A picture from our correspondent in the Indian Ocean, Siganus Sutor. Here are one hundred and twenty-five goats, one dog and a man, probably a goat herd or compulsive pet owner, he recently bumped into in Mauritius. I’m not sure it’s exactly 125; Sig, who moonlights as a structural engineer, is likely to have added a hefty safety factor. If you click twice on it, the picture is easier to see.
A Bad Guide 
Even allowing a margin for invisible kids, I count only about 80. A “safety factor”, as I understand it, would cover the required capacity and more. For instance, a supporting column that theoretically has to carry X tons would actually be built with X*1.25 the capacity. 25% would be the safety factor.
Suppose the goats were intended to provide a large wedding party with a good meal. If 500 guests were invited, and you figured one goat would satisdy the appetite of 4 people, then you would need 125 goats. But with your “safety” factor, the party would come crashing down, because the actual number of goats is less than 125.
But maybe there’s no problem, so long as Sig doesn’t moonlight as a caterer.
The safety factors get compounded too. So if you add a safety factor to what is required and then add a safety factor to what’s available, pretty soon you’ve got one hefty herd of goats.
What with their summer job, our goats have no time to wait tables.
Let us not confuse a safety factor with a contingency reserve. Will no-one think of the kids?
“125” – Did he explicitly state that he was using base 10?
Well, out of sheer* amazement at the number of heads, horns and square eyes, I asked the herder “Ou koné comien ena ?”, and he just replied “Sanvennsink”. I didn’t check though. I therefore plead guilty, 1.4 times.
* Which I would have written “shear amazement” if they were angoras, but they were not.
Duh. You can’t see the goats behind Siganus (yes, I called him “Signatus”, too), goading him on.
You should get a goaty favicon for the address bar.
80 was my estimate. That would be 125 in base 3.78, which is a pretty unwieldy radix. Maybe the goatherd is a mathematical genius. Or maybe he’s just working in base 4, and there are 95 goats.
On the other hand, “sanvennsink” looks like “seventy” in Norwegian. Could it be that Norwegian is a precursor of French?? But where would the goatheard learn old Norwegian?
Freudian slip – he heard it spoken by the goats.
Wouldn’t that be a capricon?
At no account would I like to be seen as grumbling, but in my opinion it is not possible to write “125” in base 3.78 or, as the case may be, in base 4. If you were counting in base 4, you would have only four different signs to write your numbers: 0, 1, 2 and 3. So no “5”, sorry.
Uh, what about the possibility of having some of the goats disguised as dogs? (Dogs which, for some of them, ran out of the camera’s field, strawberry field, for ever.)
But maybe the herdsman wished he had 125 goats. Maybe he’s lent some to a neighbour and in return he was supposed to get an interest in the form of so many goats per tens of goats and he was already en train de vendre la peau de l’ours. Or maybe he had very bad math’s marks at the Certificate of Primary Education. It could therefore be a story like the well-known story of that Port-Louis’ docks employee who is asked to count a shipment of coconuts and who comes back to his boss saying “Conté fini, coco resté.” (Counting is finished but there are still coconuts left.)
Merde alors, I was so pleased with myself for figuring out that the base would have to be 3.78 that I overlooked the symbol set. Merde.
Maybe the symbol set is 0, 1, 2 and 5, with “5” mapping to decimal “3” in standard notation!? Nope, merde, that works out to be only 51.5 base-ten goats. Je cède.
“Conté fini, coco resté.”
Ha, ha. I love that.
But I don’t like safety factors, except for structural reasons. My wife has a different safety factor added to every clock in the house (& car, computer, oven, dog etc.). Okay, it means we aren’t often late for appointments, but I never know the real time .
By the way, “Some goats were out of the picture” is no excuse. The caption clearly says 125 goats. If I try to sell a photo entitled “Madonna” and all you see is a bicycle, but I say Madonna is just out of the field of vision … well, I’m not going to get paid much for it. Maybe it’s worth a try, though.
However many goats, they all look like nice goats. Very tidy goats. BTW, goatowners, is it true that goats smell dreadfully bad? In Russian folklore, goats are “evil” because of their “hellish smell.” (On the other hand, goats are a symbol of agility and fertility. Go figure.) The goats I have met — at county fairs, it’s true, so they were well groomed price winners — smelled nice.
Our goats smell fantastic, like newly-shorn sheep’s wool if you know what that’s like. It’s probably lanolin, I don’t know.
I commented about this recently elsewhere, I think it might have been when empty told his pig joke. It’s the male goats that have the bad reputation about smell and being evil /the devil and so on. I don’t keep any male goats, so I can’t tell if there’s truth in it, but the male goats I’ve come across smelt fine. In general, I’m pretty fed up with all human description of animals, particularly of pigs and hens — the ones we eat the most and therefore want to dehumanise as much as possible.
