Matching Tracksuits

language

How K and I Spent Saturday Afternoon

Sunday 15 October 2006

Translating course descriptions from Polish:

The course is presented in two parts. In the first part regarding the cadastre basics (semester V: professor Hycner), the course covers basic information regarding issues of land and building cadastre in Poland. The second portion regarding real estate economy (semester VI: Dr. Rutkowski), the course covers basic information regarding spatial development planning basics and information regarding real estate economy basics. The part regarding cadastre basics develops problems connected with establishing the land and building cadastre based on the existing land and building register. It also covers acquiring, storing, and actualizing cadastre information, which is developed in the laboratory, and students prepare cadastre documentation for a portion of the cadastral unit � using the most modern computer technology.

I was going to try to ramble on in a style similar to the original Polish of all these course descriptions, but it’s too hard. I guess you have to be “prof. dr hab. inz” to write like that…

The worst part is that for our purposes, we have to translate this as close to “word for word” as possible. A literal word for word translation, as in most cases, would make less than no sense. But the catch is that these are the writings of engineers and surveyors — in Polish they read awfully. So we’re trying to strike a “delicate” balance.

Translating anything is bad enough. Translating poorly written material is a nightmare.

Reading List

Wednesday 13 September 2006

Frederick Wirth writes in Prenatal Parenting of an experiment Anthony Casper conducted at the University of North Carolina regarding parental reading and prenatal development. He had mothers read Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat to their unborn children twice a day. A few days after birth, the infants were given a chance to hear the story again. However, using a device fitted with a special nipple, the infants could change the story being read by changing the rate at which they were sucking.

As demonstrated by their sucking speed, the newborns remembered The Cat in the Hat better. Furthermore, they preferred it read forward instead of backward. (Wirth, 37)

So I guess in a way I was wrong when I suggested that our daughter might prefer Shell Silverstein to Robert Frost.

Or, looking at it another way, here’s a chance to get my daughter interested in all the nerdy literature I love.

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse

I aim to give L a headstart on senior lit…

Reading and Walls

Tuesday 12 September 2006

Wirth CoverIn my “Currently Reading” pile of books lies Prenatal Parenting by Frederick Wirth, M.D. Most interesting so far have been the sections on fetal sensory development, particularly the development and growth of the auditory system. Wirth writes that at “twenty-two weeks of gestation the developing infant will respond to sounds from outside the womb. By twenty-eight weeks the infant responds to sound in very consistent ways.” (28) And so K talks to her walk driving to work, and I press my cheek to K’s belly nightly and tell our daughter how much we’re looking forward to meeting her.

K and I have been playing a little music box for our daughter nightly for some weeks now, but recently, we’ve added reading to the ritual.

It should have a noticeable effect:

I can always tell which of my full-term newborn infants have been read to. They have more mature orienting behavior to auditory stiumli. I can even tell which fathers have been active in reading to their unborn child. I do this by holding the infant between me and his father while we compete for the infant’s attention by calling the child’s name. If the dad has been actively involved in the reading and singing, his child will turn his head toward him, looking for the source of the sound. Invariably, when their eyes meet they both react positively. (Wirth, 29)

SidewalkOften, it’s selections from Where the Sidewalk Ends, not so much because L will like it more — obviously, fetal brain development at this point is not that advanced — but because K likes Silverstein’s playful language.

Tonight, Robert Frost, concluding with one of his best, one of the best, period: “Mending Wall.” It has one of the truest passages ever written:Wall

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’

Such concerns seem largely forgotten these days.

Language Log

Tuesday 8 August 2006

My new favorite site:Language Log. “Weblog run by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman, with multiple guest linguists.”

This entry on Dan Brown from a couple of years ago left me wiping the tears from my eyes. In another entry about Brown books, we read, “In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae.” (Source)

Really worth a look.

Recent Listening: Gender Grammar and Names

Wednesday 26 July 2006

“Who cares about grammar?” some ask. That devil-may-care attitude I suppose works for some. There are a few jobs were clarity seems critical. “Spiritual leader” seems to be just such a job.”

