Comment on The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography

• 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.

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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      • uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thanks for explaining. I can see how it can be considered public (by my own argument) while still not being public in the sense everyone else (myself included) would understand it.

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