Odd, that goat stereotype. Your girl goats do look like they’d smell like a fresh-from-the-cupboard sweater. The goats in the photo look like they just went through the goat-wash.
AJP: Thanks for the link to rio Wang, some fascinating stuff. Do you know http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/surfacestructurefold.html
He has links to umpteen (that’s a techy term) architectural sites…
No, I didn’t know that site. Thanks. I’m very out of it nowadays with architecture, I don’t keep up at all.
The 45 goats must be unherd of.
I mean, there aren’t any bears with furry fells or trolls under bridges on that side of the planet. are there?
They remind me of the Arabian oryx. Oryxes. Oryx individuals. (The linked article uses all three for the plural of this creature.)
is it true that goats smell dreadfully bad?
I just ran across a passage about goats in my reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House that includes the following enlightening passage (the prisoners have adopted a young goat, which they name Vaska):
“In a word, everyone loved Vaska terribly. When he started to grow up, in accordance with a general and serious conference, a well-known operation was performed upon him, which our veterinarians knew how to do excellently: ‘Otherwise, he’ll smell like a goat,’ said the prisoners.”
(Warning to those who might want to read the book on account of its affectionate treatment of goats: the goat, like most of the characters, comes to a bad end.)
I think there’s a book in here somewhere, or at least an article for one of my daughter’s animal magazines: Goats In Literature. But I can’t read books about goats coming to a bad end.
I’m about ready to go around smelling male goats to see how true this story is.
to see how true this story is
I think this is one of those cases where art had better not try to imitate life. A billy-goat is not a dog, you know, so it might misinterpret your sniffological advances.
I really don’t understand all this fuss about billy-goats smelling horrible. They’re not dogs, but nor are they lounge lizards in a cloud of Vétiver and voluptuous promise. The sally-goats clearly don’t mind the smell, since cute little bouncy baby goats keep rolling off the assembly line. In fact the smell may simply induce the ol’ Duldungsstarre that obviates the need to persuade reluctant females.
The insistence that men smell of nothing but cheap soap and perfume is a female revenge on males who expect women to smell only of expensive soap and perfume. It seems few people anymore can deal with their bodies in any other way except to sterilize them. Not even goats are spared.
“any way except to”? “any other way than to”?
any way other than to!
I remember the story of a French billy-goat, who used to live near Lyon, who gave milk. He must have had a very maternal smell. He died of a tit infection and his owner stuffed him.
Maybe that was just a hydrophobic she-goat. Comme l’oncle Gabriel s’écria (approximativement) à propos d’une autre dame trop parfumée: keskipudonktan??
Vous voulez dire: Doukipudonktan? (Pas possible, ils se nettoient jamais.)
–tonton Chapeau
And for the rest of us (me, anyway):
AJP, the copy-paste function sometimes plays havoc with phonetic transcriptions.
In my recollection (quite far back already) the “word” is “Douksakipudontan” D’où que ça qu’il pue donc tant? = “Where is that stink coming from?”, which I don’t think is directed at people. Perhaps in the film the “ksa” part was removed because it was provincial and therefore unfamiliar to the scripwriter or director? (Queneau was from Normandy and Zazie must be too – I grew up in Normandy and this use is also widespread in Canada). Using just D’o~ doesn’t seem right: “Where are they stinking so much from?”.
Technical linguistic note: This is not a “phonemic transcription” which would also be in a phonetic alphabet, but a phonetics-based spelling using the conventions of French orthography, since it is intended to be read by ordinary French speakers. There are a number of such transcriptions in the book, reflecting Zazie’s speech, which is innocent of the grammatical analysis which writers of French have to perform in order to follows the rules of orthography.
I don’t think the authors of text messages are taking a cue from Queneau though, most of them are too young or unsophisticated to have read him.
What I remember is the novel, I have not seen the film.
Thanks, Marie-Lucie. I’ll try to fix that…
…But I can’t. It was like that in the article I stole it from.
I can’t get a google match for ‘Douksakipudontan’. They say I ought to make sure all the words are spelled correctly.
In fact the smell may simply induce the ol’ Duldungsstarre that obviates the need to persuade reluctant females.
Well, I’ve learned a helluva new word, and one that seems to have no ready English translation.
I’m not sure that I know the difference, in a case like this, between (1) persuading and (2) inducing a state that obviates the need to persuade.
The English phrase is “standing heat”. I agree it’s not so good.
vide: In English it is “standing reflex” or “immobilization response” – a “spread-legged mating posture”. This is a specific pheromone-induced behavior in boar sows.
Your 2) is the inducing of Duldungsstarre, which is a physiological reaction. All you need is a bit of boar saliva, and the sow reacts – no soothing words, no coaxing behavior on the part of the breeders is needed, or has any effect of any kind in any direction. That’s the difference from your 1) “persuading”.
