Today’s big news: I found a very small snail on the road when I was taking the goats up to the reservoir. I brought it home so it doesn’t get run over.
I don’t think it’s one of the French eating snails, though it may be, it could just be a baby. I hope so, so that it will have some friends. It’s shell’s about 13mm. diameter, whereas they’re about an inch and a quarter. Here, for scale:
A Bad Guide 
I hope it’s called Brian.
:shudders:
I’m sorry, I still hate hate hate snails.
Of course! Brian it is.
Let’s hope they don’t hate you, then.
Why is it I keep seeing dark ambiguity everywhere? When I read:
it could just be a baby. I hope so, so that it will have some friends.
I think “aw, isn’t Crown a nice guy”. But when I take into account what immediately precedes it:
I don’t think it’s one of the French eating snails, though it may be,
then suddenly the idea of the snail having a lot of friends becomes sinister. A lot of friends for your gourmet grill. It reminds me of the Lobster Quadrille song:
`”Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail …
Snails are our friends, or mine anyway.
I don’t eat snails any longer and in fact I never really liked them, it’s just the garlic butter that’s quite good. I’ve always loved oysters, though.
Lewis Carroll had a bit of a thing for mollusks on foot, didn’t he?
I think Mr Crown is very nice. I, too am constantly removing snails from the dirt tracks hereabouts lest they be “aplastat” by tractors [I like that word, it’s almost onomatopoetry] and putting them in dewier, safer locations; but I also think people should eat things they have a close relationship with (and ideally slaughter for themselves, as kindly as possibly). I think this is not a popular position. Once, in America, my neighbour bought 21 baby chicks and raised them (only one was a casualty to a cat or similar) and had her aunt come and we all learned how to slaughter chickens and further prepare them for the freezer, &c. And we knew what THEY’d eaten in their turn – no hormones, &c. If I had any land I’d probably do something similar. I know, Mr. Crown, you don’t want to eat your beautiful hens, but an elderly laying hen I believe is a nice boiling-fowl… When our daughter was a baby we said we’d eat her if she died. We didn’t want her to get too far away from us. And yes, that snail would be suitable for eating (as part of a group…) in Catalunya. Here, people put them to eat lettuce to clear their insides; but I’ve always thought if I had the space, I’d put them to eat MINT. And I wouldn’t do the recipe where they are roasted until they WHISTLE. Never.
And this is my favourite Carroll riddle, but it isn’t wearing shoes on its non-feet.
‘First, the fish must be caught.’
That is easy: a baby, I think, could have
caught it.
‘Next, the fish must be bought.’ That is easy: a penny, I think, would have
bought it.
‘Now cook me the fish!’
That is easy, and will not take more than a minute.
‘Let it lie in a dish!’
That is easy, because it already is in it.
‘Bring it here! Let me sup!’
It is easy to set such a dish on the table.
‘Take the dish-cover up!’
Ah, that is so hard that I fear I’m unable!
For it holds like glue-
Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the
middle:
Which is easiest to do,
Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the
riddle?
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
My first introduction to Carroll’s work came from someone else using a pseudonym. I have fond memories of listening to Danny Kaye singing The Walrus and the Carpenter on one of my Dad’s 78s. By the way, your Norwegian snails seem to have much prettier and more clearly defined patterns than the ones in our gardens.
In my experience most people hate slugs (the shell-less cousins of snails), or at least enjoy being repelled or disgusted or made squeamish by them. Snails, on the other hand, seem to evoke fondness or even protectiveness in many of us. Is it the pretty shells that make the difference?
I like that story about eating your daughter, a modest proposal. I would be — delighted is putting it too strongly — happy to be eaten after I’d died of natural causes.
It’s not that hard to wash mint leaves, but am I missing something?
It’s good, but calling it ‘a fish’ is a red herring.
It’s a lovely snail, but it’s not common.
Norwegian doesn’t distinguish between slugs and snails, they are all snegler. I had a post recently where some people admired our slugs. There’s another one here about snails.
True. My favourite part is the price. 1p. Like all those old American (maybe there are European ones too) recipes where some sort of meat pie is “bulked out” with oysters because they are so cheap. Although nowadays it seems to be heretical to recommend cooking oysters at all.
It was even cheaper than 1p, it was 1d.
I didn’t know about bulking out with oysters. In the nineteen-seventies there was a place in Marshall, California that made barbequed oysters. They were delicious. I think it closed.
