The mystery of the ‘W’

An eyewitness report from an hour of Speak-dating

In the adventure comedy classic It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), a dozen treasure hunters spend three and a half hours trying to find ‘the big W’ under which the treasure is hidden.

On 26 October 2017, a dozen colleagues spent an hour trying to twist their tongues around another type of treasure: The treasure of languages!

As a native Dane living in ‘Little Portugal’, I decided to walk past the Swedish and Portuguese stands and headed straight for the Maōri one. It was with a mixture of disappointment and relief that I was welcomed not by a tattooed dancing warrior but by Tama, our New Zealandic colleague from Internal Communication.

I did not completely escape the Maōri ritual though, for what Tama taught a fellow Dane and me was how Maōris greet each other when they meet. OK, you can just say Kia ora! but why take this easy road when you can introduce yourself by blessing a mountain, a river and your tribe before saying your name?

The challenge was not so much to pronounce the Maōri words than to think of a place in our flat country of birth that even remotely qualifies as a mountain… But New Zealanders are open and friendly, so we each chose a Danish hill, or in my case a famous migrating sand dune, Råbjerg Mile. I thus opened the greeting ritual with the exotic sentence Ko Råbjerg Mile te māunga.

Tama handed us a list of EU tribes. Ours is called Tenemāka, so we formed the sentence Ko Tenemāka tōku iwi. It takes little imagination to see that Tenemāka means ‘Denmark’. Maōris do not like soft consonants, nor two consonant sounds in a row. With that in mind, the list of EU tribes was relatively easy to decipher, even the word for Finland, Whinirana, knowing that the letter combination ‘wh’ gives an ‘f’ sound.

There was one exception though. One so funny that it has been my favourite story to tell since my Speak-dating experience. France in Maōri is called Wīwī — what an absolutely wonderful onomatopoetic creation! And another great way to use a ‘W’.

But on to Whinirana. I was greeted by Sanni, a trainee who with great enthusiasm taught my Croatian colleague Dubravka and me how the Finnish word for ‘dragon’ actually means ‘salmon snake’. How the world’s longest palindrome, saippuakivikauppias is pronounced. And how kuusi palaa can mean anything from ‘six pieces’ to ‘Your moon is on fire’.

Dubravka, hosting the Croatian Speak-date, returned the favour to Sanni and me by teaching us some useful phrases in her — comparatively — simple mother tongue: Bok! Ja sam Bjørn. Molim pivo! Hvala! (‘Hi! My name is Bjørn. One beer, please! Thank you!’) — What else can one ask for after a day of visiting Dubrovnik’s old city in scorching heat.

Actually a beer was exactly what I needed after finishing my Speak-dating journey in the Welsh corner. Only… ordering it in Aberystwyth would be a lot less easy than in Dubrovnik: Peint o gwrw os gwelwch yn dda. Although Welsh people are also known for being friendly and welcoming, I would be afraid of mispronouncing the order and instead turning it into some sort of Celtic insult.

John Evans, suitably clad in a Welsh jersey, had prepared three or four big sheets explaining the pronunciation rules and listing some useful phrases. How ‘dd’ is like the English ‘th’. How not to spit when pronouncing ‘ll’.

And how ‘w’ is in fact a vowel.

There, mystery solved. I look forward to next year’s Speak-dating.

Den levende collage

»[D]et gik op for mig at teater og scenekunst ikke er en låst ting,
men i virkeligheden en levende collage
bestående af lys, lyde, rum, mennesker,
bevægelser, tid, tekster og tanker
som kan sammensættes på uendeligt mange måder
og give uendeligt mange forskellige udtryk.

Det fascinerede mig.
Ligesom at bygge lego uden manual. Den tanke kunne jeg godt lide.«



Maja Clementsen Hansen
Skuespiller og scenekunstner
i “Ramplelyset” Juni 2016

Five more days

Avoiding EURO 2016: A self-experiment — Day Twenty-Six

Physical art

Avoiding EURO 2016: A self-experiment — Day Twenty-One

Another quiet day, although I know there was at least one match today: Poland vs Portugal. After watching the interesting dance performance Körper by the famous contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz, I avoided the cafes that showed EURO 2016 on big screens.


 
Or so I thought. As I left the place where I had a pizza, my companion saw — and told — that one of the teams had equalised to 1:1.

Judging from the silence in my Portuguese-dominated quarter, Polska actually nailed it!

But as I do not know, I will simply quote a joke I saw on Facebook today:
‘An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman go into a pub…
…to watch Wales show them how to play football.’
— so I more and more have the tendency to think that Wales is the mysterious missing team in the quarter-finals. In a way that would be cool, ‘cause there’d be a fourth team to support. That’s half of what remains.

The story so far

Avoiding EURO 2016: A self-experiment — Day Eight

Wow! It has been a week since the opening match already! And what I know for sure about the EURO 2016 matches is that:

• It is held in France
• The host nation played against Romania
• Switzerland scored against Albania
• Iceland drew against Portugal (and Ronaldo was angry)
• Poland beat Northern Ireland by 1:0 (and Lewandowski was angry)
• Germany played against Poland
• Austria played or will play against Hungary
• Wales will play against Russia

I don’t think I learned anything new about the tournament today. It was simply too busy at work, and during lunch, when one side of the table started talking football, I had the reflex to focus on the other side, discussing books.

