My wife and I have a regular, semi-religious ritual called “Reviewing our Credit Card Bill and Being Horrified”. We do this once a month, rain or shine, and it’s a critical part of the glue that sustains our marriage.
Like most rituals, ours has certain phrases that are repeated at key moments. They include “What was I thinking?”, “What were we thinking?” (we’ve learned that “What were you thinking” tends to derail the ceremony), and, our perennial favourite, “Another whiskey?”
The word budget comes to us from the Old French bougette, a small leather bag or wallet. Old French got it from the Latin bulga, which stole it from the Gauls when Rome bestrode a good chunk of the known world. So in essence, the French took from Latin a word that Latin had earlier taken from its predecessor. To paraphrase Demetri Martin’s quote about Employees of the Month, this is the kind of revenge that surely makes you a winner and a loser at the same time.
The Gaulish language is thought to have died out some time in the sixth century, and what triggered it is the same thing that put a dent in Old English - the aristocracy, in an attempt to suck up to their Roman conquerors, ditched their native tongue as quickly as they could in favour of Latin.
The main difference is that whereas Gaulish died out in the process, Old English merely retreated into the country, where the peasants lived. Thanks to them, it lives on in largely modified form today, sitting happily alongside French and a host of other languages in our modern, mongrel tongue which I and many other sad souls with no social life love with a passion.
Gaulish was a Celtic language, of which there were probably dozens (deciding what constitutes a language versus a dialect of a language is a complex matter, well beyond my entry-level pay grade). Etymologists divide the languages into Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic, the latter being those languages spoken in what is today’s Great Britain. While the Continental languages all died, the Insular ones live on in Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
Why they survived as their cousins faded away, I don’t know, but I’ll keep you posted if I dig up anything.
As for budget, it didn’t take on its modern meaning, “statement of probable expenditures and revenues”, until 1733. (Don’t you love that word probable in there? Seriously, who’s kidding who?) Budget as a verb was a decided latecomer, not showing up until the late 1800s.
While you and I may grizzle about the difficulties of balancing a budget, there’s no question that we’re way better off than our grandparents and great-grandparents. According to The Atlantic, families in the early 1900s spent about 80% of their income on food, clothes and housing. By 2003, that figure had fallen to 50%, reflecting the falling cost of food and clothing in particular.
It’s easy to forget, too, that in 1900, life looked more like it did for someone living 500 years earlier than it does for someone living today. Only a quarter of American households had running water and fewer had flush toilets. Electric lighting was reserved for the wealthy and almost no-one owned a car. Between 1900 and 2013, average life expectancy in the US rose from 47 to 79 with falling child mortality a key contributor.
The rest of the Western world experienced a similar increase in ease of living and longevity over the same period. What often surprises people is that some time around the 1960s, the so-called Third World began catching up too, and today less than 10% of the global population live in what the World Bank defines as low-income countries. As a result, the phrase “Third World” - which arose during the Cold War to define countries not aligned with either the US or the USSR, but also became a synonym for poor, undeveloped countries - has largely fallen into disuse.
Let me add here, there’s poverty and then there’s poverty. While fewer and fewer people today are living in the kind of abject, grinding, life-threatening poverty that was so widespread until the 20th century, that doesn’t mean that everyone today is living in gilded mansions and driving around in BMWs.
Even within countries considered wealthy, places still exist where poverty is rife.
A smaller gap doesn’t mean there is no gap, and nor does it mean that a small number of people in the world are not outlandishly rich. If your life is about fighting for social equality, I say keep up the good work - the job is far from done.
And if your life seems to be about forever balancing an unbalanceable budget, my sympathies. My only advice would be don’t take whiskey out of your calculations, whatever you do. You’re going to need it next time you review your budget.
Bits and specious
As a rule, I avoid providing references for most of what I write, which has the distinct advantage of making it difficult to prove me wrong. However, I’m making an exception this week. Here’s the Atlantic article referred to earlier, and here’s my source for mortality figures in the US. My source for the claim regarding closing income gaps is the book Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund.
If you’re convinced the world is heading to hell in a handbasket, Factfulness is a good antidote. Its subtitle, Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, says it all. Rosling was a passionate advocate of using data to assess the state of the world, and Factfulness is a sobering reminder of how easy it is for us to be certain about things that just aren’t so (or used to be so, but aren’t any more). Rosling had his critics, but Factfulness is must-read for anyone interested in major trends that shape our world.
On that note, have you read Steven Pinker’s 2017 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress? My eldest son thinks Pinker is a glass-half-full, reality-denying Pollyanna, but I found this book compelling. Like Factfulness, it’s jam packed with data, which makes it a million times more useful than most of what we read online, regardless of whether you agree with its conclusions.
Quote of the week
It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.
George W Bush
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