17 Jun 2009
Mary Jackson
Oh good, comments are working.
The school is not that bothered about attendance because pupils are being taken for "extended holidays", i.e. to find marriage partners from back home.
17 Jun 2009
reactionry
No Man Is An Iceland
The thing is, is that the play's the Althing's to-all-men.
- William Sagaspeare
By the way in the UK and Ireland slated means seriously criticised, not scheduled. That difference really confused me when I first started trawling the international headlines.
- E.W.
Hopefully [shudder] I'm not the only Yank here who did not know that "slated" could mean "criticised" or even "criticized." If Slate magazine's head honchos were to declare a hudna and schedule a civil discussion of an unseemly row (erupting after say, a reformist was kept off the ticket for promising to start things over with "a fresh, clean tabula rasa") over a list of candidates for its board of directors, could a headline read, "Slate Slate Slate Slated For Discussion" ?
Moving beyond the above sceptred and desceptred (might some mountebank, perhaps speaking fractured Austrian, try to pass himself off as the "King of Ireland" to Obama in hopes of scoring an iPod or Region 1 DVDs?) isles to Iceland, one could trawl for international headlines of cod pieces along the lines of Rights Asserted By British Trawlers Slated In Icelandic Althing. The Brits and Norskies, of course, eventually stopped buggering and bollixing on and managed to muddle through to an end to the "cod wars," although one could imagine some false starts if an Icelander thought that he or she was being given an metaphorical invitation to a log-bashing behind an out-building upon hearing a Brit say, "We would be happy to attend a summit meeting if you woodshed Yule it." (In order to avoid such misunderstandings, it is humbly proposed that the British diplomatic corps be augmented with young, "cunning linguists" (see old saw about Noam Chomsky) who will be referred to as "nuance-y boys")
Alright now, Brits; repeat after me:
The schedule hit the skidmarks.
[have at 'em with centum, not satem, on the "sch"]
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
[just don't go busting your Bow Bells here]
And with disrespect to Spain (whose "degraded" men are, according to Belloc, "saucy with the girls"), who gives a rip about the assertion that Ricardo Montalban "mispronounced" Cordoba in his advert for a pleasantly priced, yet luxurious Chrysler product?
A point of disclosure: Not only was I ignorant regarding "slated," I had been under the impression that "Iceland" simply meant "island," and only recently discovered that the source of my mistake was a botched "take away" from the following from an erstwhile NER Nordic (or "Arctic" in his inclusion with Northern Asiatics) Man:
"I was going to show off my mastery of matters etymological by observing that "Iceland" is just a misspelling of "island" and has nothing to do with ice. Someone told me that years ago and I have believed it lazily ever since, without checking. Now that I do check, Messrs. Merriam and Webster advise me that "Iceland" does, in fact, mean "ice-land," not "island". Never hurts to check these things. The Chinese cover both bases: they call it Bing-dao, which means "ice-island."
Badabing, Badaboom, Badabingdao,
'Slater, Dudes