Zone Distances

The radius of the air bubble around suburban middle class white people living in Australia, New Zealand, England, North America and Canada is generally the same. It can be broken down into four distinct zone distances.

1. Intimate Zone (between 15 and 45 centimetres or 6 to 18 inches)

Of all the zone distances, this is by far the most important as it is this zone that a person guards as if it were his own property. Only those who are emotionally close to that person are permitted to enter it. This includes lovers, parents, spouse, children, close friends and relatives. There is a sub-zone that extends up to 15 centimetres (6 inches) from the body that can be entered only during physical contact. This is the close intimate zone.

Why language skills are great for business (Lucy Jolin, The Guardian)

Planning where to invest for the new year? Find out why learning a language could be your route to success.

“I love you” on Parisian Love wall Place des Abbesses, Paris. The words are written in 311 languages. Photograph: Alibi Productions/Alamy.

Don’t know your bonjours from your buongiornos? You’re not alone: three-quarters of British adults can’t speak a foreign language competently[PDF]. But the benefits of being able to communicate with overseas clients, suppliers and buyers are huge – as are the costs of lacking that facility.

“The UK economy is already losing around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of lack of language skills in the workforce,” says Baroness Coussins, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages (APPG). “And we aren’t just talking about high flyers: in 2011 over 27% of admin and clerical jobs went unfilled because of the languages deficit.” The APPG’s Manifesto for Languages is calling for a raft of measures to tackle this problem, including encouragement such as tax breaks for companies who invest in language training.

Strong words (Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian)

As words die out, we’re more in danger of losing ‘decent’, ‘duty’ and ‘punctuation’ than ‘dirty’, ‘stick’ and ‘guts’.

Mopestar Media

 Fascinating stuff from the University of Reading, which has announcedthat our oldest words have been in existence for an awfully long time, yet that “50% of the words we use today would be unrecognisable to our ancestors living 2500 years ago”.

Mark Pagel, who is perhaps tellingly a professor of evolutionary biologyand not of linguistics, added that “if a time-traveller came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble”.