In which the pond enjoys a quiet Sunday with Polonius's prattle and garrulous Gemma ... with a post-cartoon bonus for the unwary ...

 

After yesterday's Herculean outing, the pond decided it would take it easy in its Sunday meditation, and the reptiles on parade helped enormously by allowing the pond to do a Tootle and wander off the rails ...

The pond knew that not a single reptile would bother with that story in The Atlantic ... so why not start with a quick reference?

Not being an evolutionary biologist - the pond is inclined to believe there's strong evidence that evolution in reptiles topped somewhere around two hundred million years ago during the late Triassic or early Jurassic times - the pond could then cheerfully move on to plodding Polonial prattle ... even if it was just the same old stuff, as seen at inordinate length yesterday ...

In all this, we must remember that at times Polonius pretends he's a dog, and indulges in catty asides and full frontal snide bitchy remarks, so he knows a lot about abuse ...

He's probably disappointed that he won't be noticed by the French clock lover and so might have to pay for the T-shirt ...

As for the pond it was greatly cheered by the revival of 'ning-nong', because that and just plain 'nong' were much beloved in its Tamworth days, though the source remained obscure, per Aust Geo here ...

It's been such a long time since I heard anyone called a nong and it would seem that another colour is fading from Australia’s once-vivid linguistic canvas.

It’s such a precise word, nong, describing someone who, unlike a drongo, may not be completely useless, may even be intelligent, but is nevertheless a fool and not

to be taken seriously. Pollies for example; most of them are nongs.

It has its roots in one or other of the English dialects. Ning-nang – a fool – later became ning-nong and no doubt was shipped off in chains to NSW. By the time I was in my teens, nong was well established and was even used adjectivally – “What sort of nong-nong idea is that?” – though the older form was, I remember, the more popular among my parents’ generation.

Nino Culotta used ning-nong in his 1957 book They’re A Weird Mob, and no-one thought it strange, except per-haps for the language police who probably called it “quaint” – it was in print after all – and in the next breath, so to speak, berated us for “glorifying the outlandish Australian accent and murdering the Queen’s English”.

But what would those nongs know, anyway?

Of course there are other speculations as to source ...

nong

/nong/, n. Australian and New Zealand Informal.

a foolish, incompetent person.

[1940-45; prob. by shortening of Australian and earlier Brit. slang ning-nong, ning-nang fool, perh. expressive vars. of earlier nigmenog fool, of obscure orig.]

Or this one ...

a fool. The word is of obscure origin; it may originate in an Aboriginal word or as a corruption of non compos mentis (meaning 'not of sound mind'). It is probably unrelated to the synonymous ning-nong.

There are lots of nongs scribbling ideas about ning-nongs ... but it's Sunday, and a time to relax with a classic ning-nong, who for once has forgotten his obsessive compulsive need to scribble about the ABC. 

Who said the French clock lover had done the nation a disservice by so distracting Polonius he didn't once mention the absence of conservatives on the ABC?

At that mention of the ABC, the pond almost fainted, verging as it did on Polonial heresy ...

Meanwhile, speaking of isolationism, Polonius shows that he too lives in the land of chairman Rupert, confronted with a Sophie's Choice between the mango Mussolini and Ron DeSanctus as the front runners ...

There's a lot more hand-wringing at the Bulwark, the pond only mentions it because of that epic question, What about Orstralia?

Don't expect Polonius to answer, he's still playing woke snowflake to a fun, if somewhat pungent and bracing use of language, which admittedly underestimates the awesome stupidity of some of the nongs at large in the world ...

Sorry, the pond knows it's a repeat but it'll never get old for the pond ... and it got even better if you went to the original where the hapless clod tried to double down ... and went on and on digging his grave ...

And so on and on, and what an awesomely humourless prat, what with the pursed lips and the talk of "tickle-minded stuff", but the pond can indulge in the treat, because it's a meditative Sunday and there's just a gobbet of Polonius to go ...

Indeed, indeed, and the pond was reminded of that joke it caught the other night, though the pond only ran with the joke because it was on the ABC and therefore likely to have sent Polonius into a Polonial frenzy ...

