At first glance I thought it was on New Zealand’s South Island, until I read something about the Andes. Behind the dog we can see what looks like hairy black legs. A goat by any chance?
I bet Julia doesn’t know what that is, she would have said. I don’t think it would be an ideal location for a goat, although they do like to climb to the top of things.
Yesterday I talked about this hairy-dark issue with the friends that travelled with us.
They were certain that it was a sheep or a goat’s skin (I’m sorry!)… perhaps like some kind of rug.
Is it? We have many black goats here. Well, I think… I’m a city “girl” (or I was, now I’m more a city old lady), but I’m pretty sure I saw black goats in the country.
My friends, like I do, think the dog was OK, perhaps not euphoric, but resigned to his fate.
Rats! I’ll be in an obscure town in Girona hanging an exhibiton, or I could go loiter on the Ramblas and try to recognize A & D. But there’s probably a taboo about meeting up…except in rare bloggers’ conventions. And I don’t have a blog. Yet. Give me a few years.
the name rambla refers to an intermittent water flow in both Catalan and Spanish, and is derived from the Arabic ‘ramla’ which means ‘sandy riverbed’. The name of the city of Ramla, now in Israel, shares the same origin.
There are plans for a rare-bloggers’ convention for followers of language hat, but there’s never been any agreement about the location. I always vote for Mauritius or Buenos Aires.
We used to have this problem with our cats until we found a neighbor with cats to trade vacation services with. There must be some neighbor you can convince to adopt some goats….
and Catanea is blogless?…..shall we introduce her to the mysteries of wordpress.com? I would love to see what Girona and Ramblas look like.
I’ve never heard of any taboo about meeting up. I think you make up your own rules as you go along. Caution can’t hurt. I did meet someone from the intertubes years ago and it was interesting, but not what I expected.
It’s worth a try. He may be one of the more responsible ones, now I come to think of it. I don’t know his feelings about dog food–he’s a vegetarian, (only the dogs are carnivores).
Julia: Oooh, thank you! Now I get to use a well-known Spanish expression for the first time: ¡de nada!
With an opening exclamation mark!
¡Muy bien, 10, AJP! (As a teacher would say).
Thank you, Nijma. I wish I have them now, they stayed in Chile, no one wanted to come to Buenos Aires… Now I miss them (and the beautiful lake view we had there).
I have now watched the film El perro mentioned in Julia’s post, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I guess because the main protagonist was such an innocent, I was always waiting for something terrible to happen either to him or the dog and was finally just relieved that it didn’t. I much preferred the earlier film by the same director, Historias mínimas.
It had a happy ending. Tonight we watched another Argentinian movie, “La Mujer sin Cabeza” (The Headless Woman) . It was interesting, but I didn’t fully understand what was going on until I read the review in the New York Times afterwards.
Those opening exclamation marks are hard to find in Norway. For children at school in Norway, six is the highest mark awarded. Why six? I’m used to a hundred, or at least ten, and I grew up with feet-and-inches.
You people are too weird… you see too many argentinian movies! (I also haven’t seen “La mujer sin cabeza”, in fact I haven’t seen any of that director, Lucrecia Martel)
Borges would have some interesting thoughts about “color local” (“local color”?)
Bruessel, we’re going to see “Historias mínimas” right now, I’ll tell you tomorrow…
I think the Norwegians were doing this before the Iraq war.
Julia, if you ever see La mujer sin cabeza, I’d be interested to know your opinion. Although her portrayal of Argentina’s society is pretty negative, I imagine a very political director might make an equally critical film about almost any country.
Because it’s exact enough? An older system had only five steps:
Lg – Ng – G – Mg – Sg
(Lite godt – nokså godt – godt – meget godt – særdeles godt. Earlier the plain G used to be Tg “Tålelig godt”. There was also a period when “godt” was replaced by “tilfredsstillende”.) This was still used in ungdomsskolen in my days. If I remember correctly they were meant to reflect nationwide percentages 5- 25 – 40 – 25 – 5.
In videregående we had the six-step number system. I think the supposed percentages were 5 – 20 – 25 – 25 – 20 – 5.
That was all we got for final grades and exams. For homework and tests teachers used a more finely graded scale. Here’s one octave in the letter system. It was the same with numbers:
So it’s graded on the curve? Looks like it’s based on a classic bell curve.
Don’t tell anyone, but I grade on percentages. It’s strictly by attendance. If their attendance is 50% or better, they pass and they can repeat the course, otherwise they fail and they have to repeat the course. (There’s only one weekend class.) If they are there less than half the time, they really don’t learn any English.