Yet, uneducated preachers, it seems to me, are the ones most likely to follow a line of thinking like this: “My job is to communicate. If they understand me, then that’s all I care about.” You’d think if souls are on the line and all that a little more care might be in order. Apparently not.

Other times, grammatical goofs result in little more than humorously muddled texts.

The worst source of well-advertised, over-exposed bad grammar is the lyrics of popular songs. For instance, countless singers have used the subjective “I” instead of the objective “me” to make a rhyme. I guess that’s okay — it doesn’t really change the meaning.

The he/him and she/her difference, however, can make a huge impact on the song’s meaning. Consider two examples from songs I listened to recently.

First, “Hard to Handle,” the Alvertis Isbell/Allen Jones/Otis Redding song made famous by the Black Crowes:

Action speaks louder than words
And I’m a man of great experience
I know you’ve got another man
But I can love you better than him

Wiry Chris Robinson tried so hard to be masculinely sexy in that video, and it’s just difficult to imagine him deliberating between another man and some curvy groupie. But apparently, if the lyrics are to be believed, he did…

John Lennon did no better with the Beatles’ “If I Fell.” Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of two girls he’s interested in, much like I was checking tomatoes at the farmers’ market the other day, he tells one,

If I give my heart to you
I must be sure
From the very start
That you would love me more than her

Granted, it is a fantasy of a great many men to be with two women at once, but I don’t think Lennon had that in mind in penning this line. Or maybe he was thinking something along the lines of Chasing Amy.

In both instances, of course, the “lyricist” simply didn’t understand that they were writing elliptical statements. “I can love you better than he [can love you].” “You would love me more than [she would love me].”

Johnny Cash, however, had no such problems writing one of his best, “A Boy Named Sue.” The narrator’s father, just before skipping out on his responsibilities, names his son “Sue,” prompting the grown Sue to hunt him down. Just before his son shoots him, Sue’s father says,

“Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong.”

He said: “Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I’m the son-of-a-bitch that named you ‘Sue.'”

I want my children to have courage (though not necessarily such foolhardy courage), but I don’t think we’ll resort to naming our son Sue…

Learning Polish

Tuesday 11 July 2006

From my journal, ten years ago.

I’ve been working with my host mother on the basic Polish sounds and I have hit a real break through in [the] pronunciation of sz and rz. It’s great!

Earlier in the evening I was trying to pronounce one of the many “sh” sounds and after several failures I finally threw out a last attempt accompanied by a significant amount of spittle, and she cried “Tak!” with great delight.

Learning Polish was unlike learning Spanish and French for me because it occurred in Poland out of necessity. Survival even. And so the result is that I know much more Polish than I ever did French or Spanish, and I have an understanding of linguistic subtitles that escaped me in high school and university.

And I can finally say “chrząszcz” without drowning my conversational companions.

Mów po polsku!

Wednesday 4 January 2006

“Have you ever noticed how few of these children of Polish families actually speak Polish?”

Kinga asked — in Polish, of course — the other evening. She was speaking mainly of the children of a Polish couple who have been in America for more than twenty years, and who rarely if ever go back to Poland as a family. The children of these very nice folk usually speak to their parents in English, even though their parents often simply speak Polish to them.

Kinga and I both want our children to grow up bilingual, but that’s difficult enough when both parents are foreigners. When only one is a foreigner, it might be all but impossible. The language of society dictates what is Language One for the child, and not the language at home.

Where there is a community to support the use of the foreign language, it’s much easier. But North Carolina is no Chicago, and the opportunities to use Polish will be rare.

“We’ll just have to send the kids to Poland every summer,” I replied to Kinga. There’ll be Polish music in the house; we’ll eat Polish cuisine; I’ll try to speak more and more Polish at home; we’ll have Polish books in our library; we’ll just cram Polish culture down their throats! (That is a joke — in reality, there’d be no better way to turn them off of all things Polski.)

Will all that even be feasible, though?

One would think that instilling in them a sense of pride in and love for their heritage would suffice. But at a certain points in their lives, the “un-coolness” of being different would stifle any urge to speak Polish.

