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rekre8willyumtxtillyjanehttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4
Departing from Canadian stereotypes: "Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies using crack cocaine", CBC News 5/24/2013
There has been a serious accusation from the Toronto Star that I use crack cocaine. I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict.
As reader F.H. observes
"I do not use crack cocaine" is not the same as "I have never used crack cocaine" or "I didn't smoke crack cocaine on any video."
I have the impression that the mayor has been responsible for a larger sample of denials than your average Canadian politician, but I may be guilty of stereotyping our neighbors to the north.
The audio clip comes from this CBC video, 43 seconds into the video.
It rains. And is chilly. I am not feeling the urge to haul down to the farmer's market this morning. In fact, my only urge is to sit on the sofa, nom toast-and-coffee, and work on the Hard-Deadline Client Project. I suppose that's not a bad goal, actually.
Meanwhile, I have this odd feeling that I'm actually ready for BEA next week. This is, of course, utter self-delusion. And yet... Jaym has the SFWA signing schedule worked out. We have the SFWA booth coverage schedule worked out (more or less) to avoid the unfortunate Incident last year when two of us basically rode herd on it the entire time, and wasn't THAT fun (no, not really). All of my meetings are set (sort of) and there's a growing pile of Stuff in the BEA-prep area of my apartment. I've even gotten the water and extra power cords wrassled already.
Which means of course that whatever nails us will come out of the blue, and if you can't predict it, why worry about it, right? We Have a Corporate Card, We Can Fix It.
(some of you may remember the Great Load-In Disaster of last year. Throwing money at a problem sometimes really is the only solution, especially when dealing with the electricians' union.)
I am tempted oh so tempted to set up a video camera and record each day at the booth, the good the bad and the ridiculous. If only because by the time BEA winds down, Jaym and I usually can't remember what the fuck just happened, much less what happened three days before....
If you're going to be there, stop by! The SFWA table will have various authors signing books and giving away Stuff! (the actual schedule will go live on the SFWA website on Monday, I'm told). And if you're around Thursday at 4pm, and happen to be wearing a blogger or librarian badge, I might have Stuff especially for you...
When I was in college, I took a memoir writing class, and one of the in-class writing exercises we were to do was to write about “our mother’s cooking.” Or, if not our mother, who did the substantive cooking (which turned out to be a non-mother for a couple of people in the class).
There was a sameness to the stories: long, white kitchens, large meals of poultry, rather a blandness of cuisine that my family never shared.
Me? I wrote about the trimaran we built when I was a kid and the smell of the butane stove, the fun when people would go diving and bring back abalone. Then I got into an extended description of cutting abalone into pieces and having it still crawl across the cutting board, even while I was whaling on it with a meat tenderizer.
Abalone’s tough, you know. Really have to pound the everloving crap out of it for it to be tender enough.
Oh, and the island we were at (San Clemente) was being shelled by the military in training exercises at the time. From five miles out. Whoosh, boom!
Bonus.
Naturally, we had to read our little pieces aloud. As I read mine, I pounded the conference room table at the appropriate points.
At the end, everyone was a bit stunned, and the teacher said, “Okay then.”
It was not until that moment that I realized there was anything the least bit unusual about my upbringing. Truly.
Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.
http://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2013/05/2
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4
At the top of hundreds of webpages belonging to the Shenzhen Energy Corporation, a large power company in Guangdong Province, China, we find the following four main headings:
shǒuyè 首页 ("Home")
xīnwén zhōngxīn 新闻中心 ("News center")
tóuzīzhě guānxì 投资者关系 ("Indicrteurseus")
qǐyè wénhuà 企业文化 ("Culture")
The English translations for items #1, 2, and 4 are acceptable (although I would prefer "Corporate culture" for the fourth one), but what in the world happened with the translation of the third item? One wonders if the webmaster just dozed off and fell on the keyboard when he got to that one.
Strangely, though, "Indicrteurseus" looks as though it should mean something, but it is difficult to determine precisely how it came to be the way it is.
In trying to make sense of what was intended, I discovered that "indicrt" is actually a misspelling of the Dutch word indiceert ("indicates"). That, however, could hardly be relevant in the present case.
The ending of "indicteurseus" looks vaguely Greek (cf. Perseus, Terseus, and so forth), but it's hard to see how that could be related to "Investor relations" either.
At this point, I should mention that there are millions of instances where Chinese corporations correctly render tóuzīzhě guānxì 投资者关系 as "investor relations", and many common software translation programs provide the right translation.
Here's my proposal for roughly what may have happened to produce "indicrteurseus". First of all, like "investor", "indicrteur" begins with "in" and ends with "r", and they are of approximately the same length (8 letters vs. 10 letters), so there is little doubt that "indicrteur" is a transformation of "investor". Note that "ind-" is a possible typo or miswriting for the first part of "investor".
Next, "relation" can be abbreviated as "rlats", so the remainder of "indicrteurseus" after "indicrteur", namely "seus", may be accounted for as a distortion of something like "rlats". Note that "rlats" and "seus" both end in an "s" and are of approximately the same length (5 letters vs. 4 letters).
My hypothesis is premised upon the idea that someone who knew English scribbled "investor rlats" on a piece of paper and handed it to a web designer who had little to no command of English. In other words, for "indicrteurseus" to have been derived from "investor relations" in all likelihood would have involved transmission through handwriting that was misinterpreted by the recipient whose job it was to enter what they were handed into the computer, but who was barely literate in English.
[h/t Anne Henochowicz]
 For attendees of the Madoka Magica movies |
matociquala, Range of Ghosts.
tired Syun Izakaya • Hillsboro, Oregon |
Originally published at Scott Edelman. Please leave any comments there.
I have been remiss.
I experienced The Hunt at Next restaurant seven weeks ago, and have so far failed to write about it here the way I did earlier for both the Sicily and Kyoto menus.
And I’ve run out of time—because I’m heading back to Next tomorrow night for its Vegan menu!( Read the rest of this entry »Collapse )
