412
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] uranibaba@lemmy.world 1 points 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 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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 - thus allowing the making of claims which are strictly speaking true, whilst most people will semantically understand them differently. 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 than what it does in the rest of the World, which is why I point this out.

[-] uranibaba@lemmy.world 1 points 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.

this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
412 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

59197 readers
926 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS