The Language (and travel) Thread

[Carol the Dabbler]

I just start to understand why I suddenly cannot understand the half of what I read - not to mention the confusion in my ears. I remember a line said by someone (general Patton?) about two nations divided by the common language. :P

What I learned in school was supposed to be British English, but the most I learned by using message boards and such, but right now I realize that I was hanging around in the US or "English as foreign language" parts of the www. Now it feels like everyone is using a strange slang.    ;)

 

... I am not even a native speaker in German.

You're right about "two countries separated by a common language" (generally attributed to George Bernard Shaw), but most of us on the forum these days are actually either American or continental European.  (Dunno where most of the British folks have wandered off to, but hopefully they'll be back soon.)  So yes, we probably do speak a strange slang, especially considering how quickly slang changes.

 

OK, so now we know two languages that you are not a native speaker of!  If you don't mind telling, what language(s) did you grow up with?

 

This might seem like nitpicking, but such little things are able to kick me out of a show's universe for minutes, that's why I hate them so much. The other nitpicks in Sherlock are Sherlocks violin playing and typing, BTW. 

 

Oh dear, I never noticed anything odd about Sherlock's typing.  (John's typing, however, is odd, to say the least -- he gets a couple words out of each keystroke -- some sort of macro keyboard, apparently.)  But I know exactly what you mean about getting kicked out of the universe.  Can't offhand think of any examples in Sherlock, but my pet peeve is stories (some professionally published) where a character's name is clearly a twist on the name of a real person.  I don't write much fiction, but my number-one rule is don't distract the reader.

 

[Arcadia]

Oh dear, I never noticed anything odd about Sherlock's typing.  (John's typing, however, is odd, to say the least -- he gets a couple words out of each keystroke -- some sort of macro keyboard, apparently.)  But I know exactly what you mean about getting kicked out of the universe.  Can't offhand think of any examples in Sherlock, but my pet peeve is stories (some professionally published) where a character's name is clearly a twist on the name of a real person.  I don't write much fiction, but my number-one rule is don't distract the reader.

And Sherlock's keyboard is apparently designed so that no matter which keys he hits it types what he wants to say. It's a mind-reading keyboard!

[sfmpco]

Do men actually still wear dressing gowns?  Seems very old-fashioned.  VERY OLD.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Carol the Dabbler
Moved here from another thread, along with the ensuing discussion

[Carol the Dabbler]

Of course men still wear dressing gowns -- it's just that over here, we call them bathrobes.

 

Alex is scanning the photos he took with his first camera, so I'm getting a guided tour of his teen years.  There's one photo of him and his brother fully clothed, with bathrobes over everything.  I asked him why, and he said because it was cold in the house.  Victorians didn't have central heating, so they may have made more frequent use of their dressing gowns than people would nowadays.

 

[sfmpco]

Well, I was going to say bathrobe but didn't want to offend any of the Brits on here... "Bathrobe" cheapens it a bit and "dressing gown" sounds ever so posh.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

It is not uncommon for me to see my son in his bathrobe over his clothes most days of the week.  Occasionally it's jeans and the bathrobe depending on how warm he's running that day (he tends to run warm like his dad and my sister).

[sfmpco]

It is not uncommon for me to see my son in his bathrobe over his clothes most days of the week.  Occasionally it's jeans and the bathrobe depending on how warm he's running that day (he tends to run warm like his dad and my sister).

 

Tell him it's not a bathrobe.  it's a dressing gown.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

 

It is not uncommon for me to see my son in his bathrobe over his clothes most days of the week. Occasionally it's jeans and the bathrobe depending on how warm he's running that day (he tends to run warm like his dad and my sister).

Tell him it's not a bathrobe. it's a dressing gown.

Might take some doing as he has one of the fuzzy bathrobes (more like John's) vs. Sherlock smoother material dressing gowns.

[sfmpco]

Yes, terry cloth or something fuzzy isn't quite the same.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Sorry to dispute your distinction, but in the UK, "dressing gown" appears to mean exactly the same thing that "bathrobe" does over here.  For example, in the movie of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent (played by Martin Freeman, incidentally) spends most of the story wearing pajamas and what I would call a perfectly ordinary dark-green terrycloth bathrobe (see closeup of material here) -- but I've seen/heard British comments that refer to it as a "dressing gown" made of "toweling" (as in this Guardian blurb, which also has a photo of the overall effect) -- and there's absolutely nothing posh about it!

 

Over here, "dressing gown" is either an antiquated term or else British -- and some Americans do tend to think of words in either category as ipso facto more "posh" -- so if there is a distinction, it's an American one.

 

[sfmpco]

Still is more posh to call it a dressing gown.  Though I'd hardly term the fuzzy thing i wear as a dressing gown.  No, it's definitely a bathrobe (it was a Christmas gift from my landlady who thought I looked positively homeless in my apartment huddled under a blanket at the computer!.