And so to even more lightweight fare, thanks to garrulous Gemma ...

There has of course been much said about 'woke' in recent times. There was Tim Miller patiently explaining The Wokes Didn't Crash SVB, Morons ... and the pond liked this wrinkle, Conservatives hate wokeness. Don’t trigger them by asking what it means ...

...Let’s check in with the conservative commentator and proud bastion of anti-wokeness Bethany Mandel, shall ...we? On Tuesday, Mandel appeared on the Hill’s morning program Rising, where she proceeded to repeat “wokeness” ad nauseam as she asserted that most Americans aren’t liberal and “probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke”. The program’s co-host Briahna Joy Gray stepped in at that point to ask Mandel to clarify what she meant. “Would you mind defining woke? Because it’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

Being asked to define the words that she was using seemed to come as something of as a shock to Mandel. “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that … um …” she replied before trailing off and pausing for an awkwardly long time. “I – this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.” She was certainly right about that: the clip of her torturously trying to explain wokeness, which she says she devoted an entire chapter of her new book to, has been viewed millions of time and sparked a lot of headlines.

This, by the way, isn’t the first time Mandel has gone viral. At the beginning of the pandemic, she trended on Twitter after declaring that your grandmother dying of coronavirus wasn’t her problem. “You can call me a Grandma killer,” she tweeted. “I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.” Trying not to kill grandmas? Woke!

Eventually Mandel, or “Grandma killer”, did manage to give Gray a definition of sorts. “I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define,” Mandel said. “… It is sort of the understanding that we need to – totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression … um.” She paused. “Sorry. I-it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”

Gray, to her credit, pressed Mandel to “take her time” and elaborate further. Her co-host, Robby Soave, came to Mandel’s rescue, however. Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, jumped in to say: “It’s one of those things that, everybody is weighing in … against wokeness. We do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”

Sure, it's old and there's a tweet where you can see Mandel actually doing her brain fart, but it sets the scene for garrulous Gemma ...

Poor old Gemma. Always late to the party ...

This was a question asked in the Enid Blyton Society back on 11 March 2011! by Liza:

Hi everyone,

I'm a researcher currently writing a thesis on changing gender depictions in children's books. One of my focuses is on how publishing companies have made editorial changes - or 'updates' - to classics as they've been released in new editions. If anyone has any information about when any such changes occurred in the Famous Five series - such as the deletion of words no longer perceived to be politically correct, be them expressly relating to gender or not - I'd be really grateful. And if you don't have the information yourself, but think you can point me in the direction of a person/website/journal who can, then that would be great too.

Thanks so much in advance,

Liza Miller

And this was one answer ...

Welcome, Liza. It sounds like an interesting thesis. I'm not sure exactly when changes first began to be made, but there had already been some alterations to the paperback versions of the late 1960s. For example, in my 1968 Five On a Treasure Island Knight paperback, the "King" has been altered to the "Queen". Currency updates took place in the early 1970s. Around the same time, or possibly slightly earlier, there were other small changes, e.g. jeans being substituted for a skirt, a scholarship simply being referred to as an exam and references to steam trains being removed (in some instances). Except for small details like that, relatively few alterations to Blyton books seem to have been made until 1987, when golliwogs began to be banished from the Noddy books. After that, other changes gradually started to creep in. Characters' names began to be modernised, clothes were updated, new foods were introduced and things that were deemed politically incorrect, like some gender depictions, were altered. The Famous Five series appears to have undergone updating more regularly than many other series, most recently in 2010 when the language was modernised yet again, some descriptions were slightly abridged and Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan became Ned (though Dick and Fanny remain). If you want to track the alterations in detail, the best thing to do would be to focus on two or three titles and obtain as many different editions from across the years as you can, so you can compare them. All the various printings are shown in the Cave of Books. Some books that would be particularly good for examining gender depictions are Five on a Treasure Island, Five Run Away Together, Five Go Off to Camp and Five Have Plenty of Fun.

And another answer ...