I don’t know. The snails eat the leaves (lettuce or mint or other) to clear their gut, because they will eat anything they come across, and sometimes one might not want to consume what they’ve eaten at second had. I guess I was trying to phrase it too delicately…maybe mint would be too spicy for them anyway, if they don’t harm your garden, it’s because your preferred plants are not theirs.
Yes, of course. I knew p didn’t look right there. If I’d stuck to “a penny” I wouldn’t have been wrong! I can remember my grandmother explaining (old) English money to me in the late ’50’s. How complicated it sounded (about the time we were studying nickles and quarters at school) and how much it was worth then! Amazing. Barbecued oysters sound pretty good. Maybe Ms Caviar will address the subject. Back “where I come from” you could buy them by the quart if you were too lazy to go to the beach, and my father rolled them in corn meal and fried them in bacon fat for breakfast. I’m salivating.
Pretty snail. Haven’t seen any here, but we have the same designer slugs that you have, Mr Crown. I move them off the path to save them(really, really don’t want to step on one — it’s the squishiness that’s revolting, isn’t it?). But then when I was a child I used to make worm hospitals after the rain. I got a lot of lectures about how “nature would take care of them” from my mother, but I thought they needed additional medical care (and a nice pebble convalescent home, with plenty of tasty grass). It’s a wonder I’m a functioning adult.
I don’t get this. Can you explain to the dolts in the balcony?
I just thought you might be a younger British person.
Fried oysters for breakfast? A privileged upbringing, I call that.
That’s interesting that you have the slugs. They are supposed to be advancing from the south (not actually Milan, but Spain) to dominate the entire continent, crushing everything green in their path. When they first assaulted our hill, about three years ago, I would turn them 180 degrees and they would retreat quite happily, but they finally made it to our garden last year. Every night our neighbors go out for an hour’s slug hunting even though, as I say, there’s no evidence of the slugs eating anything around here — they must have brought their own sandwiches.
You can Google “The Magic Roundabout” and find out. Some months ago we saw some of it on YouTube, if your connexion is working. Brian the Snail. (I am not native to its culture, but my husband is.) It’s nice. Niceness is very strong there.
Whatever you do, don’t try to flush them down the toilet.
they’re about an inch and a quarter. Here, for scale
Je ne vois pourtant qu’un pouce !
But I can’t explain why “un pouce” (length ± equal to 25.4 mm) is “an inch” and not “a thumb” since “un pied” (length) is “a foot” (length) and “a foot” (anatomy) is “un pied” (anatomy). There’s something that’s gone missing there — d’un poil peut-être, but missing nevertheless.
Apropos of sweet fanny adams here but I can’t be arsed looking up the relevant thread – thank you, Siganus, for the recommendation for Shashi Tharoor’s Show Business – I really am enjoying it very much.
I crave our gracious host’s indulgence for yet antoher non sequitur, but I found this article by Laurie Bauer so interesting, and the general tenor of responses to it so depressing, that I had to share. I’m guessing that the Hat readers here might enjoy the subject matter.
http://bit.ly/TEcPB
Overreacting, I think. It’s human nature for people to resent someone talking in front of them in a language they don’t understand. “If we all understand English, why do they speak in a private language”, they would say in my old neighborhood. ” They must do it so they can talk about us.” I always wanted my Hispanic neighbors to talk in Spanish so I could practice listening comprehension, but they wouldn’t do it–they knew the resentment. Same at work, the Hispanic caseworkers would switch to English when I sat down at their table. The reality is the person with the best language skills will switch languages. My Spanish must be getting better because my new landlady speaks to me in Spanish.
Or the person who WANTS the best language skills. Some friends/students insist on speaking English with me even though their English can make conversation a really slow guessing game; but then, they have patience when I insist on speaking to them in their native languages, too. So we both have to make an effort, and have no “normal” language between us – tends to depend on the subject matter which language gets selected. Or on who’s less tired.
“Or the person who WANTS the best language skills”. Agreed. Many of my Punjabi friends kindly indulge me in this way, putting up with my efforts to improve my spoken Hindi.
Those are difficult waters to navigate. It’s hard to distinguish determination from pride and pigheadedness in oneself, even in retrospect. When I was first learning German, I rejected people’s efforts to accomodate me by occasionally speaking broken English. I figured I would never assimilate German unless I cut myself off from everything English. Well, I reached my goal, but at what a mental and emotional cost to myself! I’m thankful for those who “indulged” me in this, but I see now that they had no choice, given my stubbornness. Perhaps resignation, rather than indulgence, is a better description of their lot with me at the time.
That way people have of switching to your language when they hear a revealing accent is a curious phenomenon, with different reasons in different situations. My sister, who speaks fluent Spanish with only a slight English accent, told me of her experiences in grocery stores in East Austin. She would speak to the grocer in perfect Spanish, only to have the answer given in broken English. Even when she continued in Spanish, the replies would be ground out with difficulty in English. She said she thinks that her interlocutors simply could not register, or believe, that this gringa was speaking Spanish to them. Such Wasp ladies just don’t speak Spanish, period.
There’s a difference between “not registering” and “not believing”. It sometimes, though rarely, happens that I switch to German in the middle of an English discussion, or to English in the middle of a German discussion, and don’t notice it until a blank expression spreads over the face of whomever I’m talking to. I think it happens when I’m tired, or spaced out in some way, for example due to the subject under discussion, something non-technical and feely. More than once I’ve watched a DVD or seen some brief report on television and then, when I wanted to recommend it to someone who was not bilingual, I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether it was in English or German. “Thinking in English” about it didn’t help, nor did “thinking in German” about it. Only if I succeeded in remembering the use of some language-specific word could I infer the language used throughout, but it was only an inference.
Perhaps some context to the Bauer piece is in order. Some employers in NZ have banned workers from speaking any language other than English, even in lunch breaks and other off-duty time. Hence the “bullying” comments.
I would like to add a remark about the grocery store situation. Mexican folks in Texas, and everywhere else I’ve met them, are generally well-spoken regardless of education and extremely polite, I would say even more so than Texan gringos. I can imagine that the armor of deference, which they were expected to wear for so long in the Southwest USA, encouraged them to discover such moves as could be performed easily despite the armor. There are many Wasps who would like to think they speak Spanish, but can’t carry three Spanish phrases in a handbasket. So the polite Mexican grocer, wanting to forestall the embarassment of the Wasp when his Spanish peters out after two sentences, immediately takes up the conversation in English.
Thanks! It’s quite charming. Now I get it.
Grumbly Stu — I’ve had the same thing happen with Russian/English. I’ll be looking through a card catalog and register a title, but then can’t recall the language. This is bad science, but still — it seems to me evidence that we don’t think in languages. The info gets registered at some other level.
…. and then there’s the bore at the table who hears you speaking his language nearly perfectly, but insists on speaking in terrible, ungrammatical broken English at you. I loathe those guys.
Sili, once upon a time I ate snails. But only once, and I don’t do it anymore.
Stuart, it might have been on the deleted thread (“Language Hat, the movie” if I’m not mistaken), on which we were talking about actors and their voice. Glad that you are enjoying the book. I believe it must be fun for anyone who knows a bit about Indian cinema.
it might have been on the deleted thread
Yes, it was.
Here is the relevant bit:
Gosh, thanks…I think. I am not sure of the reading of “just” in that first sentence. Yes, I am grateful. But not younger. (Sadly? hard to say. I might’ve missed all that privilege!)
You have to tell them in their language that you don’t understand what they’re saying — cruel, but necessary.
& probably this is topic drift, or even topic drift drift…and I’ve likely said it before: In Catalonia when they detect an accent in your Catalan or even think you LOOK “foreign”, the shopkeepers &c. immediately shift to Castilian [Spanish]. Because NO foreigner could possibly speak Catalan. Much less prefer it. Even less, be more functional in Catalan than Castilian. My husband even wrote an article on this for a Catalan magazine (originally in Catalan, of course) – I think the English translation is here: http://www.fundacionespriu.coop/numero/ultimo/index.php?Mw%3D%3D&ODk0 but it’s a .pdf, I’m afraid if it works at all. Like your Texas Mexicans &c., they’re trying to be polite and helpful, but not logical. “Answer in the language you’re addressed in, if possible.” would be a nice addition to etiquette for travellers, maybe.
Oops, nope. You have to scroll down the page to “Culture” and find “Pleasant and Envied Land”. If that doesn’t work, I’m opting out. Apologies for tedium.
“You have to tell them in their language that you don’t understand what they’re saying — cruel, but necessary.”
