Many, many years ago, I overheard my friend Ruthie (whatever happened to Ruthie?) say
Breath is the difference between man and laws.
Well, that certainly sounded deep, but what did it mean?
Then she added
Or Rampal.
Oh! She meant Herbie Mann, Hugh Laws, and Jean-Pierre Rampal. Ruthie played the flute.
I was thinking of this because I heard Jonathan Schwartz play Rampal. Rampal was wonderful of course. It’s the breath.
Earlier in the week, I found fresh bialys at the market, so I bought three. For breakfast Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And I get home and slap my forehead. “I forgot to buy cream cheese!” ARGH! What good are bialys without cream cheese? I don’t know either.
So all week those naked bialys have been sitting in the fridge, burning a hole in my appetite. (Yes, I can mix metaphors better than you.)
Last night I went shopping to entertain myself with pretty colors, and I got tired, and I got in the car to come home, and I remembered the bialys. And thought about all the hassle of going to the supermarket just for cream cheese. And my scary brain, which was tired, thought,
“Is there a drive-thru cream cheese place?”
I thought that. And by the Gods there should be. But it turns out, not so much.
I went to the supermarket. Such is life.
Arthur: “Hey, I can use the magnet as a bookmark.”
What else needs to be said?
So there I am in Brazil. I’m lecturing with the help of my wonderful translator Lulu (who is very sweet and pretty; I’ll have to post a picture).
She is having fun with me. When I get lost in my notes, I tend to say “ba-ba-ba-ba” which, when typed, makes me look like a drooling idiot, but in person, is just a more bouncy version of “ummmm…”
So I’m lecturing. I say something, Lulu translates. I say “ba-ba-ba-ba”. Lulu says “ba-ba-ba-ba”. She got a big laugh too. Who knew that was a cognate?
I’m reading Dumas’s1 The Vicomte de Bragelonne (the Three Musketeers 30 years later, with the restoration of Charles II as historical background), and I ran across this passage:
As he approached, he heard the noise of the pulleys which grated under the weight of the heavy pails; he also fancied he heard the melancholy moaning of the water which falls back again into the wells – a sad, funereal, solemn sound, which strikes the ear of the child and the poet — both dreamers – which the English call splash; Arabian poets gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only translate by a paraphrase – the noise of water falling into water.
Huh. French has (or had, as of 1850) no word for ‘splash’.
It seems such a basic word to me, such a necessary word, that of course it strikes me as strange that the French don’t (or didn’t) have an equivalent. That’s the nature of different languages, though. The Germans may well think it odd that we have no words meaning Treppenwitz or Schadenfreude; Spanish speakers may consider us barbaric for failing to distinguish picante from caliente, or chile from pimienta.
‘Splash’ appears to have its origins in onomatopoeia, which is of course a particularly rich source of linguistic differences. (Consider animal sounds, for example: French turkeys say glouglou, and their roosters say cocorico.) In French, onomatopoeia is less ingrained in the language than it is in English–it’s used more in comics than anywhere else–although apparently the word ‘cliché has onomatopoeic origins.
As for the ostensibly Arabic ‘gasgachau’, that’s either a bad transliteration or an invention of Dumas’s: a Google search brings up only the same passage (in English and French) from Vicomte de Bragelonne.
1Yeah, it looks weird. There has already been an extremely lengthy and ultimately inconclusive discussion about this sort of thing, and trust me–you don’t want to go there.
I leave for the airport in an hour. I am eager to be home although I have had a wonderful time here.
This internet connection keeps knocking out my WordPress connection although most other stuff is fine. It’s the anti-blog.
Portuguese punctuation is fun. Look what I have on my keyboard here: Ç~ç¨. Of course, I’m always hitting it when I mean to do something else, so…
See you soon!
In Brazilian Portuguese, “d” when followed by “i” or “e” is pronounced as a “j”. So “dia” sounds like “jia”.
Now this is interesting. This morning on the elevator someone said “bom dia” and I briefly thought he was French; that he’d said “bonjour”. I never could figure out how “day” was related to “jour”, but I can figure a trajectory from day to dios to dia to jour.
Still not getting the good-to-bon connection, but whatever.
I’m in Brazil. There’s an Internet cafe in the hotel. It’s a bad place from which to post, but I thought I should check up on y’all and make sure Tom isn’t tormenting you. I have been trying odd things like Brazilian chocolate pizza.
Today was a quiet day punctuated by brief moments of victory. When you speak very little of the language, small successes are delightful. I was told most Brazilians speak English, but apparently there’s a huge class divide. This means that service personnel—wait staff, maids, clerks, cashiers—don’t speak English, and these are people with whom I need to communicate. So, ordering a sandwhich, asking the maid to clean my room, and telling a waiter my room number were all delightful (for both of us in each case). I would go mad if unable to communicate, but my what a treasure it is when hard-won.
This came up in comments. How come a “women’s magazine” (“woman’s magazine”?) means Vogue or Cosmo or Good Housekeeping or Glamour or Marie Clair, but does not mean Ms. or Bitch or On Our Backs?
My sister-in-law just had a baby. (Yay!) (He’s really cute.) (Totally YAY!) (SOOOOO cute.)
Okay, I’ll start over.
I sometimes think about tuna fish. Not, y’know, the food. Although that too. But the phrase. Because isn’t it redundant?
It peeves me that Brits & Aussies call beets “beetroot.” Do we say “carrotroot”? Do we say “lettuceleaf”? No. Therefore, whence “beetroot”? Yet we do say “tuna fish.”
So on Sunday, my sister-in-law (the brand new mom) and I were discussing food cravings during pregnancy, and I mentioned how funny it was that Arthur pretty much hates every food that I gorged on in pregnancy. I craved mashed potatoes, he can’t stand ’em. I ate an absolute ton of tuna, he won’t touch the stuff.
And New Mom said that she, too, craved tuna during pregnancy.
“But not, y’know, tuna steak. Tuna fish. In the can.”
So that’s interesting. “Tuna” means tuna steak, or sushi, or sashimi. “Tuna fish” means Chicken of the Sea.
And the baby? Really cute.