Perhaps I’m wrong? Hopefully I’m wrong. We shall just have to read a few books about raising bi-lingual children.

Substandards

Wednesday 12 October 2005

Yesterday evening Kinga and I watched Człowiek z Marmuru  (“Man of Marble”), something of a 70’s Polish Citizen Kane, directed by Andrzej Wajda. I decided to watch it with the subtitles on, with the thought of possibly reviewing it for Anvil and Sprocket, a friend’s film review site.

I was horrified, though, at the pathetic translation for the subtitles. I would say no more than sixty-five to seventy percent of what was said was actually translated. The subtitles were more a summary of the dialogue than the dialogue itself. So many subtleties were completely dropped as a result that some of the more interesting characters in the film were simply flat, boring characters. If I didn’t know Polish, I would have said, “Oh, it’s okay.” But it’s not just “okay.” It’s a brilliant film, which does lose a bit of momentum at the end and Krystyna Janda does over-act a bit here and there. Still, the idea is solid – a Polish Citizen Kane that tracks the rise and fall of master mason Mateusz Birkut, a humble man who becomes a symbol of Polish Communist labor through propaganda films. It is one of the most accessible films for non-Poles, for there is a lot that depends on an intimate knowledge of Polish culture. But if you don’t know the language and rely on the subtitles, it is significantly diminished.

It got me to thinking about the art of subtitles. You certainly can’t write everything the characters say, for no one could read that fast and keep up with what the visual aspect of the film – which is, after all, somewhat important in film! And yet, you have to leave enough in to round out characters, else you get a film with flat characters.

ESubL

Wednesday 14 September 2005

Being bilingual can really be a troublesome affair when trying to teach English – if your student’s L1 is different than your L2.

Today, while subbing, I worked with a student of Latin origins who spoke very limited English. I speak even more limited Spanish, though I’ve decided I must learn that language. At any rate, I found that while working with her it was a constant and very conscious struggle not to lapse into Polish. “She doesn’t understand what you’re saying,” a voice was screaming in my head, “So use another language.”

Unfortunately, Polish was not terribly helpful.

The world of ESL is frightful in some ways. The responsibility is enormous.

As an EFL teacher, I was teaching a foreign language, which means it’s not going to be used that often. It’s not often going to be the basis of all other learning. And teaching English as a foreign language also affects the skills stressed. My primary goal for my students was verbal communication. Writing is important, but not nearly as important as speaking.

I confess, then, that I probably didn’t spend enough time with my students working on writing, until the national testing standards changed and forced my hand.

ESL is an entirely different animal. The goal is simple: get students’ English up to a level where they use it as their primary language for instruction. Think about it: it’s re-wiring a house, re-pouring a foundation. No, wrong analogy. It’s adding a second set of wires to a house, putting a foundation within a foundation.

And what do students do in the meantime? If they have limited English, how do they learn science? The idea solution is bilingual education, with L1 gradually being phased out. But the ideal is often just that.

I ustacould

Monday 11 July 2005

“I ustacould, but I cayn’t no mo.”

“Me and Mama, we was there yesterday.”

“I ain’t never said such a thang.”

Kinga had her first encounter with southern accent, virtually unintelligible southern accents over the Fourth of July weekend. Visiting my family in South Carolina, poor Kinga probably said “Excuse me?” more times in those few days than she’s said in the last few years combined.

It’s not just the accent that’s difficult. There are so many quirks of a southern, South Carolinian accent that cause problems.

  • Present perfect usually is created with a form of “have” plus the past particle (i.e., “done”). Southern present perfect is created with “done” plus either the past simple form (“ate”) or the past participle — usually the former. So instead of “I’ve already eaten,” be get “I done ate.”
  • “Be” in the past simple is always “was.” “Were” is virtually non-existent. “We was gonna try, but…”

Now she has an idea how difficult the local dialect in Poland was for me.

-ation

Thursday 19 May 2005

I did a lesson on word formation with a group of juniors today. We worked on turning nouns to adjectives (i.e., beauty to beautify) verbs to nouns (i.e., improve to improvement), and then I stunned them with the news that they were going to learn more than a thousand new words during the lesson.

