I recently chatted with Gillian Saunders, director of Grant Thornton Strategic Solutions, the consulting firm that has been working on the 2010 World Cup for over a decade now. In this podcast she explains why South Africa got the bid, how preparation for the tournament has changed the country, the controversy behind the giant stadiums, and the one thing you should see when you visit South Africa.  Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Rafferty: So Gillian, I was wondering if first you could first discuss, give us an overview, of the role Grant Thornton has played in the preparation for the World Cup.

Gillian Saunders: Well we were first approached in the late nineties by the South African football association, FIFA, to assist them with looking at a bid for the World Cup, and they felt that the way to promote this country going for the bid, was to look at the economic impact it would have on the country. So we did an economic impact analysis then; subsequent to that we did one for the 2006 bid and then we did another one for the 2010 bid which of course was a successful bid and we now actually have the event happening next year. Since then we’ve updated it a couple times. Most recently only last year, haven’t updated it again since, we will plan to update it after the draw in December when there’s a lot more finality about exactly who’s coming, where they’re traveling, etc…

Rafferty: In 2004, what role did you play in South Africa winning the bid to host the tournament?

Saunders: Well I think one of the reasons that Africa was seen as an attractive destination for the event was people did feel that it’s an event that can actually help the economy of a country like South Africa and other countries in Africa, and that was what we demonstrated and what went into the bid book and what helped I think position South Africa as a meritus winner of the event; and if we go back even further, the initial exercise we did, and it was based on work we’d done previously for Grand Prix that had been successful as well in terms of saying that major sporting events actually leave an economic legacy and are beneficial to the destination. And that you know there are some people that feel the benefit is minimal, that the benefit is often not only measured in the actual economic benefit of the event or the net additional economic benefit of the event, but the profiling of the destination that has a knock-on effect for trade, investment, and tourism in years after the event. So we looked at all of that, and basically our exercise was used by the football association to get South Africa to buy into bidding for the event. And the FIFA 2010 event is a huge undertaking from a government perspective; the country has to give a lot of guarantees and has to be involved in a lot of the infrastructure needs if there are such. So it brought our government on board to go for the event

Rafferty: So since winning the bid, what role has your firm played in the preparation for the tournament?

Saunders: We’ve been very involved with a number of the venue cities. We’ve worked on specific economic impact studies for those cities so that they can understand the benefits to the city itself. We’ve also worked on the stadia, for, in fact eight of the stadias out of the ten that are being used, we’ve done the business plan for. That was used by the National Treasury to make decisions on what funding to give to the stadia development projects in each city. Then we worked on destination marketing work for provinces and towns and neighboring countries, doing strategies of how they can best maximize their involvement in the event, as well as how they can protect what they may need to protect in terms of if the event has a negative impact on their country. So for instance neighboring countries like Namibia and Botswana, it’s very much their high tourism season, and they need to have the strategy to maintain their normal tourism markets so that the tourists don’t feel crowded out and don’t not come. For instance the Olympics in Greece, when they were in Athens, I think it was in 2006, 2004, they saw one of their worst seasons on the Greek Islands, simply because tourists start to feel, “I can’t go there, it’s too busy for me.” So we’ve been working on strategies like that with neighboring countries and with towns, in South African towns and cities.

Rafferty: So, how has the preparation for the World Cup affected the economy in general? Or how different does the country look from 2000 when you began doing this research? Does the landscape look any different? Do you think the economy has improved?

Saunders: I think the main change in South Africa is the government has put a huge amount of money into infrastructure. The normal amount that often gets quoted is more than 400 billion rand. Now what a lot of that is, is accelerated infrastructure projects that would have been needed and should have been done anyhow. But we were, if you like, very lucky that the World Cup became an impetus or a catalyst for all that happening. But within that is probably of the order of 30-40 billion rand worth of infrastructure that’s directly related to the event. Which is transport infrastructure around the stadia themselves and the stadiums. And I don’t know if anybody’s been lucky enough to see our stadiums, but we’ve got some stunning stadiums coming up. The one in Cape Town has had it’s lights lit up now, and you’ve seen it against the sort of backdrop of Table Mountain and the harbor and the port. It’s an amazing thing to see. We’ve got another beautiful stadium, in, new stadium, in, or more or less new, in Johannesburg called Soccer City and it’s designed after a calabash. And so these things are coming up around the country and people are seeing them either reported on the news, photgraphed in the newspaper, or they’re going past them themselves and they look stunning. And our transport infrastructure is still rather a lot of building signs and road works, but we can see that we are getting some massive improvements to our transport infrastructure. What’s happening now as well, I think the ball has really started rolling with the Confederations Cup earlier this year, is the sponsors and the host cities are really getting behind the programs and advertising that are sort of getting the population now to feel very positive and proud about the events coming. So there’s a lot of billboards that are using 2010, there’s a lot of advertising, a lot of merchandise in the shops that’s already out there. So it’s starting to build up the excitement in the country towards the event and that’s beginning to go quite nicely. We have something for instance, it was started by the tourism industry, instead of having casual Friday, we have Football Friday. And everybody wears a soccer shirt, any soccer shirt, Bafana Bafana, our national team is good, on Fridays. And that’s starting to roll out. We’ve had the Deputy President launch it on the lawns of the Union Buildings. So those are things that are changing, that we are seeing in the psyche in South Africa.

Rafferty: I have read there’s been controversy over these stadiums, basically saying that they’re a huge money suck because in the end they’re going to be rendered useless after the World Cup, and I was just wondering what your opinion is on that.

Saunders: Some of them are going to be well used. For instance, the one in Cape Town is a prime location and an iconic city where we know when we worked on the business plan that conference organizers, race organizers, people who organize functions and events, main ones, looked forward to getting that facility and being able to use it. The trick to any of these is multiple sports that you can get in them and the alternative uses which you can get in them. So we feel Cape Town can go very well and one of the big pluses for Cape Town would be if the Western Cape rugby moved to the new stadium, which has been talked about, it’s been discussed in the press, but nobody knows whether or not it would happen. Because they have a stadium that’s too small, that could easily be sold for good property development rights and then make a move into the new one. So the things that could still happen to make these stadia even more long term viable. A stadia generally is a cost to a municipality, you know there’s only a couple of places like the soccer leagues in Germany and England that can have stadias that actually sustain themselves. So they often make a small operating profit or a small operating loss, they are sustained by subsides from the government side—it’s the extent of those subsidies and how much they would cost. And some of our stadia in the less prominent towns, such as Nelspruit and Polokwane, they may be the ones that struggle the most in terms of having on going reasonable levels of usage and reasonable levels of income. But they will be used on an ongoing basis.

Rafferty: Grant Thorton, at the beginning of your research, you estimated that the World Cup would contribute 55.7 billion rand to the South African economy and generate 415,400 jobs, and 19.3 billion rand in tax income to the government, and I was just wondering if you could tell me: Do those numbers still stand? Do you still estimate that’s what we’re going to see happen?

Saunders: Yes they do, the only area, because some of that expenditure has happened, it’s been a lot of the infrastructure spending. The only area that people could challenge if they wanted is the tourism spending which I mentioned at the beginning and since how we’ve build that up. But all the research we’ve looked at related to soccer and people following an event like this, is that recessions and things like don’t usually have much of an impact. They might trade down slightly, but they’ll not, not travel, so we fully expect the same levels of tourism and tourism expenditure as we had originally estimated. And to be quite honest, our estimates are probably on the conservative side because we know there’s certain information we just couldn’t get the information on, that’s being spent by some of the provinces, and some of the cities, and some of the sponsors. So being consultants we are slightly on the conservative side. So we wouldn’t change those numbers at all, and the employment generated as well, we wouldn’t change any of those numbers. We would stand by them and say, “Look they were on the conservative side, they are still a little bit on the conservative side.”

Rafferty: There’s going to be a bunch of people traveling to South Africa for the World Cup. What is one thing that you would recommend they do? And it doesn’t even have to be soccer related. What’s one thing you suggest they do when they come?

Saunders: It’s a difficult one, but I think the thing that has the most impact is if they can make it to a good game park and do some game viewing. You know African wildlife is stunning, the African Bush is stunning, it’s a very very different experience. And even if they can’t make it to one of the top game reserves, which would mean traveling in some instances quite a way, it depends where they’re based and where they watch their matches, we have lots of smaller wildlife farms nearer to the big cities, so take time to go and see some of our wildlife, it’s stunning.

Rafferty: Great. Well Gillian, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today, I really appreciate it.

Saunders: It’s a pleasure Michelle, thank you very much.

