As Russia was dropping missiles on Ukraine by the dozens in mid-December of last year, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a new Law on National Minorities, in order to comply with the EU's accession criteria of protecting national minorities. What this new law does, however, is exactly the opposite: Kyiv strips from its ethnic minorities rights which they had previously enjoyed.​​​ ​​

Ethnic minorities, for instance Poles, are not guaranteed under the new legislation to freely use their ethnic-national symbols, even though they are fighting on the front lines, and Poland provides the biggest possible support to Ukraine.​ ​​T​hey are provided less time to air Polish-language media content and can barely use their mother tongue in schools or outside their homes, even though they were free to do so since the independence of Ukraine.

https://www.newsweek.com/suppression-suppressed-ukraines-restrictions-minority-rights-opinion-1779946

 

The Dutch explain the habit by being open-minded, outspoken and averse to anything that involves indirect messages. The Dutch are proud of being straightforward.

The British are appalled by the Dutch ways because they are comfortable in the cognitive space space encircled by politeness constraints.

Which of these two modes of discourse is "right" is difficult to say. One must learn to communicate with both.

Get - that's one of the most challenging English verbs. But when it is used with a preposition after it, it really is sometimes maddening to decode. 

English with Lucy may certainly be helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXK006PVir4

Even in our own mother tongue, we still learn a new word every two days

When we learn a new word, we continuously update our knowledge around that word until we have a firm grasp of it, Gaskell says. He gives the example of "breakfast", a word most of us use confidently. But when another, similar-sounding word comes along, it can renew our uncertainty around that existing word.

"At some point in the last five years or so, you would have learned the word 'Brexit' [referring to the UK's vote to leave the European Union], and that's a strong competitor to 'breakfast'," he says.

When the new word "Brexit" competed with the existing word "breakfast" in people's minds, mix-ups happened. A plethora of newsreaders and politicians came up with phrases like "Brexit means breakfast" and "ploughing ahead with a hard breakfast". To use the new word appropriately, and distinguish it from similar-sounding words, we need to link it to our existing knowledge, Gaskell says: "And in order to do that, you need to have some sleep."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230213-how-people-dream-in-foreign-languages

Baseball, power and war - 2022's key words

WORDS OF THE YEAR

Was 2022 defined by conflict, power cuts ... or a viral word game? That's what language experts around the world have been trying to decide as they nominate their words of the year.

 

Homer

Meaning: "A point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base."

Nominated by: The Cambridge Dictionary

Why: A homer is both the sound of success in baseball and thousands of angry Wordle fans throwing their phone at the wall. The Cambridge Dictionary chose the word after they saw a huge spike in search traffic outside North America from players of the viral game wondering what it meant\\\\\\\\\\\\

Britain will pause for a two-minute silence Sunday to remember the nation’s war dead as King Charles III leads a Remembrance Day service for the first time as monarch.

Charles and other royals and senior politicians will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph, the national war memorial in central London, to pay tribute to the sacrifices made by fallen servicemen and women. Remembrance Sunday is marked every year in the U.K. on the closest Sunday to Armistice Day on Nov. 11 with the wearing of poppies and a national two-minute silence observed at 11 a.m.

Permacrisis - a word describing the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability - has been chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year.

It "sums up just how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people", said Alex Beecroft, head of Collins Learning.

t led Collins's annual compilation of 10 words or phrases which "reflect our ever-evolving language and the preoccupations of those who use it".

Here is the list of the top 10 words and phrases in alphabetical order, plus their definitions in full:

Carolean: Of or relating to Charles III of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or his reign.

Kyiv: The capital of Ukraine, on the Dnipro River.

Lawfare: The strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent.

Partygate: A political scandal over social gatherings held in British government offices during 2020 and 2021 in defiance of the public health restrictions that prevailed at the time.

Permacrisis: An extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.

Quiet quitting: The practice of doing no more work than one is contractually obliged to do, especially in order to spend more time on personal activities; the practice of doing little or no work while being present at one's place of employment.

Splooting: The act of lying flat on the stomach with the legs stretched out.

Sportswashing: The sponsorship or promotion of sporting events in order to enhance a tarnished reputation or distract attention from a controversial activity.

Vibe shift: A significant change in a prevailing cultural atmosphere or trend.

Warm bank: A heated building where people who cannot afford to heat their own homes may go.

Last year's word of the year for the Oxford Dictionary was vax, while words related to vaccines spiked in frequency in 2021 because of Covid, with double-vaxxed, unvaxxed and anti-vaxxer all seeing a surge in use.

Previous Collins' words of the year include lockdown, climate strike, single-use, fake news, Brexit, binge-watch, photobomb and geek.

The Oxford Dictionary's previous words of the year include climate emergency, toxic, youthquake, post-truth, emoji-tears-of-joy, vape and selfie.

 

One of the most fundamental books on the problem was written by Louis-Jean Calvet. Still, his understanding of the nature of the vehicular language has a strong taste of political bias rather than linguistics.

"Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!" That is the slogan the Ukrainian military officially began using at the country's Independence Day parade on Friday, replacing the soviet-era "Wish you health, comrade!"
The phrase dates back to World War I, when military units from the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic were fighting alongside German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers against Russia. However it was in the 1930s when it really took hold, becoming a rallying cry for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), explained Oleksandr Zaitsev, a historian from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.

"There are records showing that during the court hearings against OUN's leader Stepan Bandera in 1936, his supporters were accompanying the slogan 'Glory to Ukraine' with a hand-throwing fascist-style salute," he told DW
https://www.dw.com/en/new-glory-to-ukraine-army-chant-invokes-nationalist-past/a-45215538

Learn why the Dutch don't like to say sorry: 
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0d1dqv3/why-the-dutch-don-t-say-sorry

The theory of politeness for the English discourse turned out to be disputed not only by the Germans, the French and the Dutch, but even by the such insiders of the English discourse as Robert Lane Greene and Henry Hitchings.

Still, the war for politeness is raging on..