[The following items were published on a monthly
basis, between January 2005 and July 2008 in BAM
NEWS, which is the
official publication of B.A.M.—The
British Association of Monaco. They were all contributed by George SANDULESCU to one and the same column,
entitled LANGUAGE CORNER (usually situated on page four).]
2005.
BAM NEWS. January 2005. page 4.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
[In
his Interview to BAM reporter Lois Bolton, published by BAM NEWS in December 2004, George has
alleged that “he knows ten languages”…]
Queries to George:
Ever since 1 December, members keep asking me which are “my ten” languages: whenever I choose to add Latin to the list of “ten”, they look so puzzled !
So, I better explain what I mean by
“knowing” a language: in my profession
it means, not so much to spit out a few
words in order to buy matches or cigarettes in French or Albanian (I do NOT
smoke!), but rather that when one is given a text (written or spoken) in one
language, to be able (with a dictionary) to transfer its meaning into another
language, which is for me English; and this definition is meant to cover “dead”
languages, such as Cornish.
I do indeed regret that my ancient
Greek is “so” non-existent, having been exterminated in my younger school days
by . . . Russian.
BAM NEWS. January 2005. page 2.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
John Keats & Robert
Burns !
The English Romantic poet John Keats (
1795 – 1821 ) loved Scotland, and was a great admirer of Rabbie Burns: he even wrote a poem entitled On
Visiting the Tomb of Burns and even another one, Written in
Burns’s Cottage, which is far
more visits than most of us had done . . . in our much longer lives. But Keats
was still puzzled about Scotland; here is only the fourth and last part of his
funniest poem A Song about Myself :
There was a naughty Boy,
And a naughty Boy was he,
He
ran away to Scotland
The people for to see—
Then he
found
That the
ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as
merry,
That a
cherry
Was as red—
That lead
Was as
weighty,
That fourscore
Was as
eighty,
That a door
Was as
wooden
As in
England—
So he stood in his shoes
And he
wondered,
He wondered,
He stood in his shoes
And he
wondered.
Very “Common Market” his Message, is it not ?
BAM NEWS. February 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
Chaucer Knew
Better English !
My Saint Val
language question ? I am asking you: ‘What does parliament mean
?’ Do not pooh-pooh me ! For I mean—what does it mean in addition to what
we all know it means ? Can it, for instance, be applied to the animal world ?
‘Never,’ you reply cocksure of yourself. I retort: Can you say a parliament
of birds, I am asking you ? ‘Not over my dead body,’ you reply
more aggressively. ‘Yes, you can,’ replied Geoff. Chaucer as early as 1372, in
the title of one of his famous St.Valentine piecesThe
Parlement of Foules (now spelt Fowl) . . . which ends with
the lines:
Seynt Valentyn,
that art ful hy onlofte;
Thus singen smale foules for thy sake—
Now
welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,
That
hast this wintres weders over-shake.
It is a day-dream poem describing a conference of birds, who are about to choose their
mates on St Valentine’s Day (with an absolutely extraordinary range of names of
birds, far more than any of us could today dream of). Actually, today we really say a
parliament of owls.
(Check it up if you do not trust me !) Quite, quite close to Chaucer !
In the same way, we also say: a convocation
of eagles. a watch of
nightingales. a party of jays (how
very appropriate !). a skulk of
foxes. To say nothing of Ambassadors, Consuls, and other birds of prey !
So much for Saint Valentine.
More ‘animals’ of the same ilk
next month ! Ta-ta.
P.S. By the way, try your own
English: here are a few ‘household’ words, in alphabetical order; find names of
assembly, or of “collectives”, corresponding to them, such as a murder of
crows, etc. (Aisling would be delighted to hear from you, for you’d be
helping her improve her scrabble !):
ants. bees. birds. cats. chicks. chickens.
crows. ducks. fish. foxes. geese. goats.
greyhounds. hares. horses. hounds. kittens. lions.
oxen. oysters. partridge. pheasants. pigs. quail.
ravens. sheep. sparrows. squirrels. swans. swine.
trout. turkeys. vipers. wolves.