Trond, perhaps you’d consider coming to live with us; you are always able to answer my Norwegian questions. All I know is, with competitive teenagers, there’s the world of difference between a 5 and a 6. If you get a five and your friend gets a six, you might as well be dead–well, for the first half hour, anyway. That’s interesting that there’s the same, if reversed, system in Germany. Nij, who was it said 90% of being successful in life is just showing up? It may have been Woody Allen.
Back when I lived there, the book everyone cited to explain Argentine craziness was Psicología de la viveza criolla, by Julio Mafud (Editorial Américalee, 1968); I have no idea whether it’s still remembered or respected, but I remember enjoying it.
A cultural antecedent of “the lively Creole” is the principal Argentine card game: The Trick. It has been studied by M. Rodríguez Villafañe with a comparison to the political reality in Argentina.
It’s a game that the most mischievous person wins, and manages to do it by lying. It is best to win by deception, and if someone does notice is told that “outsiders are wooden”. Its dynamics are representative of the political and social reality, showing those cards as owners of political power, and observers as a village audience.
El Juego del Truco
Un antecedente cultural de la viveza criolla es el principal juego de cartas argentino: El Truco. Que ha sido estudiado por M. Rodríguez Villafañe con una comparación hacia la realidad política.
Es un juego en que gana el más pícaro, y logra hacerlo mintiendo. Vale más el triunfo cuando se obtiene engañando a los otros, y si alguien lo hace notar se le dice que “los de afuera son de palo”.
That’s from here. We were taught this game by my great-aunt who lived in Buenos Aires. It’s the best, funniest card game I know.
Marks & Spencer’s seems to have changed its name to “M&S”, following the precedent of C&A (Brenninkmeyer), which went out of business, and H&M (Hennes & Mauritz), which certainly didn’t. Will Bloomingdale’s soon be changing its name to B? “Bloomingdales” is three difficult syllables.
When I was in London they called it “Marks and Sparks”. I suppose that’s the Cockney influence. The only thing similar I can think of the U.S. is a former neighbor who used to refer to Neiman Marcus as “needless markup”. And back when I was in the electronics world, a lab partner who called Magnavox “maggotbox”, and Admiral “admirable”, based on his perception of their quality. Oh, and my brother, a former mechanical engineer who in his youth said Ford meant “fix or repair daily”. His wife’s family is big in Ford, so I haven’t heard that lately, and certainly no one says it in this neighborhood, where so many depend on the local Ford plant.
Just because C&A have closed their shops in the UK, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone out of business altogether. We certainly still have them in Belgium and according to their website, they’re still going strong in continental Europe: http://www.c-and-a.com/
Marks & Spencer’s seems to have changed its name to “M&S”
Oh how I hate this trend. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is a wonderful name, redolent of history; HSBC is just another anonymous acronym. KFC, SRI, AARP, nothing stands for anything any more. Bah.
Bruessel, were they always just C&A in Belgium? I had a feeling it was only in Britain they dropped the “Brenninkmeyer” because it was too difficult for us to pronounce.
Nij, it was known as Marks & Sparks in my family, but I don’t think that was cockney, so much as just London in origin.
I thought I was the only person who even knew that HSBC was the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank–and I only know of it because of the Norman Foster headquarters from the 1980s, the one with coathangers up the front.
Fords of course have turned out to be the only company still going. I like Fords; they’re big and go fast.
Well, after gobbling up other banks, HSBC is really much larger than the original Hongkong and Shanghai Bank[ing]. (Including some in New York, which made wiring money to Vietnam a whole lot easier.)
And the peaceniks made Stanford spin out SRI, so it was only ess-are-eye by the 70s.
Sorry, Language Hat, I haven’t read that book (in fact I don’t read about Argentina, I just live here… that’s more than enough for me!)
Yes, AJP, “el truco” is something like this explanation you’ve found. Unfortunately I’m part of the 1% of the population of Argentina that doesn’t know how to play it.
I like Fords too; I’m not a car person, but my favorite uncle worked for a Ford dealership, so my family always drove them. (We used to fly Pan Am, too, and it still upsets me that Pan Am is no more.)
Well, after gobbling up other banks, HSBC is really much larger than the original Hongkong and Shanghai Bank[ing].
True, but so what? Doesn’t mean they had to change the name. Most of us are larger than we once were, but we don’t go changing our names on that account.
In Germany, C&A was often referred to as Brenninkmeyer, but I’ve never heard that here. DHL is a very sore point in Belgium, because they moved their centre of operations from Brussels to Leipzig.