It’s an easy lingustic trick, really. Words that end in “-ation” in English usually are virtually identical in Polish, only with an “-acja” (pronounced “aat-see-ya”) suffix, or a variation.

  • “revolution” is “rewolucja”
  • “inflation” is “inflacja”
  • “distribution” is “dystrybucja”

I don’t think I need to elaborate on what word young Rafał blurted out in class…

Absalomie, Absalomie…

Tuesday 8 March 2005

I borrowed the Polish version of Absalom, Absalom! for Kinga, and I was thumbing through the edition and noticed a couple of things immediately.

First of all, none of the extended passages italicized in the original are italicized in the Polish, which is strange, given how Faulkner uses italics.

Second, the famous final line, “I don’t hate the South!” was translated a little differently: “I don’t feel hatred for the South.” I’m not certain, but I think this was for fluid reading. “Nie czuję nienawiści do Południa!” ends this version, whereas a more literal translation would have read, “Nie nienawidzę…” and that double “nie” would have indeed read awkwardly.

In Defense of English Tenses

Monday 7 March 2005

Nina, at The Other Side of the Ocean, recently complained about necessary tenses in English.

Writing about learning English, she says, “As a new kid on the English-speaking block, I had to come to terms with the fact that English has sixteen verb tenses. You truly are insane.”

Indeed, most Poles when they learn that there are more than three tenses in English have a similar reaction.

The actual number of tenses is a somewhat fluid issue. Nina maintains sixteen. I would argue that there are only three tenses: past, present, and future. Within each of those, though, there are four types:

  • simple
  • progressive/continuous
  • perfect, and
  • perfect progressive/continuous.

A total of twelve, for I don’t count conditionals as tenses.

This does seem somewhat excessive but think of the versatility of the English tense system.

With a single verb tense you can:

  • Show whether it happened before or after another action;
  • Indicate whether or not it is a temporary action;
  • Show whether or not it was a completed action; and,
  • Indicate whether it was habitual or not.

Think of the enormous difference between these sentences:

  1. When you called I was eating.
  2. When you called, I had eaten.

In situation one, you’d better apologize; in situation two, you’re fine.

But some of the tenses do indeed cause problems with Polish learners, none more so than present perfect (i.e., “I have eaten sushi.”). It’s problematic because it sometimes refers to the past (“I’ve been to China. I went last year.”) and sometimes to the present (“I’ve lived in Poland for seven years.”). The first example would be translated to past tense in Polish, while the second would be present tense. Then there’s the difference between “I’ve eaten sushi” and “I ate sushi.”

It’s a nightmare that some students never fully work out.

I, on the other hand, have problems fitting all those possibilities into tense-deprived Polish. Polish does have something sort of like a continuous tense, but instead of being a different tense, it’s a different verb! “Obejrzełem” is “I watched” whereas “ogladałem” is more like “I was watching.”

How’s that for difficulty?!

It’s not often

Monday 7 March 2005

that I get to make a student’s day, but I think I did just that this morning.

I handed back tests to a class of first year students, by far my favorites. I love teaching beginners because it’s really a kick to end a year talking to a group of kids in English that didn’t know a single word a few months earlier. This group in particular is wonderful. There’s a very positive dynamic in the class: they’re very enthusiastic, but easily controlled.

Grazyna (not her real name) has been having problems since the beginning of the school year, and has to struggle to pass. I think she’s one of those of us who have little talent for languages.

Today, I gave her back her test. She made a “three” on it, the equivalent of a “C” in the States.

It was her highest grade ever for a major test in English.

She literally screamed, and her face glowed with the loveliest smile I’ve seen in a long time.

Those are the moments that make teaching my dream job.

Brain Leak

Tuesday 1 March 2005

It was bound to happen, I suppose. I’d heard of it, but never thought I’d experience it myself.

I’m forgetting English. Not the whole language of course, but isolated words here and there.

For instance, the other day a student asked me what “zniżka” is in English. I stood there thinking, “What is that? ‘Lowered price?’ ‘Rebate?’ What the hell do they call that, a lowered price. Student’s price?!” I couldn’t remember “discount” to save my life.