[J.P.]

 

I just start to understand why I suddenly cannot understand the half of what I read - not to mention the confusion in my ears. I remember a line said by someone (general Patton?) about two nations divided by the common language. :P

What I learned in school was supposed to be British English, but the most I learned by using message boards and such, but right now I realize that I was hanging around in the US or "English as foreign language" parts of the www. Now it feels like everyone is using a strange slang.    ;)

 

... I am not even a native speaker in German.

You're right about "two countries separated by a common language" (generally attributed to George Bernard Shaw), but most of us on the forum these days are actually either American or continental European.  (Dunno where most of the British folks have wandered off to, but hopefully they'll be back soon.)  So yes, we probably do speak a strange slang, especially considering how quickly slang changes.

 

OK, so now we know two languages that you are not a native speaker of!  If you don't mind telling, what language(s) did you grow up with?

 

This might seem like nitpicking, but such little things are able to kick me out of a show's universe for minutes, that's why I hate them so much. The other nitpicks in Sherlock are Sherlocks violin playing and typing, BTW. 

 

Oh dear, I never noticed anything odd about Sherlock's typing.  (John's typing, however, is odd, to say the least -- he gets a couple words out of each keystroke -- some sort of macro keyboard, apparently.)  But I know exactly what you mean about getting kicked out of the universe.  

 

My first language is Polish. I moved to Germany at 23, knowing German only from school, so I cannot really call myself bilingual.

 

BTW, there is a pic of Mycroft looking at a "target" which is in Poland - if they are about to include anything of it in the S4, and screw up the language I will turn into a fire spitting dragon. 

 

What I find even worse about the violin playing is that BC actually CAN PLAY violin.   <- this is what I want to do to BC each time he plays.

And typing? If the actor cannot make it looking natural - use a body double or don't show the hands! It's not like you need some sophisticated CGI to make it believable. 

 

I feel let down each time something like that happens. Especially if the show is good.

Imagine you are in a noble restaurant, eat a wonderful meal... and suddenly find a fly in your dessert. That's what it feels like to me. 

[SherlockedCAMPer]

 

 

This might seem like nitpicking, but such little things are able to kick me out of a show's universe for minutes, that's why I hate them so much. The other nitpicks in Sherlock are Sherlocks violin playing and typing, BTW. 

 

Oh dear, I never noticed anything odd about Sherlock's typing.  (John's typing, however, is odd, to say the least -- he gets a couple words out of each keystroke -- some sort of macro keyboard, apparently.)  But I know exactly what you mean about getting kicked out of the universe.  

 

What I find even worse about the violin playing is that BC actually CAN PLAY violin.   <- this is what I want to do to BC each time he plays.

And typing? If the actor cannot make it looking natural - use a body double or don't show the hands! It's not like you need some sophisticated CGI to make it believable. 

 

I feel let down each time something like that happens. Especially if the show is good.

Imagine you are in a noble restaurant, eat a wonderful meal... and suddenly find a fly in your dessert. That's what it feels like to me. 

 

 

Benedict was taught violin for the show but hasn't practiced it enough to get it down right all the time.  Drives me nuts as well when he is obviously bowing to fast for the music. (Director, sir, please remind our beloved Sherlock to slow down his bowing for obvious slow pieces.  Find out the tempo from the powers that be and help the guy look like he's been playing since youth not since 2009, thanks.  Sincerely, all the musicians & music fans in the fandom.)

[Inge l-w]

There is a thread about the pronunciation of Lestrade, but I was watching one of the early Rumpoles, S1, when Erskine-Brown, who has been to Winchester, says "veg/tables" and Guthrie Featherstone, who has been to Marlborough, counters with "vegEtables"! Even the poshest public schools cannot agree on the appropriate pronunciation of the most mundane words, apparently!

[J.P.]

A small digression:

Once again I was reminded of the fact that while researching anything on the web each language you know doubles your range. I was reluctant about looking for Sherlock anywhere except the English world, because my brain has a limited capacity and my days are not elastic.  But today I discovered that a Polish (media and film) blogger I was reading from time to time and liked a lot, is also a Sherlockian. She was even invited for the premiere of S3 to London. 

 

Her report starts with:

 

Steven Moffat leans forward in his chair and looks vigilantly at the journalists gathered in the audience, who came from all corners of the World - from Finnland to China: "If you give anything away about this episode, remember that I know where you live" he says. "I will kill you and your children."

"Maybe not the children" Benedict C tries to mitigate him. But it makes the threat even more dreadful.

 

 

 

Would love to see that. 

[Inge l-w]

Dear J.P., then what are your views on the Sherlock Holmes series produced through Polish/British co-operation starring Geofrrey Whithead and Donald Pickering? I managed to watch all of them with English as their spoken language with Polish translation over them, which I find the most difficult Slavic language to learn, compared to which Russian is a piece of cake!