But your name doesn’t appear (to people paid to worry about such things) to restrict you geographically.
No, but people could get the impression all I care about is languages and hats. I’m so much more than that! But I accept the loss to my image because it’s a great name.
Canton is a small town outside Boston, supposedly named because it’s on the opposite side of the world as Guangzhou. In 1835, a local savings bank was chartered, Bank of Canton. (You can probably see where this is going.)
In the early 20th century, a Bank of Canton was chartered in China. With some ups and downs, it kept that name through the 80s. (Then I think SPNB acquired it, so now I guess it’s part of B of A.)
In the meantime, (1) the local bank has opened some Boston area branches and (2) the Boston Asian communities have redistributed. I don’t know for certain, but I have to imagine some confusion has resulted.
A Bad Guide
At first glance I thought it was on New Zealand’s South Island, until I read something about the Andes. Behind the dog we can see what looks like hairy black legs. A goat by any chance?
Hope not !!!
I bet Julia doesn’t know what that is, she would have said. I don’t think it would be an ideal location for a goat, although they do like to climb to the top of things.
That was also a mystery to us… we don’t know what that black thing is!
(Sea lo que fuere, no parecía algo vivo, lamento decirles)
Some long possession wrapped in a rug, I’m guessing.
By the way, don’t ever try anything like that if you want to run for office in the US.
This Romney man is clearly vile. Only a Republican wouldn’t stop his car to let his children go to the loo.
Well, Romney’s dog was locked in a cage. I don’t know if that’s related to his being Mormon or not. This dog looks happy enough.
The dark, furry thing looks like an alpaca to me. (Just the leg of one, of course. The rest is behind the dog.)
It does look like there’s a hoof. But are alpacas black? I thought they were beige, or like your sister’s calf.
Good point.
Reminds me that I should ask for some photos to see her progress.
Yesterday I talked about this hairy-dark issue with the friends that travelled with us.
They were certain that it was a sheep or a goat’s skin (I’m sorry!)… perhaps like some kind of rug.
(espero que entiendan mi inglés básico)
Shocking. The colour wasn’t very goatlike, but perhaps it was dyed. Did your friends think the dog was okay on the car roof?
Your English is great.
Is it? We have many black goats here. Well, I think… I’m a city “girl” (or I was, now I’m more a city old lady), but I’m pretty sure I saw black goats in the country.
My friends, like I do, think the dog was OK, perhaps not euphoric, but resigned to his fate.
You’re too (TOO) kind…
I’m sure you’re right, it’s just that our goats are white (-ish), so that’s what I expect.
That’s because yours are angels! (I’m sure the one on the roof car was an evil goat…)
Goodness. Are there evil goats? (Not just occasionally naughty goats)?
May be there are not many, but THIS ONE was evil.
That’s why it ended like this…
So… we don’t have to worry!
Okay. But I’m not letting the goats on the car roof. In summer, Vesla likes to jump up on the bonnet (not when it’s moving).
My family are going to Barcelona for the weekend. Unfortunately for me, I have to stay here and look after the animals.
Yes, that’s wise.
Oh, how I envy your family!
Yes, me too, of course. Apart from everything else, it’s the only place in Europe that’s going to get any sun in the next few days.
Rats! I’ll be in an obscure town in Girona hanging an exhibiton, or I could go loiter on the Ramblas and try to recognize A & D. But there’s probably a taboo about meeting up…except in rare bloggers’ conventions. And I don’t have a blog. Yet. Give me a few years.
I see from Wikipedia that
Yup.
There are plans for a rare-bloggers’ convention for followers of language hat, but there’s never been any agreement about the location. I always vote for Mauritius or Buenos Aires.
:-) With these options my vote is obvious! (But you do have to bring the goats…)
Julia, I’ve put your other blog in the blogroll (above). You never told us about it.
Oooh, thank you! It was really hidden before. ..
And it’s just a rough thing.
We used to have this problem with our cats until we found a neighbor with cats to trade vacation services with. There must be some neighbor you can convince to adopt some goats….
and Catanea is blogless?…..shall we introduce her to the mysteries of wordpress.com? I would love to see what Girona and Ramblas look like.
I’ve never heard of any taboo about meeting up. I think you make up your own rules as you go along. Caution can’t hurt. I did meet someone from the intertubes years ago and it was interesting, but not what I expected.
It’s not just the goats, we’ve also got a horse and dogs and hens and a parrot. It’s all or nothing.
Can’t you just train the horse to look after the others?
LOL ! It’s a great idea, dearieme!
How come you didn`t think about it before, Crown?
