly visible through language is the current state of affairs in Belgium. The country is divided in two main parts: French-speaking Walloon and Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has been struggling to have a strong government since 2007, and while there are deeper cultural and economic differences between the two areas, language is by all means the most prominent and immediate one.

In Northern Italy, homophobic, xenophobic and wannabe-secessionist political group Lega Nord insists that local dialects be taught in schools and used as official languages in public offices, also to mark a clear distinction between the North and the South of the country, and possibly to make it harder for immigrants to integrate, as they would have to pass a dialect test before being granted the permission to dwell in a given town.

It is interesting to note that immigrants from the same area of the world often tend to form clusters. Prime examples of these are the numerous “Chinatowns” and “Little Italy” neighborhoods. This happens not only to get the immediate support that derives from kinship; it is also a way to retain the group’s original culture. How long this lasts is debatable; it is a fact immigrants today are able to keep up with their origins more than immigrants could do just a few decades ago. To this day, respect for foreign cultures is more widespread, as is the ability to stay in touch with the motherland. Back in the day, it was not uncommon for second-generation immigrants to only have a basic knowledge of the family’s native language, even though the accent that came from their first-generation immigrant parents stayed for several more generations, and in some cases it became a distinguishing trait of the specific local group (see for instance the Brooklyn accent.) This kind of accent usually has a much stronger connotation of pride for its speakers compared to “standard” ones such as the Boston dialect.

In other cases, a social class might lay claim on its speech, slang and accent as a way to differentiate itself from the upper, “snob” classes; see for instance the Cockney speech.

Groups within a language

Group identity can, however, also be claimed within a language. Black people, for instance, have been historically referred to by white people using words that had a strong negative connotation, the most common of which is negro. While the origin of the word is not offensive by itself (it simply means “black” in Spanish), it started carrying a negative meaning by the way it was used. Moreover, as the word found its way to different languages and dialects, variations of it appeared; what is interesting is that today the more phonetic transcription nigger or nigga is considered somewhat more offensive than negro.

In any case, modern usage has led to unusual workarounds to be politically correct. Most non-blacks might use the phrase African-American, which of course only applies to black people born in the Americas. In the United Kingdom such phrase would make no sense, and consequently the word black is used without worry, in part because black slavery, or slavery of any groups for that matter, was not as widespread in the UK. (The situation in India, however, was quite different: the possessions of the East India Company was notably exempted from the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.) The race for political correctness in North America about the words used to refer to black people has been exploited for humorous purposes by many comedians, usually replacing black with African-American in unrelated phrases such as “black Friday.”

A very interesting aspect of ethnic and social groups targeted by offensive words is that, over the course of times, members of such groups take on the usage of the same words to refer to one another, in a linguistic phenomenon called reappropriation. This does not mean that the words is decontextualized and cleared for usage by anyone; on the contrary, those who do not belong to the group are discouraged even more from using it. In addition to the original offensive connotation, the now-reappropriated word carries the additional implication that the outsider is mocking both the group and the group’s usage of the word itself. Words that have been reappropriated include most racial and sexual slurs, but can also include words such as nerd or geek. In some cases, some words achieve enough “grammar strength” to be declined: for instance, the word guido (originally used to refer to working-class Italian immigrants in the NY area, from the first name Guido that was probably common at the time) has given birth to the female version guidette.

It is worth noting that members of one group are sometimes allowed to use reappropriated words belonging to other groups or even joking about them, without necessarily sparking harsh reactions from members of the “target” groups. This is clearly visible in Russell Peters’ stand-up comedy. Being the son of first-generation Indian immigrants in Canada, he defines himself as being brown and jokes about how different ethnic groups and their languages are perceived by one another, playing with and effectively demolishing common stereotypes. It is very likely that the same lines would cause controversy if they were uttered by a white man (especially those about Arabs), proving that linguistic reappropriation, and ultimately language, can change the way we relate to one another.

Culture could not exist without language, and not only because we wouldn’t be able to share it with one another. Animals, lacking full languages, are only able to communicate simple pieces of information: there is food over there; a predator is approaching; I am ready to mate. Contrary to popular belief, they do not chit-chat with one another; they are simply relaying basic information. A cat might indicate to one of its kind that it is happy, but will not seek a full conversation with its fellow. They lack the body parts to do so, and are therefore unable to conceive any higher form of communication. This is not unlinke people who are blind from birth: not having ever seen colors, they simply don’t know what color is. It’s an entirely abstract concept to them, much like every human fails to grasp the concept of a fourth dimension. (I strongly recommend reading Edwin A. Abbott’s “Flatland” to get a better idea of the problem.)