BAM NEWS. March 2005. page 4.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
The Answers to the February Quiz:
a colony of ants. a swarm/grist of bees.
a flight/volery of birds. a clowder/clutter of cats. a clutch/cletch of chicks.
a peep/brood of chickens. a brace/paddling/team
of ducks. a school/shoal of fish. a gaggle/skein/flight/flock of geese. a trip/tribe of goats.
a leash of greyhounds. a down/husk of hares. a harras/pair/team of horses.
a cry/mute/pack of hounds. a kindle/litter/
kendle of kittens. a pride of lions. a yoke of oxen.
a bed of oysters. a covey of partridge. a bouquet/nest/nide of pheasants. a litter of pigs.
a bevy/covey of quail. an unkindness of ravens. a drove/flock
of sheep. a host of sparrows. a dray/drey of squirrels.
a wedge/bevy of swans. a drift/sounder of swine. a hover of trout.
a rafter of turkeys. a nest of vipers. a route/pack of wolves.
{32 answers}
BAM NEWS. March 2005.page 4.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
HOWLERS CLASSIFIED ?
Both famous writers and the obscurest learners make mistakes which are very hard to imagine.
Joseph Conrad had his mistakes, in Chance
for instance, but after all, he was
Polish! Shaw too put his foot in it in the very title of You Never Can
Tell—a faulty title; but he was Irish, was he not. And Hemingway
was perhaps the worst of them with A Moveable
Feast, where the first e
shouldn’t be there at all . . . But he was certainly very American!
One
of my main tasks as a language teacher was reading and correcting essays and
translations; and I used to keep a record of the most memorable howlers; some
of them might have been mere typing mistakes, but their punch was still there .
. . Here are but some of the most striking ones (some of them have “language”
flaws; others not exactly so. And “classifying them” may indeed be a
theoretical headache. But you’ll see
for yourselves !). Could you possibly help me set them right all over again ?
BAM is sure to be looking forward to receiving some feedback.
We were trapped in a blazing car, but luckily enough
a river was passing by.
1. √.(a bit of geography:) Melba is where Napoleon
was imprisoned.
2. √. (spelling ?) Big flies were hoovering all round the
room.
3. √. (definitions:) The Gorgons looked like women … only more
horrible.
4. √. (definitions:) Sinister means a woman who hasn’t
married.
5. √. (geography ?) Harlem is the place where the Turks
keep their wives.
6. √. (definitions:) A virgin forest is one where the hand
of man
has never set foot.
7. √.As he walked through the
room, he heard the sound of heavy breeding.
8. √. (antonyms ?) The opposite of evergreen is nevergreen.
9. √. (malapropism ?) In the United States people are put to death
by elocution.
10. √. (no comments) People were running all over the
place,
the boys in shorts and the girls
in hysterics.
11. √. (a malapropism:) The octopus wrapped his testicles round
the diver
and strangled him.
12. √. (another malapropism:) A
litre is a nest of young puppies.
13. √. (rhetoric? No way !) The
process of turning steam into water again
is called conversation.
14. √. (homonymy, for sure:) As she went through her wardrobe,
she found a scorpion in her drawers.
She rose quickly.
(Some howlers are genuine strokes of genius, and
quite “uncorrectable”!)
15. √.Television gives me something to do, without my having to do
anything.
16. √. (malapropism:) A vandal is a kind of shoe that shows all
the toes.
17.√. (robust male chauvinism ?) The brain of a woman is almost as heavy
as a human brain.
P.S. Don’t forget to send in your protests! Yours, George.
BAM NEWS. April 2005. page 4.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
ANSWERS to the March Quiz in The
Language Corner:
1.running by.2.Elba.3.hovering.4.Rewrite.5.spinster. 6.harem.
