Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: language

  • follow milk

    I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?”

    “Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression and messy hair struck me with insight.

    “Is it… what you eat when you are done with drinking only milk?”

    I didn’t know how to say ‘breast milk’ let alone ‘solid food’ so I just said, only milk.

    “Exactly!” he said, and then used that pricelessly dear word Germans have for breastfeeding infants. “It’s for sucklings.”

    We both shifted our stuff along the counter as the person in front moved on.

    “So can you use it for other things, in general, like… I’m just having a beer as a followlunch?” I asked, hopefully.

    His brow clotted. “No. No, that is not right.”

    Learning German. It’s one-third flights of folk poetry, two-thirds ‘that is not right’ and ‘we simply don’t do it that way.’

  • a rise in Berlin

    Went for a long wander in the forest with a local acquaintance to guide me. We climbed Berlin’s highest peak, which sounds more dramatic than it is. The lake is called Muggelsee and I had to use actions rather than words to explain what is a muggins, or muggles, in English: the kind of affectionate puzzlement you might feel while rubbing someone’s whole face with the palm of your hand. We stopped among some very tall birch trees and they were tinkling & tingling with tiny tiny sound. Very far up there was a hole, in the bole of the trunk. My companion pointed. “In that hole,” he said. “Bird kids.”

    ~ Four years ago today, I was shown a slight rise in flat as an omelette Berlin. I fell in love with a man who loves birds and since then we’ve been working it out. There is a German word for the displaced denizens of the East who feel a painful craving for the lost Ost: they combine it with ‘nostalgia’ to reach Ostalgie.

  • born by scissory section

    A German’s interpretation of my Australian pronunciation of flasher just yielded the phantom of the flesher: a guy who walks round with his coat open, flashing people with his flesh. Having cherished sundry other examples like “this cost fifty bugs” and “you have a great bump” I was reluctant to point out the error – but I’ve been made to promise so I broke it to him, gingerly; then had to turn away to hide my overweening affection when he confessed he now felt totally discombubbled.

    Yesterday my osteopath described his daughter’s birth by making a scissors motion: she had to be cut out, his wife had “a scissoring.” Thus we render unto scissors that which is scissors’, yield unto flesh what’s in flashes. It’s all gold.

  • this land is our land

    Was quite excited to work out last night by decoding the allergies notice in a Korean BBQ restaurant (‘alergia’) which began ‘en caso de…’ – ‘in case of…’ – that ‘casa’, house, must mean your case. It’s your shell. And mi casa es su casa. My case is your case, we all breathe the same air, death and the roiling adventure of this life will inflict us all.

    On the way home we passed again the man whose giant telescope, set up in the square outside the Teatro Real, has shown me on previous visits Jupiter, and her moons, and – unbelievably – Saturn, looking like a chalk sketch much stouter and smaller than I had always pictured Saturn. He busks with it. Drags it down there, I can only suppose, on the back of a small truck and sets it up pointed at whichever body in the heavens is tonight most significant, then he stands artlessly waiting, perhaps not polishing the lens but minutely adjusting the sights after each visit, inviting all and sundry to take a look through his machinery at the distant miracles now shedding some light on us – too little light, and too late. We didn’t stop to look through the lens again but my companion pointed out the joy on the man’s face, the way when someone steps up onto his wooden footstool to apply their eye to the eyepiece stooping to reach it he himself bends in, unconsciously it seems, and eagerly, as though he is sharing their experience and imagining their wonder. The first time I saw Jupiter in a long line of moons I was almost crying. Now every time the man and I wave to one another, satisfaction on our faces, a strange friendship. Mi luna es su luna, inevitably.

