Number 76
I found the following review of The Da Vinci Code on Amazon.com and wanted to share it because of the peculiar charm of Coskun Sami's English:
Oh Dan, do you really take Da Vinci?, March 20, 2004
Reviewer: Coskun Sami from Istanbul, Turkey
As a matter of fact I was attempted to the book because of the press hurray, and, actually thrilling at the beginning the book ends much lame. Maybe the author should have read something more profoundly than the usual popular bogus. Especially the claims about Leonardo are twisted and they are also misleading the general reader, as a matter of fact, unfortunately we have a lot of self-proclaimed Da Vinci experts here in Turkey right now because of it. About the religious claims: In a society where the Christian faith and practice is not well known, this book made some interesting effect and now everyone awaits the much hyped Gibson's movie. What a coincidence :-) I'll have to read Eco again; as a "real scholar" he writes better "fiction" than this.
Umberto Eco is the Italian author of Foucault's Pendulum. I haven't read that, though I did read his book, The Name of the Rose, as well as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I concur with Coskun Sami that Eco is a much better writer.
By the way, one Amazon review of Pendulum was actually a misplaced critical review of Code. Also by the way, I recently learned that Amazon has a feature called ”So You'd Like To . . . " in which readers can list their favorites books about a given subject. I ran across this listing: "So You'd Like To Study Religion With A Circus Monkey: by James Patrick O'Connell, a monkey training theologian".
The77th national spelling bee, sponsored by Scripps-Howard, was picketed by members of the American Literacy Society, because English spelling is illogical. Well, what isn't? Anyway, these folks think English spelling leads to dyslexia, illiteracy, and hardships for immigrants.
One of the protesters was a bus driver who admitted to being a terrible speller. Another was an ESL teacher who feels that she wastes too much time teaching spelling in her class. Hardly unbiased observers.
Bee spokesman Mark Kroger defended traditional English spelling: "For these kids who understand the root words, who understand the etymology, it's totally logical." (Notice how he felt he had to define "etymology" before using it.)
Well, maybe it's not always totally logical. But the point is that spelling is not divorced from meaning; it's not only about sound. It conveys history and can convey meaning.
Spelling can be useful to immigrants who are learning pronunciation at the same time they are learning to read and write, to distinguish, for example, between a hearing problem and a herring problem.
How many kids today are even taught about word roots, or know that they exist?
I'm not saying English is easy, but then I'm not saying everything should be easy. Everyone who's capable of speech can understand language and be understood, though not everyone will be as skilled or graceful verbally as others. Not everyone is really good at arithmetic, but we don't consider changing mathematics for that reason.
Besides, if we went to wholly phonetic spelling, we would be forced to spell words differently in different regions, or else choose just one standard pronunciation. For example, "girl" works in print for everyone; but I've actually heard someone say "goil". English already has enough phonetic capability to allow us to display those interesting variations.
One day I was wondering why "patrimony" and "matrimony" should have such different meanings. These etymologies are from www.etymonline.com:
patrimony: 1340, from O.Fr. patrimonie, from L. patrimonium "a paternal estate, inheritance," from pater (gen. patris) "father" + -monium, suffix signifying action, state, condition. Earliest use in Eng. was "property of the Church," or "spiritual legacy of Christ." A curious sense contrast to matrimony.matrimony: c.1300, from O.Fr. matrimoine, from L. matrimonium "wedlock, marriage," from mater (gen. matris) "mother" + -monium, suffix signifying "action, state, condition."
So men's condition is that of property, and women's, motherhood. Harrumph. No wonder we've got ~
acrimony: 1542, "quality of being acrid," from L. acrimonia "sharpness, pungency of taste," from acer "sharp" + -monia suffix of action, state, condition. Figurative extension to "temper" is first recorded 1618.
In response to PO 75:
No more free lunch? Indeed; now we just have the free buffet at happy hour, for exactly the same reason. :)My good friend Paul, an Englishman living in Japan, used to do English translations of Japanese-authored manuals for various big-name manufacturers . . . . He sent me some exceedingly strange shirts from a Tokyo shop's section "American goods as sold in America," including just the sort of phrases you sent . . . . you can see his recent scrapings at his site: www.bushcat.com, particularly the "Japan bits" link: "Version Up BOOING Blue Cola gum Super Brain Panic !!"
A salesclerk at the local grocery store called scallops "seafood," which indeed they are, but she distinguished seafood from fish. Fish is seafood too, i.e. food from the sea. She meant shellfish.
"Thankyou" is not a word. "Thank you," on the other hand, is (are?) two words. (Of course they are two words, but the expression is two words.) In PO 21, Teutonization, I mentioned the bad habit of shoving words together just because they often appear as a phrase, such as "alot" for "a lot" and "alright" for "all right."
License plate: BAD NEES. Do you suppose it belongs to someone named Nees?
I watch a lot of home decorating shows for the same reason I used to watch "Love Boat" (low key, no bad news, no politics, no death, no brain required), and even though I know grammar is not their forte . . . well, anyway, here's this week's collection:
A woman described her wedding as a "calamity of errors." It makes sense, but the phrase she didn't quite remember was "comedy of errors" (the title of a Shakespeare play).
Dr. Phil referred to "common-sensical" attitude. Seems like that adjective-making impulse should have produced "common-sensible" but in fact "common-sense" in itself is a perfectly good adjective.
Newsman: "We're dealing with the issues of race and the balls are brown and white." I think he was thinking of juggling the issues.
An idle thought led to an experiment about the relation between font size and file size. I didn't know if one character always has the same number of bits in computer memory no matter what size. A 104-page manuscript typed in 12 point Arial is 306 KB. I saved it in two other files and changed it first to 2 point then to 72 point type. The 2 point font brought it down to 9 pages, but it was still a 306 KB file. The 72 point type brought it up to 3,561 pages and 389 KB. It seems disproportional and I still don't know how many bits a character is, or even if I'm expressing the idea correctly.
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