Jake Kraft received a MSc in Anthropology at Oxford in 2004 and just finished up a JD/MBA at Stanford. Having recently visited South Africa, one of Jake’s college buddies (and my dear friend) suggested Jake contribute to our “Place of the Year” campaign, to which he kindly agreed. In the following piece Jake sheds light on South Africa’s exorbitant population loss since the mid 90s by consulting three natives who chose to leave. Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa exports many goods which the world consumes and which enrich South Africa. Other countries buy South Africa’s metals and minerals, agricultural products, machinery, and wine, sending their own goods and cash in return. But in the last fifteen years, South Africa’s greatest export has traded at great profit to importing nations and at great expense to the exporter. Since the mid-1990s, more than one million South Africans, including more than a fifth of the white population, has emigrated abroad. Many of these are South Africa’s most educated citizens; most have no plans to return.

Last winter I visited South Africa and enjoyed tremendous natural scenery, wildlife, bustling cities and towns, food, and cultural traditions. South Africa is wonderful for a tourist, but life as a resident is more complicated.

I made the trip to visit three South African friends whom I had met in the United States. This opportunity to see them and learn about their home was special not only because I would be guided by locals, but also because it would be my last chance: all three had decided to leave the country and settle elsewhere.

My first stop was in the Eastern Cape, to visit my friend the journalist. A wiry white English South African, he had been lucky to study at top boarding schools and attend an excellent private university where he had become a collegiate champion in kayaking. In addition to inimitable charm, he has a great deal of compassion, and as a journalist wrote stories highlighting the plight of AIDS victims and AIDS orphans. He unearthed local corruption, and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of South African history and culture, as well as a seemingly endless number of friends who would greet us wherever we went.

He now lives in London. South Africa has limited opportunities for an enthusiastic journalist to grow in his career, especially as traditional media models fall apart and journalism becomes intertwined with the internet. He would love to go back if he could, but he doesn’t know how or when South Africa will have professional opportunities in which he can flourish.

From the Eastern Cape I traveled to Johannesburg, where I met my friend the entrepreneur. Chinese South African, he had grown up in a posh area on the North side of the city, attending excellent schools and University in the United States. His family lived in mansion straight out of Beverly Hills, including swimming pool and pool house, magnificent rooms for living and entertaining, and a garage full of sleek Mercedes. The local malls and restaurants were equivalent to anything I’d seen in the United States and we spent a very civilized afternoon eating scones and playing croquet with friends at the local club.

My friend now lives in China. Besides its luxury, his family home in South Africa is surrounded by 15 foot walls, which are topped with electrified barbed wire. The outer doors of the house are fortified with steel bars and must be unlocked with a key from the inside or outside in order to enter or leave. An enormous guard dog barks at any movement. Security guards with sub-machine guns patrol his neighborhood. Even so, not long ago, perpetrators managed to poison the dog and hop over the walls from a nearby telephone pole, catching his mother as she was exiting the pool house, and holding her and the rest of the family at gun point as they robbed the home. The family survived, but the incident was uncommon only in that sense. Every house in the neighborhood has this kind of security, and violent robbery is a daily risk. As he pursues his ventures, my friend would prefer that his success won him some other life.

My last trip was to the Free State town of Ladybrand, a small farming hamlet not far from the Drakensberg Mountains and the Lesotho border. Here I met my third friend, the broad shouldered and sandy-haired son of an Afrikaner farmer. He had grown up chasing cattle thieves on horseback, swimming in river dividing South Africa and Lesotho, and dreaming of playing rugby for the Springboks. He never spoke English until he traveled to Cape Town for his University degree, where he gave up rugby and excelled at actuarial studies. After finishing University, he landed himself a job with a prestigious international consultancy, where he was whisked around Africa, working at the great mining projects and factories of the continent. Once he had a taste of the outside world, he wanted more, and sponsored by his company, he came to the United States to finish his education. When he did, he decided to stay in San Francisco. There is opportunity in South Africa, he believes, but why take the risk with so much government corruption and physical violence. As a South African, he did not feel wanted in America, but as a businessman, he did not he feel wanted by South Africa.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more beautiful sunsets, eaten better steaks or had more outdoor fun than I did in South Africa. But I left the country feeling discouraged. If my three friends are in any way representative of the million plus who have left or are leaving, how can the South Africa expect to win its fight against AIDS, improve its government and civic life, or bring its education and economic opportunities not only to the lucky few born into them, but also to the millions born into extreme poverty? How can the country find a way to keep its educated and passionate young citizens, or a way to bring them back? What should be the priority? The rule of law? Economic opportunities? Security?