7. DELETE ‘the hand
of’. 8.breathing.
9. evergreen is contrasted with deciduous.
10. electrocution.11.Rewrite.12.tentacles.13.litter.14.conversion.
15.Rewrite. 16. ‘uncorrectable’! 17.sandal. 18.Rewrite.
BAM NEWS. April 2005.page 4.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
RUMOURS. Or Bullseye Bacon?
This
is to dispel the rumour that Shakespeare was born on
Saint Valentine’s Day. No! He died on Saint George’s Day. Actually, he
was born the day he died. Or rather: He died the day he was born. Did he then
ever exist ? That is precisely why he is the Myth
that He is.
There
used to be an old old guide in the Houses of Parliament who was quite obsessed
with the sentence—“Shakespeare was born, and Shakespeare died on the very Day
England celebrates her Patron Saint! It’s no coincidence that!”, he used to say
again and again.
Let’s
now turn to Numerology: When he was 46, and in order to celebrate his own
birthday—just like Saints Valentine and George used to do—he wrote Psalm 46 of the Authorized Version. (The Version was
started in 1604, and Authorized in 1610: another 4+6.) And how did he sign it in order to prove
to the world that he did it himself ? Well,
nothing simpler: if you count 46
words from start of the Psalm—the telegraph
way—you land on SHAKE; and if you
count 46 words from end of the same Psalm you land on SPEARE. Which makes 5 times 46 in all. Quite a
feat! (Do not
count selah, which is sprinkled throughout the OT as a sort of
punctuation mark!)
In
short: did Shakespeare write his own plays? Not
at all! But he did write...chunks of the Bible, most certainly about St George!
It was another one that did all the Plays—in order to save his... bacon, and he did score bullseye
really. Remember that Shakespeare never even owned a bible: he was only into second-best beds—quite
alliterative all that. . .
BAM NEWS. May 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
FRANGLAIS ? With An Impish Touch . . .
Would any of you care to translate the following two
chunks of franglais back into English, and
perhaps also indicate where they were taken from ?(The adjacent Picture may
indeed help . . .and the “franglais” signature . . .)
Tout pille or, note,
toute pille, date hisse de caisse tiens !
Où est d’air tisse n’eau
bleue Inde mainte ? Tous ouverts
De silence, Anne
d’arrose offerte rageuse forte jaune
Or; tout teck âme
sagène, c’est ta si oeuf trou bel ce.
Anne bâilleur pose en
gaine d’aime.
Guillaume Chequespierre.
De Oise à noter beau y.
Âne à noter beau y,
vas-y!
Iran et ouais! Tousse côte lande
De pipe elle fort; tousse-y!
J.Quittce.
P.S. First, work on it to recognize the text: do NOT look it up! After having done that, translate into English—syllable by English syllable.
Good luck.
(To facilitate things, the second text has already
been published in English on page two of the January issue of our BAM Journal.)
BAM NEWS. June 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
A
Handshake I Revere.
The other day, an outstanding member
of the Monte Carlo Club was asking me—“How do you pronounce Monegasque ?”. For a split second I thought he meant the
word, but No!, he meant the Language . . .
Monegasque is the only language I
never attended to at all before I got right to the very place, in the very late
1970’s. Walking the Principality from end to end with my 92-year-old mother
trotting briskly behind me wherever I went, I once managed to buy two books
about Monaco: one was about Money, the other was about Language. As Money never
made me tick, I was hooked on the language one—which did fire my linguistic
imagination.
Having a good knowledge of French and
Italian, and more than a smattering of German, understanding Monegasque was
fairly plain sailing from the start. As to the speaking of it, I was in
luck: for in the days when I was
Director of the Princess Grace Irish Library, I was housed in the
same building with the Académie de Langues Dialectales de Monaco,
which focused exclusively on Monegasque.(Anybody wishing to learn
it can take courses there!) Though strongly disagreeing with the label of
“langue dialectale” applied to a full-fledged national language,
I started taking evening courses at their elegant headquarters in Fontvieille,
and kept them up for more than three months, until the moment I detected some
linguistic variation in pronunciations between, say, Place des Moulins and ...