Exhibit two: I was making a test key for a first-year class’s test, and I came upon the word “pralka.” “That thing for washing clothes,” I mumbled to myself. I closed my eyes and I could see my in-laws’ sitting there. Clothes washer? Washing machine.

Now this is not to say that my Polish is so dang good that I’m more comfortable speaking it than English. No — quite the opposite. I am to Polish what clear-cutters are to bonsai. But as the saying goes, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Despite my constant reading and writing, words manage to get wedged in my head and I can’t shake the jumble out.

Of course, I have the same problem in Polish. To an exponential degree.

Androgynous Mittens

Saturday 12 February 2005

The bumping, swaying motion of the bus was, as usual, rocking me to sleep. I was returning from Nowy Targ, the nearest Polish town, fighting sleep as I usually do on busses in Poland.

Ironically, a town in Slovakia is about fifteen kilometers closer, but not as accessible by bus.

In front of me sat a mother and her child, who looked to be two years old. About halfway home, I glanced down to notice one of the child’s mittens had fallen on the floor. I reached down to pick it up, then leaned a little over the seat and was going to address the child. “You lost something, didn’t you?” And then the mild panic struck: is this a boy or a girl? Wrapped up tight for winter, the child was androgynous, with only a face visible. So I said nothing, and simply gave the mitten back to the mother. Rather, she noticed I was holding it and literally jerked it out of my hand. Odd experience.

I didn’t say anything to the child because I didn’t know the child’s gender, and that is essential if you’re speaking to someone in Polish in the past tense. Polish verbs are curious because their past tense forms are gender specific. “I took” for a man (wziałem) is different than “I took” for a woman (wziałam). Not terribly different, but different nonetheless.

If I were to say to a little boy, “You lost something, didn’t you?” the “lost” would be “straciłeÅ›,” whereas for a little girl it would be “straciłaÅ›.”

The verb endings for males are:

-łem-liśmy
-łeś-liście
-ł-l

For females, however, they are:

-łam-łyśmy
-łaś-łyście
-ła-ły

My father-in-law always does this when he asked Kinga and I where we went, if we’d disappeared for a few hours one Sunday afternoon. “GdzieÅ›cie byli?” he’d ask, taking the “Å›cie” ending from the verb and throwing it on “gdzie,” or “where.”

Update:
Vivi asked “So, when you are talking about mixed company (ie a man and a woman), does it default to masculine, like French?” Short answer: yes.

Will the madness never end?!

Returning to the androgynous mittens’ story, my wife informs me that people make such mistakes all the time, with the mother usually correcting them. So I could have just chosen a gender and let fly.

God Holding His Breath on Borrowed Time

Thursday 13 January 2005

Until I noticed the reference to God being “blue.”

Thus I left things hanging.

Many words in Polish have dual meanings. Nothing new there — English is loaded with them, my students like to point out.

“Niebieski” in Polish is derived from the word “niebo,” which is “sky” or “heaven.” Immediately we get into trouble, because the sky is a physical, observable phenomenon, while heaven is, at best, theological conjecture.

With such a start, meanings can only slide into more silliness.

The ontological status of the meaning of “niebo” aside, it gets more confusing when we throw the adjectival form into the mix. As expected, “niebieski” means “heavenly.”

However, “niebieski,” as you first learn it in a Polish course, would be “blue.”

Hence, whenever I’m in Mass and hear that we should now direct our prayers “do niebieskiego ojca,” I can’t help but conjure up images of blue deities even though I know the priest is just telling us to direct our prayers to our “heavenly father.”

There are other slippery words in Polish.

“Pożyczyć” is undoubtedly my favorite. It means, “lend.”

And “borrow.”

[Short pause.]

Exactly.

At first, that seems like saying “xidhb” in some language means “black” and “white.” “Lend” and “borrow” have such intrinsically different, though related, meanings that it’s difficult to comprehend that a language exists that represents both ideas with the same word. But it’s really not that different: lending and borrowing both involve a temporary transaction of a given object, with the implicit understanding of said article’s eventual return.