It’s worth a try. He may be one of the more responsible ones, now I come to think of it. I don’t know his feelings about dog food–he’s a vegetarian, (only the dogs are carnivores).
Julia: Oooh, thank you! Now I get to use a well-known Spanish expression for the first time: ¡de nada!
Julia has some great lizards.
With an opening exclamation mark!
¡Muy bien, 10, AJP! (As a teacher would say).
Thank you, Nijma. I wish I have them now, they stayed in Chile, no one wanted to come to Buenos Aires… Now I miss them (and the beautiful lake view we had there).
I have now watched the film El perro mentioned in Julia’s post, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I guess because the main protagonist was such an innocent, I was always waiting for something terrible to happen either to him or the dog and was finally just relieved that it didn’t. I much preferred the earlier film by the same director, Historias mínimas.
It had a happy ending. Tonight we watched another Argentinian movie, “La Mujer sin Cabeza” (The Headless Woman) . It was interesting, but I didn’t fully understand what was going on until I read the review in the New York Times afterwards.
10, AJP! (As a teacher would say).
Those opening exclamation marks are hard to find in Norway. For children at school in Norway, six is the highest mark awarded. Why six? I’m used to a hundred, or at least ten, and I grew up with feet-and-inches.
You people are too weird… you see too many argentinian movies! (I also haven’t seen “La mujer sin cabeza”, in fact I haven’t seen any of that director, Lucrecia Martel)
Borges would have some interesting thoughts about “color local” (“local color”?)
Bruessel, we’re going to see “Historias mínimas” right now, I’ll tell you tomorrow…
“Why six?” It’s the Babylonian influence, obviously.
I think the Norwegians were doing this before the Iraq war.
Julia, if you ever see La mujer sin cabeza, I’d be interested to know your opinion. Although her portrayal of Argentina’s society is pretty negative, I imagine a very political director might make an equally critical film about almost any country.
Why six
Because it’s exact enough? An older system had only five steps:
Lg – Ng – G – Mg – Sg
(Lite godt – nokså godt – godt – meget godt – særdeles godt. Earlier the plain G used to be Tg “Tålelig godt”. There was also a period when “godt” was replaced by “tilfredsstillende”.) This was still used in ungdomsskolen in my days. If I remember correctly they were meant to reflect nationwide percentages 5- 25 – 40 – 25 – 5.
In videregående we had the six-step number system. I think the supposed percentages were 5 – 20 – 25 – 25 – 20 – 5.
That was all we got for final grades and exams. For homework and tests teachers used a more finely graded scale. Here’s one octave in the letter system. It was the same with numbers:
– G – G(+) – G+ – G/M – M/G – M- – M(-) – M –
So it’s graded on the curve? Looks like it’s based on a classic bell curve.
Don’t tell anyone, but I grade on percentages. It’s strictly by attendance. If their attendance is 50% or better, they pass and they can repeat the course, otherwise they fail and they have to repeat the course. (There’s only one weekend class.) If they are there less than half the time, they really don’t learn any English.
When I went to school in Germany, our marks were one to six, but one was the highest and six the worst.
Sure, AJP, I’ll let you know.
Our society is something …”special”. Negative? may be… crazy? certainly!
Trond, perhaps you’d consider coming to live with us; you are always able to answer my Norwegian questions. All I know is, with competitive teenagers, there’s the world of difference between a 5 and a 6. If you get a five and your friend gets a six, you might as well be dead–well, for the first half hour, anyway. That’s interesting that there’s the same, if reversed, system in Germany. Nij, who was it said 90% of being successful in life is just showing up? It may have been Woody Allen.
Julia, in what way is it crazy?
Woody Allen said 80%. But that was some time ago; maybe there is a new system now.
Or it’s the same system and it’s just happening more.
Trond, perhaps you’d consider coming to live with us; you are always able to answer my Norwegian questions.
Or you could ask somebody in your household born and raised in Norway. Vesla looks bright.
AJP, Argentina is crazy in every way. It’s impossible to explain it, sorry.
Back when I lived there, the book everyone cited to explain Argentine craziness was Psicología de la viveza criolla, by Julio Mafud (Editorial Américalee, 1968); I have no idea whether it’s still remembered or respected, but I remember enjoying it.
Apparently it was first published in 1965, but my copy is 1968.
Or you could ask somebody in your household born and raised in Norway. Vesla looks bright.
Vesla is sick of answering my questions about Norway; when she sees me coming she runs.
Thanks, Language. I’ll see if I can get hold of it.