Le Rocher. At that moment, I decided I had become an Advanced Learner, and
stopped the courses.
Soon after, as part of the yearly
“reunion de travail”, followed by a working lunch, I even informed Prince
Rainier over a drink of the phenomenon of the two teachers of his language:
after listening to it all, he shook
with an enthusiastic peal of laughter, which so well characterized his cordial
and outgoing personality. I have always enjoyed talking to him. And always in English
of course.
But most memorable of all was his
handshake—so direct, so warm, so full of strength, and so spontaneous. In it one could feel the craftsman, the
sportsman and the aristocrat all in one . . . His handshake to me was indeed
the epitome of all he stood for as a Person, as a devoted Family man, and as a
most remarkable Head of State. For all I know, I have always been a convinced
Royalist . . . and he strengthened that conviction of mine.
But coming back to the initial
Question— “How do we pronounce Monegasque ?”, the answer is quite, quite
simple: In very much the same way we pronounce Corsican, and Genoese— ‘Genovese’
— , and Niçois, and Provençal, and Mentonnais . . . With perhaps a more than
strong overtone of Italian to it !
BAM NEWS. July / August
2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
The
Tsunami.
Exactly six months ago, on Boxing Day 2004, at 8.25 a.m.,
a “tsunami” hit a large part of Asia’s southern coasts.
Tsunami—usually pronounced suuNAAmi—is an English
word all right:
given by most big English dictionaries; thus, the
Concise Oxford
explains that it is made up of two Japanese words—tsu
‘harbour’ and
nami ‘waves’—, and the larger Oxford, in thirty
volumes or so, specifies
that it entered the language more than a century
ago, in 1897, with the
sentence:
“Tsunami ! shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and
all sounds and all power to hear sounds were
annihilated by a
nameless shock
. . . as the colossal swell smote the shore with a
weight that sent a shudder through the hills”. (It
was backed up
by other uses in writing in 1904, 1938, 1956, 1967,
1970, 1972,
1981, 1984 etc.)
In Italian, in addition to seismo, and
terremoto,
there is maremoto, which is in fact
the exact
equivalent of the English-Japanese word discussed
above.
The French language, present in Asia throughout the
past century,
has used the word tsunami since 1915
by the side of tremblement de terre,
or seisme.
BAM NEWS. September 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
What’s
in a Name?
About five-and-twenty years since, a word arose, and spread over
England like railroads subsequently: Snobs are known and recognized throughout
an Empire on which I am given to understand the sun never sets. (
Thackeray,1846.)
A
snob is one who meanly admires a mean thing. ( The New Oxford Dictionary,
in 30 vols., paraphrasing Thackeray)
Naming your kitten, your puppy, your Baby! And of course naming your
characters, if you write fiction. Thackeray was indeed an unsurpassed master at
that. I spent most of the summer rereading him, and I stick to my guns of yore:
he is a far far better writer than Dickens, and outshines all other Victorian
fiction by a long chalk. And today, there is Vanity Fair in a second
film version, Indian this time, in addition to the BBC one. What makes
Thackeray so special, one wonders. Most probably his biting irony and killing
sarcasm. It is without doubt the writing of The Book of Snobs that gave
Thackeray the idea of writing the one and only Vanity Fair! And naming characters
is his favourite form of irony! The
central name of the novel—the Crawley
family—Crawler, in the earlier Book—is
sarcasm-tinged; just remember the creepy-crawlies
of your summer residence . . .
Proper-name sarcasm ? Lord Claud Lollypop
and Lady Lollypop or Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone—in both Book of
Snobs and Vanity Fair— are my favourites. But there is also Mr and Mrs Clapp, Sir
Thomas Coffin,the celebrated hanging judge, and Mrs Fanny Highflyer, a social climber, proper
names which all remain very largely untranslatable in any language—lethal
virulence going lost. Here is a most relevant sample from Vanity Fair,ch.
51; it is a Morning Post account: “Yesterday Colonel and Mrs Crawley
entertained a select party at dinner at their house in Mayfair, which was
attended by the Duchess (Dowager) of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of
Cheshire, Comte de Brie, Chevalier
Tosti, Countess of Slingstone, Lady F. Macadam, Major-General and Lady Grizzel
Macbeth, and (2) Miss Macbeths, and Hon. Sands Bedwin.” Only Gorgonzola was
missing! Anybody can see that it is cheesy snobs all the way . . . or almost,
rather than aristocracy. But is it irony? Is it sarcasm? Or is it sheer fun? In
fact, it’s a subtle combination of the three! Some deep knowledge of French
table art is perhaps required to get the pungently cheesy flavour of it all.
And at quite another dinner, cunning Becky outwits the brilliant Lady Stunnigton, and the witty Mr Wag.
Thackeray is more cutting in naming
his characters, being far “Sharper” than Dickens could have ever hoped to be.
Dickensian naming is indeed of the kinder kind. Thackeray—virulent ?
vituperating ? Here is compact proof: “Mrs Frederick Bullock, née Osborne, with
her twopenny gentility, came in a chariot with the bullocks emblazoned on the
panels, and the flaccid children within . . .”
BAM NEWS. October 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
James Joyce, Shame’s Voice—and the Letter.
The following funny letter, ultimately written by
Joyce himself, was published by Samuel Beckett as early as 1929, as the very
last item in a critical anthology bearing the significant title Our
Exagmination of His Factification of Work in Progress; it provides a
jocular-amusing foretaste of Joyce’s manner
of writing Finnegans Wake, a book which was published in full only ten
years later, on his 57th birthday—just before the war.
Here it is, in a nutshell—the manner of ‘funny’ Joyce (please read it slowly, and
twice over. . .lots of languages involved . . .and no misprints) :
A
LITTER to Mr
James Joyce.
Dear Mr Germ’s Choice,
in gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know
that, being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened the window
and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half ter one other the numboars of
“transition” in witch are printed the severeall instorments of your “Work in
Progress”.
You
must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or to be smart, but I
am so disturd by my inhumility to onthorstand most of the impslocations
constrained in your work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I
consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above Averroëge men’s
tality and having maid the most of the oporto unities I kismet) I am writing
you, dear mysterre Shame’s Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it
all.
I am
überzeugt that the labour involved in the compostition of your work must be
almost supper humane and that so much travail from a man of your intellacked
must ryeseult in somethink very signicophant. I would only like to know have I
been so strichnine by my illnest white wresting under my warm Coverleytte that
I am as they say in my neightive land “out of the mind gone out” and unable to
combprehen that which is clear or is it there really in your work some ass
pecked which is Uncle Lear ?
Please
froggive my t’Emeritus and any inconvince that may have been caused by this
litter.
Yours veri tass
Vladimir Dixon
BAM NEWS.
November 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
Azur-eyed Kevin Shakes MC.
[NOT INCLUDED IN THIS SELECTION]
BAM NEWS. December 2005.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
“Crazy” ? or just “Outlandish” ?
Book clubs are usually restricted to reading—and discussing—fiction.
I for
one do ‘read’ many dictionaries in addition—monoLingual dictionaries, biLingual
dictionaries, and encyclopaedic ones, even…dictionaries of idioms; for the
French are very fond of publishing pseudo-poetic or anecdotal accounts of their
own phrases. La puce à l’oreille ! What
more poetic title than that ?! And a cheap paperback too. Recently I
‘read’ a book called The World’s Strangest
Proverbs—a collection of hundreds of popular sayings from
absolutely everywhere. Here is a dozen or so of them; and I have deliberatly
picked the more “juicy” ones:
* Empty gossip jumps with one leg. [Estonian].
* Dry pants catch no fish. [Bulgarian].
* Mistakes ain’t haystacks or there’d be more fat
ponies than there is. [American].
* When you see a village with nine houses and ten
inns, flee from it. [Bulgarian].
* The ground is always frozen for lazy pigs. [Danish].
* He who depends on people hangs from a tree. [German].
* Lying a little, stealing a little, will get you
nicely through the world. [Estonian].
* Barbers, doctors, pleaders, prostitutes: all must
have cash down. [Indian].
* Do not praise a day before sunset, a horse before
a year, a wife before she’s dead. [Czech].
* When you shake hands with a Greek, count your
fingers. [Albanian].
* Throw the fortunate man into the Nile and he will
come out with a fish in his mouth. [Egyptian].
* If a low-bred man obtains wealth, he will carry an
umbrella at midnight. [Tamil].
* Drink and sing: an inch before us is black night.
[Japanese].
* Why should a man without a head want a hat ? [Chilean].
GEORGE ASKS: Any suggestions for native
English equivalents for any of the above Proverbs ?
(to
be continued in the next issue, i.e. that of January 2006.)
ends THE YEAR 2005.
2008.
BAM NEWS. January 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
netEnglish
Once upon a time, in October 1999, just before the
€uro came about, a computer scholar—Bob H. by name—discovered that a computer
virus far more insidious than the Chernobyl Disaster was fast spreading
throghout the Internet. What did the virus do ? Nicknamed FoulyDo,
after Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first & second
editions—a more than classic style guide in all respectable English
households—it flatly refused to deliver eMails containing grammatical mistakes…
The
virus was causing something akin to panic in America too, which had become of
late quite prone to typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so
very accepted in current internet practice. An internet tycoon, called LoseItAll.com, loudly declared that the virus had rendered
them helpless. For instance, each time they tried to send a message, they got
back the following Error Statement: “Your dependent clause preceding your
independent clause must be set off by commas, but never before conjunctions…”
This FoulyDo virus makes eMailing impossible,
meaning the end to a Communication Revolution once hailed as a significant time
saver. (A study of more than a thousand users found that the use of eMail
increased productivity by 1.8 hours a day, because everybody took less time to
formulate thoughts & intentions; but they also lost 2.2 hours of productivity a day on account
of eMailing so many silly jokes to girlfriends, former spouses, parents and
other solicitors…)
An FBI
agent in the pay of the European Union, whose name was simply coded
SEEsaw!, insisted on speaking on the telephone to everybody for fear that
eMailing his comments may leave him connectionless for the rest of the season.
Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a massive surge in orders
for Fowler’s MEU.
The above lines were not written by George ! They
all come, abridged and adapted, from a very good book entitled Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss,
published in 2003 by Profile Books, London, at £9.99, and subtitled “The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. It was declared Book of the Year 2004.
BAM NEWS. February 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
We
Are Amused.
As we are all on the Riviera here, it is perhaps
time to look at a French book, for a change. About the French language.
Entitled La Grammaire an s’amusant. I
was indeed hooked by it. First, because French has always amused me. Ever since
I was seven, or less. And the grammar of any language is an amusing topic. But
the subject is worth taking up. As French is the language of our hosts. Our
Monaco hosts. As they are doing their best to learn English, we too, I think,
must be doing our best to learn French. Be it only for the sake of polite
communication. Which must always accompany straightforward communication (now
that it is not even worth buying cigarettes in French…). But what is Grammar to
the French? Here is the answer. I quote: Une phrase sans verbe ne respire plus qu’un merlan sur le
sable; elle étouffe. Une phrase sans verbe n’avance pas, elle manque de tonus,
elle va nulle part. Si tu grimpes dans une voiture sans moteur, tu va faire
du surplace ( ? ). Ella a des
roues, un volant, une carosserie, des sièges en cuir, des phares, mais elle ne
roule pas. Une voiture n’existe que pour rouler, une phrase aussi. Le verbe,
justement, c’est le moteur. A very Americanized view of
grammar, don’t you think ? There
are 5,000 verbs in the French Language. How many do YOU know ? How
many does un membre de l’Académie Française
know? Neither
is anywhere near half that total !
