Superhuman Brits and confusing commentary at the Olympics －オリンピックでの超人的な英国人と分かりにくい解説－

How have the Olympics been for you?

It turns out that my country is a nation of superhumans.  That has been nice to know.  Britain is currently second in the Olympic medal table.  With a population of around 65 million, we are ahead of China.  Who said that Brexit would be an economic and cultural disaster?  Actually, I think I did.  Well, the Olympics are showing that we still have some energy in Britain after all.

But on the other hand, I have found it quite difficult to enjoy most Olympic events.  Without being able to see the impressive sight of powerful athletes, or graceful gymnasts, or at least the weird sight of synchronised swimmers, I am left listening to the commentary.

I can enjoy listening to football commentary.  A good commentator can paint a picture of the players’ movements and the flow of a complicated game.  For example: Maradona has the ball on the left wing.  He flicks the ball past the full-back and makes it to the by-line.  He whips in a cross...  Can Pele get on the end of it?  He jumps with Beckenbauer.  And he bullets a header into the top left corner of the goal, past the hand of the despairing goalkeeper Banks!

In contrast, how would a commentator describe Olympic events?  Can you even work out which event the commentator is describing? 

1
Bang!  They’re running.  They’re running.  They’re running.  And it’s all over!  Jamaica win the gold!

2
He could hit a really big nail with that!  Now he’s starting to spin.  He’s going round and round.  He lets go.  Thud!  Okay, here comes the man with the tape measure. 

3
Boing!  There she goes.  She has jumped quite high.  Boing!  This time a jump and a twist.  Boing!  This time a jump and a flip.  Boing!  A jump and a back-flip.  Boing!  Oh, no.  She moved her leg.  The judges won’t like that.

4
She runs up.  She does the funny little dance and jump.  And she as landed in the sand.  She looks pleased.

5

The two competitors take one final look at each other.  Now they get ready to jump, bouncing gently on the board.  There they go.  Splash!  Oh, my.  Should the water be that green colour? 

Perhaps you can see how difficult it is to enjoy the Olympics from the commentary alone!  But enjoy the rest of the events.  And well done to all the medallists, especially the superhuman ones.

 

Vocabulary:

Brexit – British exit from the European Union

a gymnast – Someone who does gymnastics, or indoor events using mats, trampolines, springboards, parallel bars etc.

synchronised – of events, clocks, actions etc., arranged so that they occur at the same time

boing – the sound of something bouncing
 

Events:

1 – The 100m sprint

2 – The hammer throw

3 – The trampoline

4 – The triple jump

5 – The synchronised diving.  Due to a mistake when cleaning, the pool turned green at this year’s event.

 

 

Follow the past masters, but not too closely －名人を真似ろ、ただしそっくり過ぎるのはダメ－

1 - It is the best of creative times, it is the worst of creative times

So much great work has been written in the past that we have run out of new ideas, and writers are forced to shamelessly borrow from successful works of the past.

For evidence of this you need only look at the increasing number of lawsuits for plagiarism in the music world recently.  American band Spirit unsuccessfully sued Led Zeppelin over the similarity of parts of the famous hit “Stairway to Heaven” to their own song, “Taurus”.  Ed Sheeran is facing two separate lawsuits over plagiarism.  The most recent one claims that he copied large sections of Marvin Gaye’s hit, “Let’s get it on” in his own hit, “Thinking out loud”.

2 - Someone must have slandered Jimmy P., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was sued

Jimmy Page, the guitarist in the band Led Zeppelin successfully defended the band from the charges of plagiarism in an American court.  But even though he won, the band will still have to pay their own 600,000 dollars in legal fees.

It has always been difficult for musicians and writers to make money from their work.  It used to be record companies and publishers that kept most of the profits.  Now that they are also having difficulties, it is the lawyers who smell the chance for a profit.