I find “standing reflex” pretty dull in comparison with Duldungsstarre, which means “a rigidity [resulting from / creating / amounting to] toleration”. Metaphoric applications to human behavior spring to mind.
Yes, “a rigidity [resulting from / creating / amounting to] toleration” deserves a proper word in English.
Don’t equivalent expressions already exist? Bleeding-heart liberalism, knee-jerk liberalism, subscription to the Guardian etc.
‘Stoical’ was what I was thinking of, on reflection. What have you got against The Guidiron?
I have nothing against the Guardian. But people keep popping up in the Sunday Times and Radio 4, making the same kind of remark about the Guardian being relentlessly bleeding-heart, or words to that effect. It appears to be a kind of game in a subset of polite society, I didn’t invent it. I never hear casual remarks about other newspapers like the Sun, the Telegraph etc., although God knows there’s enough there about which to make disparaging remarks. Could this phenomenon be correlated with which papers are owned by Murdoch?
The Sunday Times in my comments is always the London edition. How would I get the New York edition? I didn’t even know there was one. Why would I, in Germany, want to get any edition but the London one?
I never hear casual remarks about other newspapers like the Sun, the Telegraph etc.,
You never heard of The Torygraph?
From the Wikipedia article on the 80s BBC tv programme Yes, Prime Minister:
How would I get the New York edition? I didn’t even know there was one.
I can get it in Oslo, or rather I could if I wanted to.
In my recollection (quite far back already) the “word” is “Douksakipudontan” D’où que ça qu’il pue donc tant? = “Where is that stink coming from?”, which I don’t think is directed at people. Perhaps in the film the “ksa” part was removed because it was provincial and therefore unfamiliar to the scripwriter or director?
I haven’t seen the movie and checked my version against my copy of the novel, being the picky copyeditor I am.
In that case, LH, I withdraw my comment. But plain dou doesn’t seem right to me, or the plural verb phrase. But it must be more than 40 years since I read the novel.
I have the Zazie book right in front of me, and LH is right, it is Doukipudonktan. To be followed soon after by Skeutadittaleur = ce que tu as dit tout à l’heure = what you’ve said before. According to Wiki, the book was published 50 years ago.
I am pretty sure I heard my version somewhere. perhaps it was someone talking about it, quite some time before I read the book myself. If so, it means that someone else was not happy with just “dou”. In any case, I stick to my interpretation of D’où as “where … from” and not “why”.
Can a more recent reader comment on whether (as determined by the context) the “ipu” sequence corresponds to singular il pue or plural ils puent, since only the latter would definitely be about people (at least one of whom would be male)?
“Skeutadittaleur” is right, it means ‘what you said a little while ago’.
The context is Gabriel at the Gare d’Austerlitz waiting for Zazie to arrive. This is the beginning of the novel: “Doukipudonktan, se demanda Gabriel excédé. Pas possible, ils se nettoient jamais. … Tous ceux-là qui m’entourent, ils doivent pas faire de grands efforts.” So he’s definitely talking about people he suspects of poor personal hygiene. He then gets out a perfumed handkerchief and gets into an altercation with a woman who says to him “Qu’est-ce qui pue comme ça?”
Merci, bruessel. So my memory failed me in this as in other things. I should really reread the book, but I don’t have it here. I only remember a few episodes, but it was great fun to read.
Fair enough, but kabulanolak?
(I didn’t say the kabri.)
????
Come on, Marie-Lucie, didn’t you know that lanolakabulo?
I find it listed with expressions “hard to understand when spoken fast”, such as
(called a tautogramme). There are also tongue-twisters (virelangues) such as
It seems that 1) is not a tongue-twister (in the English sense) for a French speaker, because it is easily spoken as
I find it curious that the French virelangue is explained (at the link) as a playful expression which is hard to pronounce OR hard to understand when spoken. In English, I think tongue-twisters are generally not that hard to understand when spoken. Also, something in English that is hard to understand when spoken is not, for that reason alone, called a tongue-twister.
I wonder whether French speakers in general would find that 1) and 2), even when spoken fairly slowly, are hard to make sense of – say when they’re casually uttered in the middle of a conversation about things other than ânes and la toux de tata. I bet they do find it hard. On the contrary, the English “she sells seashells by the seashore”, for instance, said in any context, would present absolutely no difficulty to the understanding. It is merely hard to say and particularly to repeat.
I want to know what you people are doing writing things on my blog in the middle of the night when I’m asleep. The only one with an excuse is Marie-Lucie.
Sorry AJP, I was on my way to bed, but as I had the book right there, I thought I might as well reply to m-l before turning in. Now that autumn is coming and the nights are drawing in, you`re not going to bed with the chickens, are you? (German expression “mit den Hühnern zu Bett gehen” meaning to go to bed really early).
Oh, please don’t apologise for leading a more exciting life than me. Actually I have been going to bed very early; though not as early as our hens, they don’t even wait for it to get dark.