Happy Friday to everyone.  It’s been a sad week at OUP as a member of our department left for an exciting new job at Tor. While we are all excited for Cassie it is sad to lose a co-worker!  Enjoy the links below and be sure to check out all the posts we did this week on South Africa, in honor of Place of the Year!

Former OUP publicist Cassie Ammerman makes her Huff Po debut.

Cloud computing in plain English.

I’ve loved Chana Bloch’s translations for years, but here is the chance to read her original poetry.

Vaccine-Finding Map.

Paul Carr debates Jeff Jarvis about so-called citizen journalists.

On how we judge books.

It’s the heart of Fall so here is a fall poem from Mary Oliver.

A great job for a Deadhead librarian.

The 25 most-valuable blogs in America.

Should you respond to a bad review?

Rock out!

Maps without keys.

Our OUP-UK friends Helen Eaton, Assistant Commissioning Editor, Academic Science and Dewi Jackson, Publishing Editor, Higher Education, recently went on a trip to South Africa.  In honor of our 2009 Place of the Year selection they have shared their experience with us and some stunning photos.  Be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here

We recently spent 20 days in South Africa split between Cape Town, the Garden Route, and Kruger National Park.

Cape Town is a beautiful and unique city filled with plenty of things to do and see whatever your taste. It is watched over by Table Mountain – an imposing 1000m rocky mountain that fills every vista. The views of the city and surrounding sea from the top are incredible – you can either hike up it or take the easy cable car option (as we did). Day trips to Cape Point (the site of many shipwrecks) and inland to the famous Cape Winelands are highly recommended. We certainly enjoyed eating and drinking in the ‘Mother City’!

The Garden Route is a verdant strip of coast stretching east from Cape Town. Its towns are small and friendly and its beaches pristine. South Africa is famous for having some of the best whale watching in the world and it didn’t disappoint. The whales swim so close to land that you can easily watch them from the shore, but we took the boat option and got within feet of 18m long Southern Right Whales. Just inland from here we visited Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo, the home of ostrich farming, where we saw, rode, and ate the largest bird in the world.

You can drive yourself around National Parks and Game Reserves in South Africa – in a VW Polo in our case – making for a more personal experience. Be aware, however, that this means if you get into trouble there may be no one around to help you, as we found when trapped between a lone elephant bull walking down the road towards us and a large herd crossing behind. We’ve never wanted a Humvee more.

In the Kruger National Park we were lucky enough to see the Big Five (Africa’s ‘trophy’ animals) – Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Rhino. But there’s much more to the Kruger experience – its smaller creatures and bird life, the views, the unique sounds of the African bush at night, and cooking an enormous steak on your braai make it truly memorable.

South Africa is a worthy winner of ‘Place of the Year’. Nowhere else in the world can you experience beautiful landscapes and incredible wildlife at the same time as eating in exquisite restaurants and relaxing on empty beaches. We had a wonderful holiday there and I’m sure that anyone who visits after reading this will do too!

1. Table Mountain viewed from Cape Town harbour. Photo by Dewi Jackson
2. Growing wine outside Cape Town. Photo by Dewi Jackson
3. Ostriches in the Little Karoo. Photo by Helen Eaton
4. Spectacular scenery on the Garden Route. Photo by Helen Eaton
5. Buffalo in the Kruger Park. Photo by Dewi Jackson
6. Lions in the Kruger Park. Photo by Helen Eaton

Jancis Robison, wine connoisseur and editor of  The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition, recently revealed the drawbacks of South Africa’s stringent wine standards: because South African wine law mandates that 100 % of the grapes must be grown in the appellation (geographic location) specified on the bottle, consumers usually have no idea exactly where their wine is from. According to Robinson this is a shame given that there are more than 80 appellations in South African wine country; terroir clearly shapes how a wine tastes and this law precludes wine drinkers from learning anything about “the Cape’s wonderfully varied geography.” But on the plus side, the average quality of wine being exported from South Africa has improved immensely.

In continuation of our “Place of the Year” celebration, I offer you some quick facts on the growing South African wine industry from The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition. After successfully gleaning two or three talking points for your next tasting or wine/cheese mashup, be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Beginner
You have a case of “Two Buck Chuck” in your kitchen. Wine falls in two categories: white and red.