I had this experience dealing with a desi tech rep handling a problem with th internet connection. He worked for my ISP and needed my password for access to my settings. My password was the name of the place in (now) Pakistan where my Dad went to school. I said it a couple of times but he couldn’t get it. So I said “it means (translation)” and he IMMEDIATELY replied “Oh, you mean (original)”. I was profoundly grateful he couldn’t see the unbecoming blend of puce and scarlet my face had become.
Well then I suppose that the following happy story must be topic drift drift drift:
Last summer my family spent a week in Tuscany, renting a house in the hills. I treasure the memory of our crazy jumbled-up conversations with our wonderful landlord. We all used what languages we had. The landlord (a big Rolling Stones fan — he once touched Mick Jagger) was fearless with his smattering of English. My wife, who had a fair command of Italian as a small child over 50 years ago when she lived there for a year, but from whose brain the Italian has been largely driven out by subsequent experiences with Spanish, was equally fearless. I was (am) more reserved, but was always willing to pitch in with a wild guess about what someone was trying to say. Our rather precise-minded 14-year-old son, who has learned lots of Spanish in school and who tried hard to bone up on Italian before the trip, would stand on the sidelines with an English-Italian dictionary chipping in with helpful comments like “no, Momma, that’s the Spanish word — wait a minute, I’m loking it up” or “no, the plural is …”. My aged mother and our young daughter just marveled at the spectacle.
When I was in Barcelona I tried to order coffee in Spanish and they pretended not to understand me. I can only imagine the reason was political. I ended up ordering in French, which served them right, as I do not speak French. I did get the coffee.
No, it’s there but it’s not about Catalan.
I found it. Interesting reading, thanks
Now that sound really bizarre – I want to say: What bar? What did you say? Maybe the waiter was Moroccan, Lebanese…but I’m sure you’ve already considered all possibilities. Maybe it was a really unusual Catalan who refuses to admit knowledge of Castilian. That would be a new one.
And as somebody’s read it, I’ll point out the fatuous appending of the original English for cited quotations which are – here in the English version – ALREADY IN THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH. (The magazine comes out in Catalan, Castilian and English – I guess they’d have had a lot of blank space in the English version if they’d left them out. But they could’ve put the Espriu quotations BACK into their original Catalan to fill those spaces. Their graphic designers were pressed for time, maybe.)
I did wonder about that …
It was a small restaurant near the Picasso museum. At the time (late 80s) taxi drivers in Quebec were refusing to take their fares to destinations unless the directions were given in French (out of separatist sentiment), I assumed something similar here.
The language sounded like Spanish but was not Spanish.
My wife, who had a fair command of Italian as a small child over 50 years ago when she lived there for a year, but from whose brain the Italian has been largely driven out by subsequent experiences with Spanish
This was exactly the situation of a plumber we had in Buenos Aires in the mid-’60s, except that his subsequent experiences with Spanish hadn’t actually given him a command of Spanish, with the result that nobody could really understand him except me, because…
Our rather precise-minded 14-year-old son, who has learned lots of Spanish in school and who tried hard to bone up on Italian before the trip, would stand on the sidelines with an English-Italian dictionary chipping in with helpful comments
…I was that 14-year-old son!
Your father is empty? God, what a revelation!
Mr Crown, you’re probably right, but I got the polite gene. Instead I smile patiently. Usually the Russians at the table will stop it, but there was one guy who continued with the “you was in school, yes?”
I’ve had strangers here, on the basis of my greeting them with ‘Hi’ (and not, I guess, ‘Hei’, or even ‘Hej’, which to me all sound the same), smirkingly begin to address me in English.
Funnily enough few Norwegians can distinguish an American accent from an English one (speaking English).
…I was that 14-year-old son!
I think he will be glad to hear that.
What I may not have made clear was that on the one hand the rough and ready approach of Ms Let’sJustCommunicate worked pretty well almost all of the time (making the lexicographical interruptions fairly irrelevant), while on the other hand there were times it was Mr GottaGetItRight’s attention to detail that that got us over a bump.
When I was younger and had better knees, my thing was to go jogging along major rivers. When I ran by the Thames I was addressed in English; when I ran along the Seine, I was addressed in English; when I ran by the Tiber, English; by the Nile, even though I was dressed in long pants and long sleeves, was offered 1000 camels, in English. But when I got to Denmark and ran by Vejle Fjord, people yelled remarks to me in Danish. I have never been in any other place where I had such a strong feeling of fitting in.