What English throws into the mix is the ownership information. By using the word “borrow,” I make it clear, without any context, that I am lacking something. By using the word “lend,” though, I make it clear that I am the owner.

Ownership in “pożyczy” is, of course, differentiated; only it’s done grammatically.

  • “pożyczyć‡ komuś›” is lend. “Komuś›” is the dative case for “ktoś›,” which means “someone.” And dative case, for those who don’t know, is the case used in inflected languages to indicate the indirect article.
  • “pożyczyć od kogoś›” is borrow. “Od kogoś›” means “from someone,” which makes the direction of the transaction (and hence ownership) clear.

Beginning students (and, to my dismay, students with some experience with English) often confuse these two English words, and come up with, “Can you borrow me your pen for a moment?” or “I can borrow you this or that.”

More linguistic ambiguity:

  • The words for “lock,” “zipper,” and “castle” are all the same: zamek.
  • The words for “pigeon” and “dove” are the same, resulting in students coming up with an interesting construction: Pigeons of Peace.

But linguistic ambiguity is a two-way street, and soon I’ll delve into the wild world of “things that mess with Polish students’ heads.”

Frying Mr. Teddy

Tuesday 11 January 2005

Recently I mentioned the absurdity of the “Freedom Fries” wave sweeping across Patriotic Probably-Mostly-Republican America. Language is a living thing, and we can’t read current politics into a word’s etymology, I argued.

An amusing example of this in Polish: the word “pan.”

In modern usage, it has the meaning of “mister,” as in, “Mr. S” being “Pan S.” “Mrs.” is “Pani,” and on a side not, I know from an Indian friend that “pani” is Hindi for “water.”

Linguistic webs aside, “pan” would also be translated to French as “vous,” or to German as “Sie.” So when speaking to a stranger in Polish, you speak to them in third person singular out of respect. (Unless you live in the mountains down south and are speaking a dialect, and then it’s like French: second person plural.)

Armed with only this knowledge and some elementary Polish, you’ll be in for an amusing surprise when you go to Mass, because you’ll hear God referred to as “Pan Bóg.”

“Mr. God?” was my first surprised reaction.

More digging.

“Pan” also, and originally, means something like “master,” in the sort of 18th-century, English manor sense. So the patriotic Mickiewicz poem Pan Tadeusz wouldn’t be translated, as a Pole joked with me, “Mr. Teddy,” but rather, “Master Tad” (Source).

And so now “Pan Bóg” makes since: it’s simply “Lord,” or even “the Lord God.” When I learned all this, I stopped snickering under my breath whenever I rarely attended Mass with a friend.

Until I noticed the reference to God being “blue.”

Names

Wednesday 29 December 2004

My name is Gary. My parents told me that when they first saw me, they just knew I was “Gary.”

There are lots of Garys out there.

  • Gary Kasparov
  • Gary Sinise
  • Gary Moore
  • Gary Oldman
  • Gary Cherone
  • Gary Glitter
  • Gary Busey
  • Gary, Indiana
  • Gary, West Virginia
  • Gary, Minnesota
  • Gary, South Dakota

So apparently it’s a popular name.

Nonetheless, I used to hate that name, particularly in junior high. I also hated my hair cut then, as well. Not man-ish enough. I wanted a Ted Danson do.

What was I thinking?

Changing my hair turned out to be easier than changing my name, which didn’t happen until college. Fresh start, new faces — I can be anyone I want. Armed with that knowledge, I tried going by my middle name: Lawrence.

It lasted a couple of weeks.

I’ve often wondered at stage names. Do Sting’s close friends call him “Sting” or “Gordon?” Is Bono “Bono” to his wife, or just plain Paul? Does Adam Ant’s mother still call him “Stuart?” When Eric Clapton was working with Babyface, did they call each other “Clapp” and “Kenneth?” Would Lauren Bacall be as famous as “Betty Joan Perske?” If you call Erykah Badu “Erica Wright,” does she answer? “Full list of stage names.

The trouble was, I could never remember who I was.

