30 Apr 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald
I ran across recently a single line of Betjeman that offers his quintessence
Quare: what was it? If you don't know, make something up.
30 Apr 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald
"recovering alcoholic"...
The falsest of false friends in translating out of Italian into English, or vice-versa, is the word "ricoverato." It means "hospitalized." A "recovering alcoholic" is the kind who hasn't been, or isn't now being, hospitalized.
Whose side do we come down on? Which language makes the better sense?
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the annals of language, the last speaker of Wiyot died last week. Karl V. Teeter, raised on a farm in Lexington (when it was still full of farms), a high school dropout and Harvard professor and tireless letter writer and corrector of errors, linguistic and other, after his retirement, was that last speaker.
His obituaries all mentioned that he had been the last speaker of Wiyot (the last Indian from the tribe, in northern California, who spoke Wiyot, an Algonquin language, died in 1962, and Teeter was then the only one left). This made me think of Dorothy Pentreath, the last speaker of Cornish, who was immortalized in the London Magazine by a mezzotint, circa 1780 (google "JIhad Watch" and "Cornish" and "Dorothy Pentreath" for more),. And I was reminded, too, of the story in the Times last month about the handful of elderly people, a dozen or so, who still speak Manchu. And a hundred years ago tens of millions of people, in the time of the Manchu dynasty, spoke Manchu. Now I am thinking of someone whom I regard, in a sense that to me makes perfect sense, as the last person in the world truly to speak English.
Sic transit. Lachrymae rerum. O tempora o mores. Eheu fugaces, Postume Postume, labuntur anni. Stuff like that.
1 May 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald
"And held me in her strong brown arms"
That's the essence of Betjeman.
