Category: Cross Cultural Comments
Bristol: A Quirky British Car Maker, Serving Quirky Customers Worldwide
I have to admit that I had never heard of the Bristol until today.
and here’s a “bilingual” link to the word … quirky!
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From West Side Story – West West Side Story – Tonight
A Masterpiece
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coup: in French, in English
From Visual Thesaurus: coup
The silent “p” in this word is the heritage of French ancestry, whence English borrows coup.
In French a coup is an act, but the feature separating a coup from any old act is that a coup is marked by success and cleverness.
English has also borrowed a number of particular coups from French, including coup d’etat, coup de grace, coup de main, and coup d’oeil.
Look it up in the Visual Thesaurus!
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A question of speech
A beautiful piece in today’s IHT.
Opinion | I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor
I know it’s coming. The people ahead of me are going one by one. Terror rises in my throat. I try to think of a plausible excuse to leave. I look around for the nearest exit. My turn is drawing nearer and nearer. What is it? Getting vaccinated? Bungee jumping? Death?
No, much worse: introductions. If you stutter, one of the most difficult situations is saying your name when you’re put on the spot.
Stuttering is an odd affliction. Unlike someone who is crippled and can never walk, I can talk fluently when I’m all by myself. I can even sing my name over and over again, loudly and with ease. And since there’s no external sign, strangers are not prepared for my handicap.
Once at a dinner party, when I was introducing myself, I hit a major block. One woman laughed gaily, and asked very wittily if I had forgotten my own name.
Fortunately for me, I have a wonderful family. My parents never treated me any differently and made me believe I could do anything. My younger sister grew up with my stutter and so always waited patiently for me to get my words out, never even turning her eyes away.
In my youth, the problem was milder and so I thought I could hide it by cleverly substituting easy words for difficult ones.
But after much deliberation and in the interest of starting my marriage with a clean slate, I told my fiancé of my speech problem. “Egad,” he said, “I thought you were going to tell me you’re an axe murderer.’‘ “But you d-d-don’t understand,” I persisted, “sometimes I just b-b-block on a word and no sound comes out.’‘ He smiled, “Good; more air time for me.”
When my daughter was 2 years old and sitting on her potty, she pulled her sippy cup out of her mouth and asked me, “Amma, why do you talk like that?” “Like what?” I asked, starting to feel a shade uncomfortable. She thought, and then said, “Starting and stopping.” I took a deep breath, “I have a speech problem.” She looked at me, said “Oh,” and put her sippy cup back in her mouth. She’s never commented on it again.
I watch with awe those who speak well, lightly, effortlessly. I listen to the words tripping fluently off their tongue. Can most people really say whatever they want, whenever they want, without worrying or even thinking about it? They don’t need to point to things on the menu. They don’t need to always drink apple juice on airplanes, because they can’t say tomato juice. They can easily share a good joke that seems just right at a particular time in the gathering, without thinking it through and deciding it’s too risky given all the likely places for blocks.
Stuttering has been brought to the spotlight this week with the Academy Award for best picture going to the movie “The King’s Speech.” It’s the first time stuttering has been the theme of a major feature film and the condition has been exhibited by the main actor.
Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the sessions at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was on stuttering. Luc De Nil of the University of Toronto explained how the speech centers in the brains of stutterers were found to be more densely packed and more active — proving my long-standing hypothesis that stutterers are highly intelligent, even if we can’t say so ourselves.
I knew I never should have come to this meeting. I can feel my heart pounding and my hands shaking. And now it’s nearly my turn. Maybe I could yell “Fire!” and run out of the room. Maybe I could call myself by some other name, something easier to say, like Colin Firth…. But several people in the room know me and this would really throw them off. Or maybe I could take a deep breath and try to say my own name. Hoping for the best, I smile and open my mouth.
Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and academic/business editor based in India.
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American Truffles
At $800 a pound for some types, truffles have some people in North Carolina excited. They also have two growers suing.
From the New York Times.
Here’s the link about what’s going on in North Carolina!
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saying … telling … speaking … talking …
Four verbs we “do” every day. Probably because we do these things a lot !! Four verbs describing one of our favorite activities. I’ll just leave it to each reader’s imagination for the others.
You might expect me to immediately go into the differences … but I’d like to touch on some common uses of “say” first.
“What can I say?” (Que veux-tu que je te dise ?)
“Do you know what I’m saying?”
Tu me comprends?
“What would you say if . . .?”
Que diriez-vous si… Que dirais-tu si …
“I can’t say for sure.”
Je ne peux rien affirmer. Je ne peux pas te le confirmer (avec certitude).
“Say when.”
“Arretez-moi.”
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Under Milkwood, a play for radio by Dylan Thomas
Back in the 1950s, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote a play called “Under Milkwood, a Play for Voices” for the radio. In a sense, it was rather like the stage play “Our Town,” written by the American playwright Thorton Wilder.
In the opening monologue to Thomas’ play, the narrator speaks these lines:
… You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing …
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall …
Listen it is night moving in the streets …
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets …
Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers …From where you are, you can hear their dreams…”
Poetry. Written to be heard.
Do you hear the sounds, both near and far? A baby sleeping. Distant thunder. Music coming from another room. We hear the invisible. We just need to … listen … to make sense of it.
Language is like that. A Play for Voices. Waves in time. Welsh waves, Atlantic waves. Mediterranean waves … Voice waves. Listen … just for a moment … You’ve got all it takes … and in fact, all the time in the world.
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Newsletter: 27 February 2011
Back in the 1950s, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote a play called “Under Milkwood, a Play for Voices” for the radio. In a sense, it was rather like the stage play “Our Town,” written by the American playwright Thorton Wilder.
In the opening monologue to Thomas’ play, the narrator speaks these lines:
“… You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing …
“And you alone can hear the invisible starfall …
“Listen it is night moving in the streets …
“Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
“Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets …
“Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers …From where you are, you can hear their dreams…”
Poetry. Written to be heard.
Do you hear the sounds, both near and far? A baby sleeping. Distant thunder. Music coming from another room. We hear the invisible. We just need to … listen … to make sense of it.
Language is like that. A Play for Voices. Waves in time. Welsh waves, Atlantic waves. Mediterranean waves … Voice waves. Listen … just for a moment … You’ve got all it takes … and in fact, all the time in the world.
Thanks for reading The Paris Savannah Connection! where you’ll find a link to a recording of “Under Milkwood,” narrated by the great Richard Burton.
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