But it is our duty, each and every one of us, is it not, to improve on
ourselves. So, what have I done today to improve my French? For we must improve
our French all the time. All of us! Even Prince Albert does so… For instance, when the current President
of France reintroduces the notion of “civilisation”
into current French journalese practice, do you think that the fundamentals of
the word’s meaning remain unchanged? It
becomes as important as the difference between parrainage & patronage,
or of soeur de charité
& dame de charité for
the French themselves.
BAM NEWS. March 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George !
DID YOU KNOW these
COMPUTER words and phrases ?
1. Cybrarian. A digital librarian. One who makes a living by doing online research and information retrieval.
2. Dust Buster. An
eMail message sent to someone after a long silence just to “shake the dust off”
and see if the connection still works.
3. Jitterati. Fear
& anxiety associated with not knowing the latest jargon, and buzzwords of
the Digital Revolution …
4. NRN. “No
Response Necessary”.
5. Open Collar Workers. People who work at home. Also called SOHO:
“Small Office, Home Office”.
6. Thrashing. Clicking
helter-skelter around an interactive computer screen in search of hidden buttons
that might trigger actions.
7. Thumb Candy. A
fast action video-game requiring lots of button pushing.
8. Tweak Freak. A
computer techie who’s obsessed with finding the root of all technical problems
regardless of the relevance of doing so.
9. Under Mouse Arrest. Getting busted for violating an online’s services rules of
conduct.
10. Uninstalled. Euphemism
for “being fired”.
11. World Wide Wait. The real meaning of WWW… (far worse than the worst of
traffic jams…).
P.S. In April when I’m done with Computers & with French, I will hopefully turn to the Cockney Alphabet…
BAM NEWS. April 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER : Ask George !
Improve Your English: Learn Cockney !
Cockney, believe it or not, is going strong, stronger than ever! Especially on the wwWeb. And the St-Mary-Le-Bow residents are very systematic these days… They start right with the Alphabet—as if Cockney ever had one… But look it up for yourself if you need any convincing.
Let’s then begin at the beginning. With the Alphabet:
A for horses (Hay
for ’orses, would self-explain it!),
B for mutton,
C for yourself.
Read them aloud, and, once you have these three clear in your mind, on a platter as it were, you are sure, with small hiccups perhaps, to do the rest of the alphabet on your own. And now you are quite ready to navigate in the Cockney world of the wwWeb without help. Do google your way up the ladder through Cockney, with fortitude.
Look
first at the letters X, K, and Q—for this is the
Elementary Stage, my dear Watson, in the doing of it: X for Breakfast. K for teria. Q
for (a) Bus. Done it? Then go on to the
Intermediate Stage:
V for (la) France. W for money. F for vescent. N
for lope.
And the last of all—the Advanced Stage: Has anybody looked at mediaeval
Rhetoric at all? That would most certainly help here: U for mystic. M
for size…(or… sis).
The More-than-Advanced Stage is the grey area of
Rejecting, Questioning or Replacing some of the solutions. It is usually
restricted to a few enthusiasts, if at all…
L for WHAT ? O for WHAT? H for WHAT ?
Et
ainsi de suite. For cockneys these days, have a good smattering of French too.
That
was indeed Cockney without Tears.
And Happy Zapping through 64,000 google entries, and don’t kill your computer
in the process. The way I did. And now that you have completed The Cockney Alphaphabet
(αβ !) to everybody-on-the-Web’s
satisfaction, you can call yourself a
true and genuine cocknerian (a new word, by me, which I choose to
pattern on existing cockneian and cockniac, and cockneyship
and cockneydom, and cockneyfy ! No porky pies, mind you !
