Is Meghan Markle Obsessed with an Archetype?

In cities across China, schoolchildren and adults have begun to sing and dance in front of health-care workers in appreciation of their long hours fighting the coronavirus. Exhausted, hazmat-suited workers now find themselves confronted by loudspeaker-toting, pirouetting citizens, and kind of wish they’d cut it out. “They might mean well, but this is wasting our time,” Tang Xuan, a nurse in Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post. “It would be impolite of us to stop them, but we are very busy. We just want to finish our job as soon as possible and go home.”

Yes, that dateline usually means just one thing: Harry and/or Meghan are at it again. The Duchess of Sussex has found a name she likes for her new Spotify podcast series and wants to trademark it … even though it happens to be a word in common usage since the 16th century. “Records show an application at the US Patent and Trademark Office was made last month by Archewell Audio, the couple’s production company,” reported The Times of London.

The trademark application is for the word “archetype,” and, according to the newspaper, “the programme title links in with Archewell, the name of Harry and Meghan’s company, which the couple said previously had been inspired by ‘arche’, meaning ‘source of action’ in Greek. It was also the inspiration for the name of their son, Archie.” Does this mean “Archie” is short for “archetype”?

Who were the eight Russian oligarchs awarded “golden visas” under the now discontinued “tier 1 investor visa” scheme, essentially buying, for investments of at least $2.6 million, the right to live in the U.K.? The shadow minister for immigration, Stephen Kinnock, is pressing Home Secretary Priti Patel for more transparency. “The Home Office last month committed to publishing a 2018 report on golden visas.… The government has not said when it will do so,” reported The Guardian. “During that period few if any checks were carried out on applicants, in what the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption described as a ‘red carpet for dirty money.’” About 700 Russians, out of 3,000 millionaires in all, bought visas between 2008 and 2015.

Leo Tolstoy’s great-granddaughter is sheltering Ukrainian refugees at her apartment in this Swiss village near the ski resort of Crans-Montana. “We are against the horrors that are being perpetrated now, the invasion of an innocent country,” Marta Albertini, 84, told The Times of London. Albertini added that she thinks her great-grandfather would have been “completely devastated” by the war in Ukraine.

The Alhambra will remain a draw. Will the tapas? Mayor Paco Cuenca threw down the gauntlet when he announced that “the city council will no longer promote free tapas,” which have traditionally come gratis with drinks in the city’s hundreds of bars, “because they’re haute cuisine” and should carry a price.

“Media from across the country swooped in to cover the polemic in the ciudad de la tapa — city of the tapa — asking whether this was the end of free tapas in Granada or pronouncing that the mayor had ‘declared war’ on the tradition,” reported The Guardian. To some, “the tapa is sacred,” although the newspaper reported that a local journalist, Cecilia Cano, tweeted, “Let’s be honest, many of the supposedly free tapas in Granada are not free, nor are they tasty, nor can you choose them. Yes to tapa, of course, but I prefer to pay for it, choose it and eat well.”

Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has been renamed “The Owl and the Kitty-Cat” in an edition produced by the charity Gender Identity Research & Education Society, because “the word ‘pussy’ now has ‘linguistic connotations’ that did not apply when it was written in 1871,” according to the Daily Mail. The word substitution has been applied to all references in the text as well. Derek Johns of the Edward Lear Society told the newspaper, “The charity’s version of the poem has absolutely nothing to do with Edward Lear because it was not written by him.”

The Daily Mail reported that the revised version was first published in 2014 “to help teachers discuss trans or gender diverse issues,” and that a GIRES spokesperson said, “In contemporary times, pussy is widely recognised as profanity. It is considered a derogatory word that dehumanises women, reducing them to sexual objects.” But the literary critic Andrew Lycett noted, “[The change] suggests that the word ‘pussy’ is intrinsically sexually charged and suggestive. That is not how a child sees the word, which is still widely used in families as an affectionate term for a cat.”

Time, maybe, to turn our attention to that equally problematic “owl.” Casual research reveals it to be an acronym for Ongoing Weight Loss, Ordinary Wizarding Level, and Older Wiser Lesbians, to name but three. Probably safest to stick with the science and just start calling the poem “The Strigiform and the Felid.”

George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large for AIR MAIL