Liza Miller, updating Enid Blyton's books has been in progress since the 1970s, although this habit picked steam with zeal in 1980s. Anita is correct in saying that The Famous Five series has undergone more editorial "updates" than any other Enid Blyton series. For instance, in my book, The Famous Five: A Personal Anecdotage, I cite some updates in Five Go Off To Camp. For example, in this book, George is described as being "black as a nigger with soot," as she is coming down a gravel-infested vent (in the first published edition of 1948, using a 1967 reprint). In the 1989 edition of that book, that sentence was changed to, "Down she came, as black as soot." In the 2001 edition of that book, the sentence was again changed to, "Down she came as black as night with soot."

Stephen Isabirye

There's more but the point is surely that tardy belated Gemma is very, very slow on the scene, and the pond guesses it will never get an answer about that use of the 'n' word, much like like the pond will probably never get to ask Gemma about this book title ...

The alternative title didn't quite fix the problem, at least if you happened to be Indian (sub-continent) or Indian (indigenous) ...

Never mind, a little more garrulous Gemma to go on with ...

The pond had promised itself that the next reptile to mention 'woke' would see the pond run with that meme that's been doing the rounds, and so was forwarded to the pond ...

But there's a more serious game afoot, involving that fascist DeSanctus, with a taste for the Orwellian ...

It's no hoax ...

Sarah Mervosh wrote a story about another angle in the NY Times ... (paywall)

It began with a tidy splash ...

And then came the words ...

The nitty-gritty process of reviewing and approving school textbooks has typically been an administrative affair, drawing the attention of education experts, publishing executives and state bureaucrats.

But in Florida, textbooks have become hot politics, part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign against what he describes as “woke indoctrination” in public schools, particularly when it comes to race and gender. Last year, his administration made a splash when it rejected dozens of math textbooks, citing “prohibited topics.”

Now, the state is reviewing curriculum in what is perhaps the most contentious subject in education: social studies.

In the last few months, as part of the review process, a small army of state experts, teachers, parents and political activists have combed thousands of pages of text — not only evaluating academic content, but also flagging anything that could hint, for instance, at critical race theory.

A prominent conservative education group, whose members volunteered to review textbooks, objected to a slew of them, accusing publishers of “promoting their bias.” At least two publishers declined to participate altogether.

And in a sign of how fraught the political landscape has become, one publisher created multiple versions of its social studies material, softening or eliminating references to race — even in the story of Rosa Parks — as it sought to gain approval in Florida.

Speaking of Rosa Parks, there was this comparison ...

Well you won't find any of that in garrulous Gemma ... but on with living in an Orwellian state ...

"Normally, a state adoption is a pretty boring process that a few of us care about, but there are a lot of people watching this because the stakes are so high,” said Jeff Livingston, a former publishing executive who is now an education consultant.

It is unclear which social studies textbooks will be approved in Florida, or how the chosen materials might address issues of race in history. The state is expected to announce its textbook decisions in the coming weeks.

The Florida Department of Education, which mandates the teaching of Black history, emphasized that the requirements were recently expanded, including to ensure students understood “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms.”

But Mr. DeSantis, a top Republican 2024 presidential prospect, also signed a law last year known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which prohibits instruction that would compel students to feel responsibility, guilt or anguish for what other members of their race did in the past, among other limits.

The state’s guidelines for evaluating textbooks targets “critical race theory,” a graduate-level academic theory that rarely appears in younger grades but has become a catchall to some conservatives; and “social emotional learning,” an approach that tries to help students develop positive mind-sets and that is viewed by the DeSantis administration as extraneous to core academics.

Florida — along with California and Texas — is a major market for school textbook publishing, a $4.8 billion industry.

It is among more than a dozen states that approve textbooks, rather than leaving decisions only to local school districts. Every few years, Florida reviews textbooks for a particular subject and puts out a list that districts can choose from. (Districts also have some discretion to choose their own materials.)

Because state approval can be lucrative, publishers have often quietly catered to the biggest markets, adjusting content for their local needs and political leanings...

There's a lot more about the politics and the publishers, but it turned interesting for the pond when Mervosh got down to the nitty gritty, and the specifics of the Rosa Parks affair in one publisher's craven world...

One Publisher’s Edits: Rosa Parks

In an attempt to cater to Florida, at least one publisher made significant changes to its materials, walking back or omitting references to race, even in its telling of the Rosa Parks story.

