Tag Archives: nuclear disaster

Language and nuclear disaster — the Japanese language’s use of honorifics may reveal a parallel tendency to defer taking charge 0

Is our barbarians’ English better suited to efficient, emergency communication? Read what Minae Mizumura said in regard to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster: One unlikely side-effect of the Japanese crisis has been a new critique of our use of honorifics. One tends to associate honorifics with social hierarchy, but they play another critical role: they [...]