• South Africa has only 1.5% of the world’s vineyards, but it is one of the world’s top ten wine producers.
• The winelands are widely dispersed throughout the Western and Northern Cape, some 700km/420 miles from north to south and 500 km across, strung between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
• Just as Europe and America people are drinking less, but better, South Africa has shifted away from a beer-and-spirit-only consumption pattern. This coupled with a tenfold increase in exports between 1993 and 2003 has shifted the focus to quality not quantity for South African vine-growers.

Intermediate
You have been a member of the Wall Street Journal wine club (WSJwine) for over a year now. When out for drinks you are confident in returning a glass to the bar because “it has turned.”

• The father of the South African wine industry was 33-year-old-Dutch surgeon Jan van Riebeeck, sent to establish a market garden to reduce the risks of scurvy on the long sea passage between Europe and the Indies. In 1652, seven years after sailing into Table Bay, he recorded: ‘Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.’
• The Benguela current from Antarctica makes the Cape cooler than its altitude may suggest, which means many new vineyard areas south towards Agulhas as well as on the west coast offer the prospect of a long, slow ripening seasoning.
• White varieties constitute by far the majority of Cape vineyeards. Chenin Blanc, known sometimes as Steen, has for long been the dominant grape variety in South Africa.

Advanced
“Education and Work” on your Facebook profile includes “seasoned viticulturist.” If you are a devout Catholic you steer clear of the chalice—even on religious holidays. And you have this commited to memory.

• Controlled malolactic fermentation, reduced dependence on flavour-stripping filtration and stabilization processes, as well as new canopy management strategies and increasing vine densities have all played a role in the increase of wine quality.
• The definition of ‘dry’ in relation to South African wines sold on the domestic market has recently been changed: the maximum residual sugar content is now 5 g/l rather than 4 g/l/.
• Pinotage, the Cape’s own crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, is becoming increasingly popular and was the single most planted new red vine variety in 1996 (Chardonnay was the white) although it still represented only 6.7 per cent of the nation’s vines in 2004.

Charles R. Macedo is a partner at Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP, and the author of The Corporate Insider’s Guide to US Patent Practice, which provides a basic understanding of patent practice in the United States as it relates to both obtaining and enforcing patents. Macedo’s practice specializes in all facets of intellectual property law including patents, trademarks and copyrights.  In the article below he looks at speed dating in a whole new light.

On Monday, November 9, 2009, the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Bilski v. Kappos. This case, involving what many think to be the dull and arcane subject of patent law, can have a profound effect on the US economy, including potentially allocating research funds and investments and limiting what information our society will learn through the use of patents.

In the US, a patent can be granted to the first and true inventor(s) of a novel (new) and non-obvious invention. A patent provides a limited right to exclude others for a limited period of time, in exchange for telling the world how to practice the claimed invention. In other words, if the inventor teaches the rest of society what he or she knows, our government gives him or her an exclusive window of time during which to commercialize that invention. The assumption of the patent law is that granting a patent will foster innovation in two significant ways: (1) by encouraging investment in exchange for the limited monopoly rights, and (2) by providing disclosure of what might otherwise be maintained in secret and/or forgotten.

The issue the Supreme Court is deciding in Bilski is what types of inventions are “patent worthy” (as Elaine in Seinfeld might have phrased it), and what types of inventions do not even get considered for a patent. This debate is so important that apparently it is rumored that more amicus curiae briefs (including a submission prepared by me) were submitted to the Supreme Court than any other patent case in US history.

In an effort to divine where to draw the line on patent eligibility, the Justices posed a variety of hypothetical inventions to test patent worthiness using a proposed rule from the Appellate Court, to see whether that Court got the right answer. As an apparent example of an invention that should not be patent worthy, Justice Sotomayor, the newest member of the Court, is crediting with asking “why not speed dating?” [Court observers note that the transcript may be in error as to whether she said “speed dating” as reported in the media or “speaking”, but “speed dating” is a more interesting hypothetical].

In response to Justice Sotomayor, I say, “why not?” A brief review of Wikipedia on the subject, as it is at least in Wikipedia’s eyes deserving of its own web page, shows that “Speed dating is a formalized matchmaking process or dating system whose purpose is to encourage people to meet a large number of new people.” Certainly, this is a worthy goal for society to encourage.

“Speed dating” (two words with a space, in contrast to the single word which is a registered trademark of Speeddating Foundation., see US Trademark Registration No. 2,463,420) is a recent innovation. According to Wikipedia, “the first speed-dating event took place at Pete’s Café in Beverly Hills in late 1998” and “several commercial services began offering secular round-robin dating events” thereafter.

