Comment on The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The current UK government are basically Posh Fascists (Notice the anti-demonstration legislation, sending people asking the UK for asylum to Rwanda and sending surveillance planes to help Israel bomb Gaza) so this is hardly surprising.
The Conservative wing of the Tory party has been well and trully buried by the UKIPers that invaded the party back in the Brexit Campaign days.
Damdy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They’re called public schools because anyone could attend them as long as they paid the cost. They were the alternative to private schools which were for nobles or religious training etc that you couldn’t buy in to. Comprehensive schools, free schools for anyone, came a lot later.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Same kind of “public” as the The Ritz: anybody can spend a night there as long as they have the 400 quid a night to pay for it.
uranibaba@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not sure what The Ritz is but that sounds public to me. The access is not restricted by any other mean than paying for the service.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The Ritz is a luxury hotel in London and that sentence I wrote is often used as an illustration of what “public” means in the sense with which it’s used in “public school” in the UK (no other nation whose language I know uses it like that and I can actually speak a number of them).
It’s also a great illustration about how de jure can be the opposite of de facto and of how one can mislead without outright lying by picking a rarelly used meaning of a word of a commonly used expression and thus produce an expression with an alternative meaning which is still naturally understood by others as meaning its most common meaning. This is probably the main verbal deceit technique used by the English upper classes.
That said, in the UK “public school” has been so long used to mean what in other countries would be called “private school”, that all Brits nowadays understand it as meaning a “privatelly run and managed school with paid tuition were access is open to anybody who can pay (theoretically as some have subtle filters beyond mere cost)”, but all non-Brits need to be expained that in a British context this combination of words means something else that what it does in the rest of the World.