artificialities replied to your post “A Sign that I’ve read too many terrible Les Mis fanfics is that every...”
Yeah, in my experience a rally is "stand around listening to speeches and occasionally cheering/chanting, usually with signs, usually in front of a govt building or something" and a march is "walking from X to Y with signs and chants." Often there'll be one followed by the other.
soundingonlyatnightasyousleep replied to your post “A Sign that I’ve read too many terrible Les Mis fanfics is that every...”
....do most people eat during speeches in uk?????????? Bb
So yeah, the standard ‘march’ is ‘you walk from A to B’ and gosh I really need someone to teach me the song that someone in my political group made up about this because it’s good. But then at the end of the march there are usually speeches, and occasionally the beginning also (which makes sense, because people are standing around waiting for people running on different extremes of Leftist Time to turn up, it’s the equivalent of having magicians in the queue) but these would usually be considered part of the march, IDK. They vary in formality from ‘I’ve set up a stage in Hyde Park and everything’ to ‘We’re standing around in a circle in Parliament Square listening to someone who is speaking un-amplified in the middle’. Generally the sound quality is poor either way tbh; I think the only march I’ve been on that didn’t have this problem was a really big climate change one, they had a second screen for people far away from the stage and everything. My audio processing is not by any means Terrible but it is rarely ever up to the job of figuring out what tf is being said.
This may well feature in my decision to eat sandwiches at this point; my honest answer is that I don’t know if it’s something that ‘most people’ do bc at this point I’m generally so wildly overloaded that I’m not really doing the social anthropology thing. But I don’t think it’s wildly outside the norm? These are generally points when there’s a bit of a drop in energy, people have been walking and yelling for a while and are kinda Tired.
It’s pretty rare to have a political action without some kind of A-B movement, but if you do it’s called a ‘demo[nstration]’, although a ‘demo’ could encompass a range of things in addition to ‘stand around listening to speakers’, and is sometimes used as a catch-all term for a political Thing, which might include marches! Also ‘demo’ is slightly uncool terminology that I persist in using for Reasons, a lot of the super cool leftists would probably use the term ‘action’ instead because they are cool. I think the other important thing is that like, if there’s a March it tends to be really formal and the police have to be notified of the route, but a demo/action is more likely to be impromptu, not highly publicised, etc, and may range from ‘not technically illegal’ to ‘highly illegal’.
So I guess that what Americans call a ‘rally’ would either be considered part of a ‘march’ or occasionally be a stand-alone ‘demo[nstration]’. Or possibly to fall in the category of ‘public meeting’? Those tend to be indoors though. As I write all this stuff out it’s occurring to me that the background of this is almost certainly the fact that in the UK things can very easily turn out to be cold/rainy and so you generally want to incorporate some Movement into your plans or everyone will be freezing and grumpy.
This may have been more information than either of you wanted.