Without language, we wouldn’t have any literature, or math, or philosophy, or religions, or politics, or engineering. If we weren’t able to fully communicate and share our thoughts with others, we would be forever stuck in an environment without being able to improve it. Chimpanzees are the most intelligent animals. They are very similar to us, and do have remarkable communication skills compared to most animals, and they are able to use tools. Yet they are not able to do more than what they do. They have no push for innovation. For instance, there are no reports of wild chimpanzees ever attempting to build anything that wasn’t directly targeted at obtaining food. If a chimpanzee had a “human-like” idea, it wouldn’t be able to share it with its fellows, and for all intents and purposes, it would be as if it had not had it. Moreover, we wouldn’t even know, because non-verbal communication has strict limits. Sign language works in humans because we have the innate ability to communicate extensively, and it could be said that muteness is a statistical error: the instinct to communicate is still there. On the other hand, chimpanzees who were taught the sign language were only able to express comparatively simple thoughts.

It would therefore be naïve to limit the idea of language to spoken word, or to a set of grammar rules, or even to a writing system. Language, in itself, is a much broader concept: it’s a foundation upon which we build everything. We are humans not because we have opposable thumbs, or because we walk while standing up. Our very humanity exists because we are able to think about abstract concepts, and we can do that because we have the potential for language.

(Click to enlarge)

It seems to me that the author of the message is not even a native English speaker. The syntax of the phrase is unusual; nobody fluent in the language would say “I do apologise,” unless someone complained about not getting an apology in the first place. Moreover, while “inconvenence,” “mechines” and “workin” might be a direct spelling of the local parlance, there is no way that “apologise” would be written “apploiges.” Misspellings are always homophones or quasi-homophones of the correct attested variants, but “applogies” has an entirely different pronunciation than “apologize.”

What is interesting to note is that the author might however be familiar with the British usage of the ending -ise. The caption of the picture does indeed mention KFC Byker, and Byker is a ward of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. On the other hand, the -s ending in “applogies” might stem from confusion the plural ending; even in that case, though, the unlikely singular “applogy” was pluralized correctly, rather than turning into “applogys.”

Also note that the author has no problems writing shorter words such as “about,” “thank,” “but” and the never-mistreated-enough “are,” which oftentimes magically turns into “our.” It is indeed a fact that shorter words are more easily remembered, at least because they tend to be more common. In any case, I am entirely unable to guess where the author of the sign might be from.

In any case, rather than the misspellings, what I find annoying is the comment of the person who posted (and presumably took) the picture: “The intelligence levels at kfc byker are sooo high! Lmfaooo.” The person who wrote the sign is ignorant, in that he or she doesn’t know English well enough, but talking about lack of intelligence is a bold and inappropriate claim at least. That might make sense (from the point of view of logic) only in case someone keeps making the same spelling mistakes over and over, even after being instructed properly.

The line between completely different concepts should not be crossed. Intelligence and ignorance are not the same. Saying so — or implying so — is not only Orwellian, but also plain wrong. At least the person who misspelled the sign is likely a foreigner and can be excused!

For the sake of simplicity, I will assume that your reader is able to read ePub and PDF files and supports the Adobe Digital Editions DRM for both formats. Most readers can however be reprogrammed to support Mobi files, however, but I personally suggest to stick with ePub.

Free e-books

Free e-books are usually classic works whose copyright has expired, and are therefore in the public domain. Without delving into deep the deeper meaning of this, the practical effect is that they can be freely republished and spread. It should be noted, however, that different countries have different copyright regulations, and it may very well be that a specific work is in the public domain in one country but still under copyright in another. Care should be taken not to infringe the local regulation.

Most books written over a hundred years ago are in the public domain, and many of them can be found in ePub format. While Project Gutenberg has an experimental ePub output format, its internals are still based on simple text files that contain the whole book as a single, uninterrupted flow. This can be acceptable, but there are better options out there.

Enter Feedbooks, my personal favorite. With thousands of books at the time of writing, there is something for everybody. The site is split in two sections: public domain and original books. Many of the ones in the public domain are actually imported from Project Gutenberg and fixed to take advantage of the unique features of real e-books: table of contents, clear chapter marking, and so on. If you are going for classics, look no further. Original books, on the other hand, are recent books made available for free by their authors. Indeed, Feedbooks also doubles as an online self-publishing platform for writers. There are some gems hiding in there, so don’t dismiss the idea of reading stuff by unknown authors!

Another interesting source is Manybooks, which carries many books also carried by Feedbooks, but also adds some from other sources.

Using unencrypted e-books is as simple as dragging and dropping the .epub files onto the memory of the e-book reader, or using a specific software such as Calibre. I will not review the latter, though, as there are many other websites explaining how it works in great detail.

Paid e-books

More recent books, such as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” (or Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight”, if you are that kind of person) are — obviously — not available for free.

There are many online stores online that carry e-books in many formats, and that is a good thing, because you can sometimes find different prices. The downside is that, even if you have a favorite bookstore, you may still have to hunt around to find one that will be able to sell what you are looking for. Publishers, unfortunately, are stuck in the “regional limitation” paradigm: just like you can’t watch an European DVD in an American DVD player (unless you force it), you can’t purchase e-books targeted at a given area of the world if you are in another. In the case of e-books, this is even more frustrating than dealing with DVDs, because there is no artificial technical limitation. The difficulty is in getting hold of the file itself, since the issue arises during the check-out process.

