(″･ิ_･ิ)っ-̾ PSY may be a tipping point for western audiences to discover how much excellent, sophisticated pop music is being made in South Korea, or could the language barrier repel them? The fact I can't understand them and the vocals become just another instrument is a reason I like foreign music, but I often wonder if those songs I love were sung in English, would I still like them? Probably not if done by your standard western pop starlets.

Is our language, English, capable, is English capable of sustaining demagoguery? I mean ummmm highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping up rhetoric. Listen to me, if Hitler had been British would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged up, fired by his inflammatory speeches, or would we have laughed? Is English too ironic to support Hitlerian styles? Would his language simply have rung false in our ears?

May I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? May I? Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically - extrinsically, from the language itself? It’s a chicken and egg problem.