  • sugar no sugar

    Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to convey ‘honey’ I first had to mime little fluttering motions with my elbows trapped by my sides, saying repeatedly ‘azucar, non azucar’ (sugar, not sugar)… When I finally spotted a squeezer of honey on the shelf and pointed to it, the assembled staff turned to each other and started mimicking my mime, going, “Ahhhh, *miele*…”

    I love languages but know none apart from German, decayed Bahasa Indonesia, and some shreds of truly pathetic French. But Spanish is glorious. I learned yesterday from some friends who run a bookshop that ‘vacuum cleaner’ is, in English translation, ‘the aspirator’ – that which inhales everything. But let’s not get too carried away – to use that other, far less celebratory phrase: as far as I’m concerned, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I’m with Nature.

  • from here to paternity

    Brother has a new baby and is taking paternity leave. In the struggle over dinner to translate the concept it came out wrong & I pounced. Eternity leave! That’s when you just walk out and you’re never going back. ‘You can take this job & shove it, I’m going home to my family.’

  • republic of unicornia

    Making a pun in a foreign tongue: Lord, but it makes me feel smart. My friend is pfaffing about online & calls me over as I drift past. “Look! My unicorn name is: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaese.” Soft, beautiful, strawberry cheese. “Wow!” I say. And then lightning strikes. “So if you ever became King of the Unicorns, your unicorn name would be: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaiser.” The Emperor of Strawberries.

     

     

  • beekeeper

    @…………..

    Sister-in-law: “Yeah that was my uncle who used to be a beekeeper. But then he lost all his bees.” Brother (mournfully): “Yeah. ‘I used to be a beekeeper but now I’m just… a keeper.’” Mum: “But he didn’t keep them, he didn’t keep them at all!” Brother: “‘I used to be a beekeeper, but now I’m just… a bloke.’” Nephew: “We have four chooks. Salty, Fairytales, Slippers, Goldie, and Superchook.” Second brother: “Only Salty turned out to be a rooster so we sent him out to a farm. He’s died now.” Me: “Really?” Brother: “Yeah. And the neighbours have two chooks that turned into roosters. The neighbours closer to town.” Nephew: “We could play chess. But there’s too many of us.”

  • or anything but

    “I’m not racist or anything, but… [racist remark]”

    vs: “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [women are people too.]”

    Why is it still embedded in our use of language that we need to apologize for opposing hatred of women the same way we need to apologize for hating people of other races?

     

  • hero, shero

    hero, shero

    Are ignorance & arrogance the same thing? I think they are. My friend and I argue. He says, ignorance goes inside, arrogance goes towards the outside. Yes I say; but as you destroy your ignorance, as you realize we are all connected and part of one another, it becomes impossible to be arrogant. (Arrogantly I am thinking: I’m not arrogant!) Well but then, he says, you become cynical. And then… you become sarcastic. I’m not cynical, I remind him (arrogantly). No, he says: you’re not. And you’re not ignorant.

    I am preening. But! he suddenly realises: you are far more arrogant than me! Yes, I say proudly, it’s true, I am. I’m a horrible snob. You have Adelbrain, he says, synthesising a new German-English compound: aristocrat’s brain. I have no money and come from a family of farmers but I realise: this is true. Leaving the room he says over his shoulder: No. You’re not arrogant. You’re just a queen. Perching four splayed fingers over his breastbone like an insect walking on an upright wall of water he explains: Birthright.

    Queen Latifah, I have heard, calls herself so because she believes every woman is a queen. Similarly I began in my 20s signing my name Cathoel Shero, having made up the word ‘shero’ to serve as an equal opposite to ‘hero.’ Here’s a cartoon I made for it in 1999. In my mind I was imagining every woman signing herself Sarah, Blessed, Dewi, Dagmar Shero: a race of super women. I thought by recognising the dignity in ourselves and calling it out, being unafraid of our strength, we could call up men all around us to be heroes. Kings and princes. Titles would be common as muck. We’d all be happy as pigs in straw castles. My theory fell to pieces when I discovered Oprah Winfrey had invented the same word around the same time and instead of feeling pleased ~ the light is rising! ~ I was annoyed. This self-centring response felt not very sheroic; not very princely. But I like to be queen of my own inner world and I like that other people are king and queen of theirs.

    hero shero