Someone would call my name and I would continue walking, oblivious to the fact that someone was trying to get my attention.

Names seem to merge with your self, and it’s difficult to separate “you” from your name.

The only reason I could start going by “Lawrence” was because no one knew me at college as “Gary.” It would have been difficult to convince everyone in high school to call me “Lawrence,” for I’d always been “Gary” to them.

Imagine calling the color white “blue” for the some arbitrary reason — it wouldn’t work, because white’s, well, “white.”

When I gave up on the “Lawrence” nonsense, a few people persisted in calling me “Lawrence” for a little while. That in turn made for a stupid situation, because I had to explain:

  1. that I’d always been called Gary;
  2. that I only switched to “Lawrence” at college;
  3. that I’d not been able to get used to it; and,
  4. that I’d decided to go back to my “original” name.

“Why’d you want to change in the first place?”

If I’d known what my name sounds like in Polish, and that I’d end up spending years here, I probably would have stuck to the Lawrence. “Garnek” is Polish for “pot” (the kind you cook in, not the kind you smoke), and so when you say, “I’ll wash the dishes,” you of course use the plural form: garnki. Or you can use the diminutive form, which sounds like…

When my wife introduced me to her grandmother, granny’s reaction to my name is, “No, really — what’s his name.” After all, what how would you react to being told your granddaughter is dating “Pots?”

Still, I’m glad I stuck with “Gary.” It at least lets me make jokes after lunch.

Freedom-frying-over-high-heat and stupid European surrender monkeys

Tuesday 28 December 2004

Old news: the Congress (and many Americans) are opting for “Freedom Fries” instead of “French fries.” (Read BBC article.) Americans are still calling “French toast” “Freedom Toast” and other nonsense.

I’m sure the French have been getting a good chuckle out of this, because it reveals striking ignorance about the English language itself. In a xenophobic attempt to purge “French” from the language and protest France’s lack of support for the American war effort, our leaders headed straight for the fast food.

Are these idiots even aware of the enormous number of English words are French in origin, thanks to Willie the Conquerer, 1066 and all that? (A short article about it.) Besides, what does anyone hope to accomplish in calling a chunk of deep-fried potato a “Freedom fry” rather than a “French fry?”

I’m sure Chirac, when he heard about this, called an emergency damage control planning session with all his advisors.

If Americans are still obsessed with “French” cooking terms (after all, “French fries” is short for “French fried potatoes”), then they need to come up with new terms for:

  • blanch (Freedom remove skin?)
  • saute (Freedom fry over high heat?)
  • fondue (Freedom melt?)
  • puree (Freedom crush?)
  • flambae (Freedom burn?)

The whole list of Arabic words in English is available here

And while these idiots are at it, why not purge all the Arabic words from English? After all the terrorists that started all this are mostly Arabic, so let’s chuck:

  • admiral (Freedom big Navy leader man?)
  • checkmate (Freedom inability to move your king?)
  • coffee (Freedom Java — oh wait, do they support us?)
  • spinach (Freedom Popeye veggie?)
  • zenith (Freedom point in the sky which appears directly above the observer (definition from Wikipedia)?)

This dumbfounding nonsense reveals a basic ignorance of how language works and develops. There are very few words in English language that were “planned” in any way. Language generally just “happens,” like shit. (A list of how words “happen” can be found at wordorigins.org)

It reminds me of a young man who was spooked by the fact that rearranging the letters in “Santa” produces “Satan” — clear proof of the evil of Christmas. Still, we’re not alone. The French are just as worried about borrowed words creeping into French, as evidenced by the Acadamie Francaise. And Celine at Naked Translations has an amusing post about this.

Of course what sparked all this is the feeling in America of not being appreciated.

The ingratitude of the governments of Belgium, France and Germany boggles the mind. If it were not for the heroism of American soldiers during the Second World War, Hitler’s Third Reich would be in its eighth decade.

Poor us — we won World War Two for those spineless surrender monkeys and they should still be bowing to our wishes sixty years later. How dare they think for themselves now! Why, we’ve earned unquestioned support!