The Language Log points towards this article in the LA Times which lists some food-related expressions in French, and gives some English examples as well. My own favourites: the English expression ‘fine words butter no parsnips’, and from Peasants into Frenchmen ‘pigs and moneylenders – you never know how much they’re worth until they’re dead’.
The Ashes haven’t even started yet.
The first football match of the new season – Liverpool’s Champion League pre-pre-pre-pre-qualifier against Total Network Solutions – was yesterday. I watched a bit of it, but it just felt wrong. The Ashes haven’t even started yet! Has the world gone mad?
[And if you had a club called something as fabulous as Llansantffraid FC, wouldn’t it make you die a little every time you heard it referred to as Total Network Solutions? Mind you, two of the other teams in the Welsh Premier League seem to be called Connah’s Quay Nomads and Afan Lido, so perhaps Llansantffraid FC just seemed a little plain.]
But anyway, I shouldn’t be doing football blogging now, because the Ashes haven’t even started yet. Shame on me.
Prince Charles has been commenting on “the duty of every true Muslim” in the aftermath of the bombings.
I get very uncomfortable when people who are clearly not Muslims themselves make pronouncements about Islamic theology. Tony Blair has done it before as well. Now we all know that Blair is high Anglican bordering on Catholic, so presumably he doesn’t believe that Mohammad was God’s last and pre-eminent prophet. He hardly seems to be in position to make judgements about who is and isn’t a true Muslim.
There’s nothing to stop him commenting on morality, or civic duty, or whatever.
It sounds like some kind of bad-taste joke – ‘What do you call a Yorkshire suicide bomber?’ but, of course, it’s not.
Oddly enough, the thing which creeped me out most wasn’t that the bombers were British, or even that they were second generation, but that they were Pakistani. It’s invidious to talk about one ethnic minority as being more British than another, but the Asian community seems much more in the mainstream of British life than, for example, the Arab community. Probably just because there’s more of them and they’ve been here for longer than some other ethnicities. And besides, they play cricket, eat curry and drink lots of tea. However uncomfortable the relationships sometimes are between countries and their ex-colonies, there is a shared history there.
BTW, I do appreciate that lumping Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis together as ‘Asians’ is missing the point in this context – there’s no likelihood of any Hindu suicide bombers on the tube any time soon – but I still find it depressing that whereas a few years ago the papers would have referred to the large Asian communities in Bradford and Leeds, now they are ‘Muslim’ communities. Not only have we changed one lazy label for another, but the new one is, in the circumstances, more alienating rather than less.
I feel desperately sorry for the bombers’ families.
I’m generally left rather underwhelmed by Geof’s explorations of visual poetry, but this one really appeals to me.
Kasey Silem Mohammad has taken Jonathan Mayhew’s comments “that poetry is a distinctive kind of thinking, that cannot be replaced by paraphrase” and riffed on them a bit.
Personally I find Jonathan’s formulation unappealing. Of course the reading and writing of poetry takes place mainly in the mind, but to call it a kind of ‘thinking’ seems to unhelpfully foreground intellectual and analytical qualities – rather than, say, linguistic or sensuous ones.
Kasey’s approach is more sympathetic to me. To excerpt a bit that is, if nothing else, easily excerptable:
“There are contexts, obviously, when it is perfectly sensible to ask what a poem means. For a student reading Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it is quite reasonable to ask what Frost means by looking into the lovely, dark woods and then saying “But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep.” It is also fairly easy to answer: he means that oblivion is tempting, but there are reponsibilities the living must honor. It is less easy to answer the question “What does the repetition of the phrase ‘miles to go before I sleep’ mean?” In fact, it may be a meaningless question.”
I’ve never felt that ‘meaning’ was a good focus when trying to understand what literature is and how it works. The very fact that paraphrase kills poetry seems enough reason to approach it from some other angle than ‘meaning’. The old MacLeish chestnut – ‘a poem should not mean, but be’ – doesn’t really get you any further. Not only does it offer no way of distinguishing a good poem from a bad one, it offers no way of distinguishing a poem from a lamp-post. More tempting is the formulation ‘a poem should not mean, but do’: a poem is a way of doing things to people with words. But then, so are novels and political rhetoric. Perhaps there is no functional difference between rhetoric and poetry – just a formal one.