That said, once you purchase an ePub with Adobe Digital Editions DRM (from now on: ADE), or a PDF with ADE, you will be presented with a very small .acsm file. The Adobe Digital Editions software — which you will have to have already installed and configured at that point — will open it and proceed to download the actual books and decrypt it. It will then be able to upload it to your actual e-book reader, if you have previously authorized it from within the ADE application.

My favorite e-book store is, without a shadow of a doubt, eBookPie. In addition to having a bunch of e-books of all kinds (with many being added daily), the site’s interface is very sleek and easy to navigate. Unlike many competitors, one distinguishing feature is the ability to limit search queries — or any other book listing, for that matter — by device or format.

My e-book reader, for instance, can open ePubs and PDF files, both encrypted and unencrypted. I can choose “Sony Reader” from the “Narrow by” dropdown box (it can read the same formats as the Cybook Opus), and I will not be presented with books that I wouldn’t be able to read. That’s more useful than it may seem, because most publishers are still getting the hang of electronic distribution and might only have their materials in formats that won’t work with your equipment.

It should be noted that “Adobe Digital Editions” and “Adobe ePub” are two different beasts: the former is a PDF file encrypted with ADE, while the latter is an ePub file encrypted with ADE. If possible, go for the latter. PDFs are not reflowable, and it may be slightly more difficult to read them without having to navigate actual pages. ePub files, on the other hand, are reflowable and your reader will build the pages itself, without forcing you to see half-pages or other monstrosities like that. In my experience, though, e-books in PDF format tend to have smaller pages than the full-fledged A4 or Letter paper sizes, so it’s not that bad. Not as good as ePubs, though.

There is, however, one reason that makes eBookPie stand out and crush the competition like an elephant does with an anthill. (I really hope PETA doesn’t come after this for such a comparison.) The reason is simple: outstanding, top-notch support.

When I first tried purchasing an e-book from eBookPie, on Friday night last week, I had some issues with the check-out process. I sent an email to tech support, asking whether it was indeed possible to buy files from Italy. Less than half an hour later, a very kind reply came from Ms. Jill Tomich, who asked me to provide additional information about the problem. This led to an exchange of messages back and forth, and the problem was ultimately fixed the next morning. Note that all of this happened between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning their time, and the whole exchange was extremely friendly. I have said in my previous post that Bookeen’s support was incredibly good, and that was true. eBookPie‘s support, however, is a million times better. I was utterly amazed by how much care an employee gave to a new customer who was just trying to buy a $1.66 e-book (yes, that’s one dollar and sixty-six cents). Now imagine my surprise when I noticed that Ms. Jill Tomich is not any employee: she is the co-founder and CEO of eBookPie. The CEO. Taking my $1.66 purchase so seriously that she followed up with me on a Saturday morning. She even sent me a discount coupon as a way to apologize for the trouble. She rocks, and the company she co-founded will grow huge.

See, it may appear that I am easily amazed, but in this case it’s absolutely worth it. Here in Italy, customers are seldom taken care of, and certainly not in such a friendly way and by someone at such a high level in a company. You are generally just another wallet to squeeze, and aggressive marketing has replaced customer care entirely. It’s all about quantity, not quality; so who cares if someone is disappointed and leaves? With companies such as Bookeen, and especially eBookPie, the approach is completely difference: you end up being so satisfied that you go back to purchase from them and you tell everybody else that they are great. That’s why I have made every single occurrence of the name eBookPie a link: they absolutely deserve it. Trust me, they are great!

Oh, and did I mention that they carry over 250,000 titles? Two hundred fifty thousand titles. Yep. You’d better be a cat, because one lifetime just won’t be enough to read them all.

In one of the following posts I will talk about a peculiar use of e-book readers: interactivity.

1. They are not backlit, therefore you need ambient light to see what’s on them
2. They do not require power to keep the image up
3. Their refresh rate is abysmal
4. They do not yet come in color, and they’re quite lame at showing gray too

So, you may wonder, why even consider buying something like this? That’s very simple: the things I mentioned above are the points of strength of these devices, not their weaknesses: it’s all about what you use these screens for. I am going to briefly go through those perveiced problems.

No backlight means no eye strain, period. You do indeed need ambient light for the screen to be readable, but then again you don’t read a book in the dark, do you?

The lack of backlight and the technology used also means that the battery life is extremely long: the batteries are only used momentarily when the screen is redrawn; in other words, the device is sleeping while you read a page, and only wakes up to turn the page. That’s why e-book readers’ battery life is commonly measured in thousands of pages, rather than in hours of operation.

E-ink screens, however, require a full refresh of the page (white → black → white → draw the text) to change the page, in order to avoid an effect called “ghosting,” which causes a hint of the previous page to vaguely persist. This problem, the lack of color, and the bare ability to go beyond a handful of shades of gray means that video won’t come to this technology before 2013 or so.

However, these devices are just great for reading standard books, such as novels. They are lightweight, long-lasting, clear and crisp, and the books themselves are usually very tiny in size: most of them barely reach one megabyte in size, and most devices have at least 1 GB of internal memory.

For more details about the technology itself, please read the page on Wikipedia. It comes with pretty pictures.