Many different techniques of speed dating have developed, with different themes and rules, all with the lofty goal of introducing two hopefully compatible people, who might not have otherwise met, in a time efficient manner. Each has its own process – a series of steps performed – many of which have proven profitable for their organizers and the individuals who pay to participate in these events.

It is not just Wikipedia that has found the topic worthy of investigation: the University of Pennsylvania and others have studied the events, and published their research findings. Further, pop culture has featured the concept in television shows like Sex in the City and in movies like Hitch.

Finally, perhaps Justice Sotomayor will be surprised to learn that the US Government has recognized that, at least when a speed date was tied to a computer in a manner conceived by Mordechai Teicher, the invention was entitled to patent protection in US Patent No. 7,305,398, entitled “Apparatus and Method for Managing Social Games”.

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Once upon a time my mother was knitting a style of sweater that had many open holes in the weave. My father looked at it and said “no wonder it’s going so fast, it’s mostly air.”

That’s the thing about nets too, they’re mostly air; but it’s what’s around the air that does the job.

I was looking at the web based dictionary wordnik and one of the features they have is a little graphic representing frequency of a word’s appearance over time. It’s interesting that their plot for the word net falls off during the 1920s to 1950s and then pops back up again in the 1990s.

It seems obvious to me that the frequency of the word net over the past decade would have increased as an abbreviation for the word internet.

I wonder what made the word less frequent after 1950; perhaps more grocery store shopping and less small-scale fishing? I don’t picture small-scale fishermen as being terribly prolific writers who’d have bulked up the word-stock before that.

If you have any ideas let me know.

Of course it could be that the wordnik stats feature has a kink in it.

Clearly the internet is so called because it is full of links between nodes, just like other networks; streets, train tracks, groups of friends.

All of these networks are so called because a real net is strands linking knots.

But it turns out that a real net is called a net not because of the strands but because of the knots.

I mentioned knitting and nodes as well as net and knot and all of these words go back to a knotty origin. They have a granular kind of Old English taste to them don’t they?

Today, Professor Christian Kay from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary team talks about categorization in the HTOED.

Click here for more posts about the Historical Thesaurus.

When I first came to Glasgow, I was puzzled by children ringing my doorbell and asking, “Goat ony ginger boatles, Missus?” (which loosely translates as, “Do you have any ginger bottles which you might give us, Madam?”) I understood that they wanted to take the bottles back to the shop and claim a refund on them, but I could not understand why their trade was so specialized. To me, a ginger bottle must be a bottle containing a ginger-flavoured liquid. Only later did I learn that for Glaswegian children, and many adults, “ginger” was a generic term for any fizzy drink – what I, equally illogically, call lemonade.

What was happening here was a clash of categorization systems. The Glaswegians and I were surveying the world of drinks and organizing it in different ways. As an incomer, I had to learn the categories of their society if I was to operate successfully within it. A similar situation faces anyone moving to a new place, or learning a new language; children learning their first language may initially identify different categories from those employed by adults.

In the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, categories shift in time rather than in space. In category 01.02.07 People, for example, we find increasing numbers of relatively recent words referring to people in terms of their age: teenager (first recorded in OED2 in 1941), bobby-soxer (1944), pre-schooler (1954), subteenager (1959). The need to make such fine distinctions perhaps reflects the importance of age in our society, as do terms at the other end of the scale, such as senior citizen (1938), third age (1972), and, less flatteringly, wrinkly (1972) and crumbly (1976) to refer to an old person. Comparable terms for many other members of the animal kingdom exist in 01.02.06 Animals, but here our world knowledge may not immediately supply the categories. How many modern urban dwellers know that the words teg, hoggerel and thrinter refer to sheep in their first, second and third years respectively, or indeed to sheep at all? Fortunately for the classifier, this information is readily available in the OED.

A further complication lies in the fact that people can happily operate with more than one system of classification. Ask someone what a tomato is, and they are quite likely to reply that it is a type of vegetable, even if they are aware that technically a tomato is a fruit. The clash here is between a folk category, based on the use of the object in our society (we eat it with other vegetables), and a scientific or expert category (fruits have seeds). Since much of English vocabulary came into use before serious classification of the natural world got underway in the eighteenth century, the two systems often have to be juggled in HTOED. Early words for plants, for example, fall more readily into categories such as ‘medicinal’, ‘poisonous’, or ‘yielding a dye’ than they do into a scientific taxonomy. Classifiers have to take account of such duality. In the case of tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and so on, the solution is a category called Fruits as vegetables.