3 - Successful writers are all alike.  Every unsuccessful writer is unsuccessful in their own way

Although Led Zeppelin won their lawsuit, it is interesting to note the reason that they won.  It was not because the jury decided the tracks were not alike.  It was because the similar parts are also like sections of lots of other songs.  Led Zeppelin successfully argued that they were not copying a single track, but were following a long copied tradition.  Perhaps Ed Sheeran will make the same argument.

If so many successful creative works become popular by closely following long copied patterns, perhaps to find something truly original you should look at unsuccessful works and unknown writers instead.  You would never find me borrowing sentences from famous creative works of the past!

Vocabulary:

shamelessly – without embarrassment or shame

a lawsuit – a legal dispute taken to a court to be decided

plagiarism – The illegal copying of another person’s work

to sue – to take legal action against; to bring to court

to slander – to say unfair or untrue things that damage someone’s reputation

a jury – a group of citizens who decide if someone is guilty or innocent in a trial

 

1 – Title adapted from the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ “A tale of two cities”

2 – Title adapted from the opening lines of Franz Kafka’s “The trial”

3 – Title adapted from the opening lines of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”

Shame on you －恥を知れ－

Being shamed in front of a crowd of onlookers can be very painful.  Picture yourself making a mistake at work and your boss pulling you into his office to criticise you.  Now picture your boss waiting for a large meeting to criticise you in front of all your colleagues.  How much worse would that be?  And what if your boss could record your shaming and broadcast it all around the world?

An innocent English teacher was once shamed in a minor way in front of his class of Japanese students.  At the end of the lesson, he turned to a pretty female student, smiled and said, “Have a nice weekend.”

She looked at him somewhat coldly and replied, “Shame on you.”

There was a short silence.  The class wondered why she was so angry.  Did she feel that the teacher was trying to chat her up and was being sleazy?

It turned out that she had actually meant to say, “Same to you,” and had merely misspoken.  But the teacher felt the embarrassment of his public rebuke quite painfully for a moment nonetheless.

I recently finished a book which suggests that much larger scale public shaming is gaining in popularity in the internet age.  The book is “So you’ve been publicly shamed” by Jon Ronson (2015).

Jon Ronson picks out many examples of people who misspoke, or wrote a badly worded or thought out joke, or broke the social rules in some minor way, and who were then subjected to a vicious attack from strangers on the internet.

One example was of an American woman who often travelled on business.  She had a blog with only a few followers in which she would write cynical jokes about the countries she was visiting – joking that she might not find anything to eat in Britain since its food has such a bad reputation, for example.

Just before boarding a plane to South Africa, she joked that she hoped she wouldn’t get AIDS while in the country, but that she probably wouldn’t because she was white.  It’s not a very funny or appropriate joke, but it seems clear that she didn’t mean it seriously.

So when thousands and thousands of people wrote furious messages to her, many people suggested that she should be violently attacked, and she was sacked by her company before her plane even landed, the reaction was disproportionate.

As a writer of a blog who often makes cynical or silly jokes, I felt sympathetic.  Reading the book also made me consider more carefully what I joke about.  For example, a big news story in Japan recently concerns the Emperor.  Many news organisations are reporting that he would like to abdicate.  I wondered whether I could find something in the story to write about before I began to worry that saying something silly about the Emperor might cause people to get angry.  Now you’ll never know my anecdote about seeing the Emperor one day in Kyoto, and what silly thoughts I might have had about it.

You can always read Jon Ronson’s silly anecdotes to keep yourself amused instead.

Vocabulary:

to chat someone up – (informal) to flirt with someone; to make romantic advances towards someone

sleazy – of a person, vulgar or inappropriate, especially someone who makes inappropriate sexual advances

a rebuke – a sharp criticism or expression of disapproval

vicious – deliberately cruel or violent

disproportionate – of a reaction, response etc., being unequal to the original comment or situation; over the top

to abdicate – of a member of a royal family, to give up one’s position; to cease to be king, Emperor etc.

an anecdote – a short, amusing story