H for Aisling, and O for George are eagerly awaiting your responses.
ends BAM Language Corner April 2008.
BAM NEWS. May 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER : Ask George
!
IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH ctd.
1. MANDRAKE : a
creature half man, half duck.
2. CATACOMB : a
grooming tool for cats.
3. PARASITE : someone
who lives in Paris.
4. GRUEL : very
unkind.
5. DOGMATIC: a
dog that cleans up its own mess.
6. HEBREW: a
beer for men only.
7. BLUNDERBUSS: an awkwardly placed kiss.
8. HICCUP: a cup used in the deep country.
We now live in a world increasingly without History…
And we enjoy it tremendously!
So, what is then wrong with
fanciful—or invented—word histories ?
Particularly, when they do fire our
imagination… the Einstein way… with Pictures and all !
James Joyce wrote the whole of Finnegans
Wake on far less than this.
(All this, and a lot more, comes from a book by
David Diefendorf of New York. The book
is
entitled Word Warps: A Glossary of Unfamiliar
Terms. It was published some time
ago.)
ends BAM Language Corner for May 2008.
BAM NEWS. June 2008.
LANGUAGE CORNER: Ask George:
Our common Wealth ctd.
English,
as a language, is a common wealth ! In
a constant attempt to improve his English, and after having visited Cockney…
James Joyce started writing his Finnegans Wake novel while
he was touring Canada… The Frenchified part of it, of course. And then he
settled in Paris. Here is lexicographic (know the word?) evidence
to that effect. Take the letter E
to illustrate—E for Effect. To
begin with, there are five different kinds of eggs in the language over
there:
1. EGG SELLENT Very
good, of considerable merit.
2. EGG SEPSHUNALL Onusual, very egg sellent.
3. EGGS ISLE Long banishment from one’s country.
4. EGG SPURT Someone with special
5. EGG ZACK Precise or accurate. As in—
“I sawer in the egg zack same place as last time.”
Then there are the other words—like
EH? The great Canajan shibboleth, which is
all things to all men. As in—
“Could
you loan me two bucks ?”
“Eh?” means
“You must be joking!”
or—
“Here’s
the two bucks I owe you.”
“Eh?” which
means “I don’t believe it!”
ELSIE B.O. A collateral descendant of
Dora, the scourge
of Britain,
she is quite in charge in Untario
of the Liquor control, a
board she organizes…
Her
sister Elsie
Beesee lives in Brish Clumbya.
Elby Ess is a brother who lives further afield.
EM
PEE A member of the Housa Comms.
EM
PEEPEE A member of the per vinshull
legislature.
ENAY CHELL Basically, Canajan players in
voluntary
servitude to Mare Can clubs.
END Comonest conjunction in Canajan.
EUCHRE
ANIAN An
imm grunt from the You Crane.
Many Euchre Anians originally settled on the
prayer
ease where their descendants consider
themselves
to be one of the found-in races.
EVER An intensifier widely employed in
Canajan. It is quite
unrelated to English
usage. “Is
it ever hot!” means “It is very
hot!”
“Coodja
gofer somepm cold?” “Could I ever!”
meaning “I
most certainly can!”.
EYE
DENTY The condition or character of
what
a thing or person is. As in the phrase
Canajan eye denty, the search for which
(next
to hockey-watching) constitutes the
nash
null sport of all.
P.S: From the book Canajan,
Eh? by Mark M. Orkin
& Isaac Bickerstaff,published at Don Mills, Ontario. 127 pp. (price not
specified …).I bought the book myself when I visited London, Untario…
P.P.S.: N.B. All the above spellings have been scrabble-validated
by
ELSIE B.O.,, Elsie Beesee and Elby Ess.
ends BAM Language Corner for June 2008.