The publisher, Studies Weekly, mostly serves younger students, with a focus on science and social studies, and its curriculum — short lessons in weekly pamphlets — is used in 45,000 schools across the country, according to its website. Its social studies materials are used in Florida elementary schools today.

The New York Times compared three versions of the company’s Rosa Parks story, meant for first graders: a current lesson used now in Florida, an initial version created for the state textbook review and a second updated version.

Some of the material was provided by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a progressive parent group that has fought book ban efforts in the state, and confirmed by The Times.

In the current lesson on Rosa Parks, segregation is clearly explained: “The law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down.”

But in the initial version created for the textbook review, race is mentioned indirectly.

“She was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin,” the lesson said.

In the updated version, race is not mentioned at all.

“She was told to move to a different seat,” the lesson said, without an explanation of segregation.

It’s unclear which of the new versions was officially submitted for review. The second version — which doesn’t mention race — was available on the publisher’s website until last week.

Studies Weekly made similar changes to a fourth-grade lesson about segregation laws that arose after the Civil War.

In the initial version for the textbook review, the text routinely refers to African Americans, explaining how they were affected by the laws. The second version eliminates nearly all direct mentions of race, saying that it was illegal for “men of certain groups” to be unemployed and that “certain groups of people” were prevented from serving on a jury.

And at that point came this ...

"Certain groups".

Great stuff, though it seems that there might have been a bit of blowback ...

....With these changes, it is unclear if Studies Weekly is an outlier, or if other publishers may also have curbed their materials.

The Florida Department of Education suggested that Studies Weekly had overreached. Any publisher that “avoids the topic of race when teaching the Civil Rights movement, slavery, segregation, etc. would not be adhering to Florida law,” the department said in a statement.

But Studies Weekly said it was trying to follow Florida’s standards, including the Stop W.O.K.E. Act.

“All publishers are expected to design a curriculum that aligns with” those requirements, John McCurdy, the company’s chief executive, said in an email.

The company’s curriculum is no longer under consideration by the state.

After questions from The Times, the company removed its second, scrubbed-down version of the curriculum from its website last week and said that it had withdrawn from the state’s review.

The Florida Department of Education said it had already rejected the publisher, citing a bureaucratic snafu in the company’s submission.

The company may still try to win over individual Florida districts. It has now gone back to its first version of the new curriculum — the one that says Rosa Parks was told to move her seat “because of the color of her skin.”

Where's Gemma in all this? She's still off with Enid, trying to make a point a psychiatrist made in the NY Times ...

 

Yes, there's serious shit going down in the original sense of the Orwellian use of Orwellian, and instead this is what lizard Oz readers cop ...

Don't be an ass? Don't be a fuckwit, of the kind that thinks words don't matter when it comes to matters of race, class or anything else ...

And with all that the pond has barely left room for a cartoon-led Sunday meditation recovery, so just a few to wrap up the formal part of the day's proceedings, dominated by one of the pond's favourite US cartoonists ... but beginning with a Faux Noise joke, as is the pond's wont ...

And for those who made it to the end, the pond thought it might slip in another recent pond favourite, an acquired taste, but one to be enjoyed by those with a refined palate ...

The pond might have been more concerned by talk of the death threats if Petronella hadn't scribbled the day before about being a party girl, a classy mix of undiluted bitch and snobby put down, mingled with yearning for the days of Wallis Simpson, aka the Duchess of fascist-loving Windsors ...

Put it in another, Nick Ray, way ...

Of course the notion of grown-up debate arose from Petronella's belief that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, possibly even a communist, certainly left-leaning and absolutely not a fascist ...

Yes, yes, what a delight she is, how easily she defends a wife basher, how sublimely she scribbles of amour propre.

She has the pond's deepest sympathy and profound admiration. Rarely does the pond come across a living, breathing member of the Monty Python upper class twit of the year competition, but what a reliable contender she is ...

Besides, it's difficult in these troubled times, you can spout nonsense, and where's the spontaneous eruption of joy at being served up tosh? This perfidy has deep, troubling roots and only a little dash of citronella can wash away the taste ...