That’s from here. We were taught this game by my great-aunt who lived in Buenos Aires. It’s the best, funniest card game I know.
I cycled to Marks Expensive this morning; they seemed to be selling Goat en Croute.
Sure it wasn’t Coat? I can’t find it.
Marks & Spencer’s seems to have changed its name to “M&S”, following the precedent of C&A (Brenninkmeyer), which went out of business, and H&M (Hennes & Mauritz), which certainly didn’t. Will Bloomingdale’s soon be changing its name to B? “Bloomingdales” is three difficult syllables.
When I was in London they called it “Marks and Sparks”. I suppose that’s the Cockney influence. The only thing similar I can think of the U.S. is a former neighbor who used to refer to Neiman Marcus as “needless markup”. And back when I was in the electronics world, a lab partner who called Magnavox “maggotbox”, and Admiral “admirable”, based on his perception of their quality. Oh, and my brother, a former mechanical engineer who in his youth said Ford meant “fix or repair daily”. His wife’s family is big in Ford, so I haven’t heard that lately, and certainly no one says it in this neighborhood, where so many depend on the local Ford plant.
Just because C&A have closed their shops in the UK, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone out of business altogether. We certainly still have them in Belgium and according to their website, they’re still going strong in continental Europe: http://www.c-and-a.com/
Found On Road Dead.
Marks & Spencer’s seems to have changed its name to “M&S”
Oh how I hate this trend. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is a wonderful name, redolent of history; HSBC is just another anonymous acronym. KFC, SRI, AARP, nothing stands for anything any more. Bah.
Bruessel, were they always just C&A in Belgium? I had a feeling it was only in Britain they dropped the “Brenninkmeyer” because it was too difficult for us to pronounce.
Nij, it was known as Marks & Sparks in my family, but I don’t think that was cockney, so much as just London in origin.
I thought I was the only person who even knew that HSBC was the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank–and I only know of it because of the Norman Foster headquarters from the 1980s, the one with coathangers up the front.
Fords of course have turned out to be the only company still going. I like Fords; they’re big and go fast.
Well, after gobbling up other banks, HSBC is really much larger than the original Hongkong and Shanghai Bank[ing]. (Including some in New York, which made wiring money to Vietnam a whole lot easier.)
And the peaceniks made Stanford spin out SRI, so it was only ess-are-eye by the 70s.
“The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is a wonderful name, redolent of history”: quite. But we all pronounced it “Honkers and Shaggers”.
Sorry, Language Hat, I haven’t read that book (in fact I don’t read about Argentina, I just live here… that’s more than enough for me!)
Yes, AJP, “el truco” is something like this explanation you’ve found. Unfortunately I’m part of the 1% of the population of Argentina that doesn’t know how to play it.
Nimja, I love your brother’s meaning of FORD!
I like Fords; they’re big and go fast.
I like Fords too; I’m not a car person, but my favorite uncle worked for a Ford dealership, so my family always drove them. (We used to fly Pan Am, too, and it still upsets me that Pan Am is no more.)
Well, after gobbling up other banks, HSBC is really much larger than the original Hongkong and Shanghai Bank[ing].
True, but so what? Doesn’t mean they had to change the name. Most of us are larger than we once were, but we don’t go changing our names on that account.
But your name doesn’t appear (to people paid to worry about such things) to restrict you geographically.
Should part of the German post office still be named after three hippies?
M, would you explain the three-hippy reference, please. I’d only just found the Stanford Research Institute.
Language Hat would probably be better off as LH.
Sorry. Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn.
Interesting, so nothing to do with D.H. Lawrence, then.
In Germany, C&A was often referred to as Brenninkmeyer, but I’ve never heard that here. DHL is a very sore point in Belgium, because they moved their centre of operations from Brussels to Leipzig.
But your name doesn’t appear (to people paid to worry about such things) to restrict you geographically.
No, but people could get the impression all I care about is languages and hats. I’m so much more than that! But I accept the loss to my image because it’s a great name.
Canton is a small town outside Boston, supposedly named because it’s on the opposite side of the world as Guangzhou. In 1835, a local savings bank was chartered, Bank of Canton. (You can probably see where this is going.)
In the early 20th century, a Bank of Canton was chartered in China. With some ups and downs, it kept that name through the 80s. (Then I think SPNB acquired it, so now I guess it’s part of B of A.)
In the meantime, (1) the local bank has opened some Boston area branches and (2) the Boston Asian communities have redistributed. I don’t know for certain, but I have to imagine some confusion has resulted.
HSBC BANK PLC
7, HIGH STREET
PE21 8SL BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE