This is a chick flick. Chick flicks suck. Right? Wrong! Not this one. While targeting a young female audience, this is a film that anyone of any gender or age can enjoy. Reese Witherspoon plays the ditzy blonde to perfection. It's been said that you have to be very intelligent to convince people you're stupid. If that's the case, Reese's IQ must be off the scale. She plays a fashion student who decides to go to Harvard Law School to pursue the man she loves. Predictably, once there she goes from success to success. While there is nothing deep about this film, it's so enjoyable that it can be watched over and over again.
Oh yes, I need to add something to my thoughts about the English language in my post on "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" two days ago. As every English school child knows, a billion is a million million, i.e. 1,000,000,000,000. For some reason Americans think a billion is a thousand million, i.e. 1,000,000,000. I don't know the reason for this. It's probably just a blunder two hundred years ago that was never corrected. Nevertheless, it's an unforgivable mistake, and would mean a failure in any English school.
I knew of the discrepancy between billions, but there's something i've been curious about.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you call 1,000,000,000? I don't think i've ever heard the term, whatever it might be, used on this side of the Atlantic.
You live in England, don't you? Now I'm confused. We've always called it a thousand million. The Germans call it a Milliarde. They also have the word Billiarde (a thousand billion) and Trilliarde (a thousand trillion). The American discrepancy becomes ever more ridiculous as you progress to higher numbers.
DeleteNope. My hermit cave is in the Pacific Northwest, up in the corner of the USA. I grew up in a few different countries and my spelling tends to be a bit mixed as a result. (As you might guess from some of my film preferences, a good bit of that was in Asia)
ReplyDeleteThat and non-arrogant attitude can lead folks to thinking i'm from elsewhere.
No real clue, but i'd guess that the change came from wanting a term for each incremental level without a "thousand" mid-level. But, purely speculation there.
My spelling has gone through different phases. I used to adhere strictly to British spelling. At university I had a Linguistics professor (an American) who said that spelling should be accepted as-is, so nobody should be arrogant enough to criticise the spelling variations in other countries. So for the next years I accepted American spelling, despite remaining British in my own spelling.
DeleteI assumed that the American deviations were the result of history. It was only a few years ago that I discovered, to my alarm, that American English was a random invention of Noah Webster. He arbitrarily decided to spell words differently to establish America's independence from England. What an idiot! Since then I've strongly reject American spelling, and I wish I could meet my old professor to tell him why.
Living in Germany, I've experienced the German spelling reform of the 1990's. It's a total chaos, and it's a lot more illogical than it used to be. It's too big a subject to write about in this comment.
Another language that's gone through a spelling reform is Romanian. The spelling was simplified after Romania came under Russian control. 1953, I think. After Romania became independent in 1989 the spelling reform was undone, and the language returned to the pre-1953 spellings, to reject Russian influence. Politics takes preference over linguistics.