Speaking of Michelin-star restaurants and vermin, check out the Rumpole story in S6, Rumpole a la Carte, not just a fly but a real live mouse!

As a point of interest, General Patton was quoting Oscar Wilde on his literary tour of the U.S., when he claimed that they were one people divided by language. Talking about Georgie, (OK, by WWII only Generals Bradley and Marshall were close enough to use the moniker to his face), he was also a self -proclaimed drama queen and definitely dyslexic. He joked about it, "A, B, and what's the other letter?"

[J.P.]

Oh, I haven't seen or read anything beside BBC version. I might - some time in the future - go further, but I don't really feel the urge now. I'm not a Sherlock Holmes fan. I'm Mofftiss version addict. So far. :D

 

As for the languages - Russian is probably harder to learn, because the cyrillic letters and because the stress/accent of the most words differ, and you have to know the word to accentuate it properly, and then when the accent is elsewhere, you speak an "o" as an "a". In Polish the accent falls mostly on the second to last syllable. And - unlike English - the same sequence of letters always sound the same. :P

 

 

[Inge l-w]

Dear J.P. , just revisited the Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson first part of the Polish co-production! Geoffrey Whitehead astonishes Dr Watson by all his initial deductions, admits to beating a corpse with a stick and has a skull residing next to his microscope, and when Dr Watson originally visits the flat, it is in as much of a mess as the modernised version, Holmes deduces the left arm wound and pronounces Lestrade's name like the modernised version! How much more stuff have the pair 'borrowed' from the Holmes universe? Oh, and the villain of the piece is Julian Fellowes, the gentleman in the middle during the post-Richard III poem reading at BC's interview. Coincidence, coincidence!

[T.o.b.y]

Bae ❤️

 

I've encountered that word all over the internet lately. What does it mean? And where did it come from?

[Carol the Dabbler]

That's a new one on me.  (I generally find Twitter, Tumblr, et al. kinda long on cute photos and short on information, so anything that favors such habitats is likely to escape my attention for quite some time.)

 

So of course I went looking, and this write-up seems pretty thorough.

 

[sfmpco]

First time I heard Bae was in the current Once Upon A Time series as that is the name of Rumplestiltskin's son.  Since then it seems to be almost a term of endearment like "baby."  It is often applied and almost exclusively applied to men, especially those considered cute or handsome.

[jadpdr]

There was an absolutely perfect moment at a conference, when a British participant showed how American English can go overboard by quoting from a paper about a "lifeless corpse" , which had everyone fall about laughing. Not even Anderson would use such a term, I should think!

 

"Lifeless corpse" just about sums everything in American marine biology journals! Dolphins are aquatic mammals, reefs are marine rocks, seawater is a saline environment! They absolutely revel in tautology, but it is great fun. I can imagine Khan confronting Spock about the absurdities and hug the picture of THAT discussion to myself, two super-intelligent beings dealing with the mysteries of American English, which all started with the famous split infinitive "to boldly go where no man has gone before"!

[Carol the Dabbler]

"Lifeless corpse" just about sums everything in American marine biology journals! Dolphins are aquatic mammals, reefs are marine rocks, seawater is a saline environment! They absolutely revel in tautology....

"Lifeless corpse" is something of a tautology, true -- though not 100%, as there are of course other lifeless things.  Nevertheless, the expression could be excused in certain contexts where emphasis is important (such as oration or poetry).

 

However, I beg to differ with your other examples.  They are not tautologies at all, they are merely science-ese or technospeak terminology for categories that include the specific item (e.g., "aquatic mammals" include not only dolphins but also seals and dugongs).  Such terminology is sometimes useful, but as you imply, it is more often used merely in an attempt to impress the audience.

 

I used to work as a software engineer in a research lab.  Even though I did not have a science background, there were some papers in the lab's quarterly review that I could, with a bit of care, read and understand, because they were written in clear English, with technical terminology used only as necessary.  Other papers were a waste of my time, because they had apparently been written to sound impressive rather than to convey meaning.

 

.... the mysteries of American English, which all started with the famous split infinitive "to boldly go where no man has gone before"!

 

I doubt that split infinitives began in 1966!  They've been around for hundreds of years, and in common use since around 1800 on both sides of the Atlantic.  Grammarians are by nature resistant to change, so of course they're still complaining about a two-hundred-year-old "fad"!

 

[besleybean]

I hate split infinitives.

Plus a friend of mine has just used the term 'very unique' on facebook and I'm having to bite and cross everything not to tell her off!

[Carol the Dabbler]

Much as we all hate it, it is the nature of language to change over time (which is why we're not posting in Anglo-Saxon).  I have my own pet peeves (e.g., "free reign" in place of "free rein," which I've even seen used in Harvard magazine), but in general, I prefer whatever phrasing sounds the most graceful -- and that sometimes requires splitting an infinitive.  Sorry I can't think of an example just now, but I'll try to remember to post it here next time I notice one.