Categorization is a basic human cognitive skill. We begin in childhood to organize things according to whether they are alike or unalike, and continue this process in adult life. Most of us will impose some sort of order on our material possessions, sorting books by author (or title, or subject, or size …), socks by colour, sweaters by season, and so on – the categories may vary from person to person, but the principle is there. Dictionary definitions often categorize words by reference to other words, as when OED defines sofa as “a form of lounge or couch” or rapier as “a long, thin, sharp-pointed sword”. Such relationships are revealed by proximity in HTOED, which thus constitutes a map of their development of in the history of the English language.

We use words and the categories they represent to impose order on our universe. If we hear the word tree, or hill, or green, very different images of these phenomena may spring to mind. Yet the multitude of trees that an individual may have seen have enough in common to form a category of Trees which is shared by other speakers of the language, and thus enables communication to proceed. (Except, of course, when the categories are fuzzy, as they mostly are, and we start arguing about whether a tree is actually a bush, or a hill qualifies as a mountain, or this particular green is closer to blue or yellow, but that’s a different problem.)

For more than 30 years of his life Albie Sachs lived as both lawyer and outlaw in an apartheid South Africa—working through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. As a result, he was detained in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Later he returned to play an important part in drafting South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a member of the country’s first Constitutional Court. As Sachs wrapped up his 15 year term this fall, Oxford published his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Below Sachs tells us why people all over the world visit the South African Constitutional Court every year.

Following his post is an excerpt from the opening of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law which features artist Judith Mason. She explains the inspiration behind her Blue Dress, one of the art pieces acquired by Albie Sachs for the South African Constitutional Court gallery and the image on the cover of his book. To learn the full story behind Mason’s Blue Dress collection go here. And for more first hand perspective on South African culture and history, be sure to check out all of our Place of the Year contributions.

Justice Albie Sachs on the Constitutional Court Gallery

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Parliament Square. Its site is wonderful, and the rather unprepossessing building it occupies has been artfully adapted to give it a friendly, functional and stylish character. The one feature that I thought worked badly, however, was the presence in strategic places on the walls of large oil portraits of dead white, male dignitaries who had occupied the building in the past. One day I will be a dead, white male judge myself, nothing wrong with that in itself. But if it is the only imagery you see, the story is one of unjust exclusion, at odds with the very notion of doing justice to all without favour or prejudice. And even those less afflicted with political correctness than myself would recognise that apart from one elegant Gainsborough portrait, the pictures represent rather gloomy dead souls haunting a building in which the evolving wisdom of the ages is intended to resolve the problems of today in a clear, transparent and convincing way. I couldn’t help comparing the paintings with those that hang in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, from which I have just stepped down as a judge after my fifteen year appointment came to an end. And this reflection made me realise what a remarkable place South Africa is to be in these days.

In particular I thought of the image of the Blue Dress in our Court. The Court was the first major new building of the post-apartheid era, constructed in the heart of the Old Fort Prison where both Gandhi and Mandela had been imprisoned. Thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world, visit the Court each year, not only to watch justice being done, but to journey through a remarkable building filled with extraordinarily rich and soulful artwork. And always, visitors pause for some minutes, and sometimes cry, when they see the Blue Dress.

The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision by their killers.

Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties of of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’, one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God…she was brave.’

…I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:

Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifey thing to do, an ordinary act…At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.

This weekend, James S. Fishkin, Professor of Communication and Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, will conduct a Deliberative Poll® in Michigan. A scientific sample of 200+ people will convene in Lansing to deliberate about the state’s economic future, and in the end, the poll will reveal what the public thinks about these issues, both before and after it has had a chance to become informed.

Fishkin’s most recent book, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, explains this method of polling. It combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice, and has demonstrated how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive modern democracies. Fishkin and his collaborators have already conducted deliberative democracy projects in the United States, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

When the People Speak is accompanied by a DVD of “Europe in One Room” by Emmy Award-winning documentary makers Paladin Invision. The film recounts one of the most challenging deliberative democracy efforts with a scientific sample from 27 countries speaking 21 languages. Watch the trailer after the jump.

EUROPE IN ONE ROOM
Courtesy of the Center for Deliberative Democracy