Ironically, after one of my colleagues mentioned a dystopian book in which the World’s population (apart from one person of course) had gone blind, my contribution to the discussion was to recommend a play called ‘The Sightless’…

Linguistic pet peeves

Working in a multinational environment in which English is the pre-dominant working language, I have noticed how non-native speakers pick up mistakes from each other. Here are five very common ones, which annoy me every time I hear them, as they are so simple to avoid.

Think out of the box: This actually means the opposite of what (most) people want to say when they use this expression. If something comes in a box, it is all standard packaged, mass-produced, ready to be unpacked and used as it is. Plug-and-play. Out-of-the-box. So to think out of the box is in fact to think conventionally, standard, with no extras or individual input.

What you probably want people to do is to think outside the box! Meaning that you have the box, or probably many boxes, that objects and ideas and ways of thinking are already stowed into, categorised and labelled. And you want new input, original ideas. You want outside-the-box thinking.

Fewer/less: ‘Fewer’ is used for things that can be counted. ‘Less’ for things that cannot. Fewer working hours and less productivity. Fewer coins and less money. Fewer mistakes and less incorrectness. Or, actually, more correctness. Maybe that is the reason why people make the mistake — the word ‘more’ is the antonym both for ‘fewer’ and for ‘less’.

It is exactly the same principle as for ‘many’ and ‘much’, but for some reason much fewer people make that mistake. Many working hours, much productivity, many coins, much money, many mistakes, much correctness.

How it looks like: No, no, no! You can ask or tell how something or someone looks, or what something or someone looks like. But not how it looks like or what it looks. It simply not correct although everybody seems to say it and thus confirm each other in making this mistake.

Eventually: It seems that in all languages apart from English, this refers to something possible, not something definite. Thus a sort of ‘maybe’. But not in English. Here, it means ‘in the end’, and I would go as far as to say that the vast majority of my colleagues use it in the wrong sense. Every time my Director says ‘we will do that iffentually’ (he’s Dutch), I wonder if he means that we will definitely do whatever he is talking about at some point, or if he refers to the possibility of doing it.

A friend showed me recently how the Oxford Dictionary (as opposed to Merriam-Webster) does list the possibility of ‘eventually’ meaning ‘maybe’. In that case, I recommend using a different word as to avoid confusion. 

Encode: This is a frenchism. In French, it refers to writing a computer programme or simply entering (for example) data into a system. Work environments influenced by French native-speakers risk introducing this verb in English when they mean just that. In English, as in most languages, it refers to the opposite of ‘decode’, i.e. to convert something from coded language to uncoded language. To encode is thus to put something into code language. If you want a word for entering data, just use …well, ‘enter’.

If you recognise any of these common mistakes in English, I very much hope that you will state an excellent example by starting to make fewer mistakes, thinking outside the box to eventually show what correct English sounds like, so that there is no need for decoding.

Happy talking :)
©2015 Bjørn Clasen 

Antabus i plasterform?

Hvad de dog ikke finder på! En pakke med antidrukpatches!

Sprog er nu en herlig ting.

Selve skuespillet i centrum

»På teatret kan og bør æstetikken kun blive et hjælpemiddel
og iscenesætteren den tjener,
der får et skuespil til at leve på scenen.«
Jens Kistrup, teateranmelder
Weekendavisen 24/11-0

Onsdag, den 20. januar 2099

I dag ville min oldefar, Christian, være blevet 226 år. Hvis han levede endnu, ville han hedder “Krajsjan”. Så sent som i 1998, for hundrede år siden, hed jeg Bjørn, nu hedder jeg “Pjen”.

Der var fest blandt de 120-140-årige i eftermiddags. Det er nemlig præcis 75 år siden (2014), at skolerne blev udført. Jajah, nu er der kun 19 dage tilbage til min 126-års fødselsdag. Hvis jeg bliver ved med at få hjernen udskiftet hvert 15. år, undgår jeg at blive senil. Jeg skal have den skiftet ud den 7. marts af professor Stylts robot, XXXMTV66.

De fleste af de 21.697.889.608 mennesker, som lever på jorden nu, regner med at få et evigt liv, da der kun er én ting, som man kan dø af, nemlig sygdommen antikata (man er gået væk fra de latinske betegnelser, og alle taler ét og samme sprog).

De sagde i dag i telebølgeavisen, at man havde vedtaget at droppe grænserne i hele verden. De sagde også, at man skulle tilat oprette et ferieparadis på ydre planet nr. 12 i solsystem 6, galakse 9.

(fra “Bjørns Samlede Værker, Bind V” af Bjørn Clasen — © 1984-85 Bjørneforlaget)

Cher Monsieur Caccioppoli

Cette carte a été faite à la main par des aveugles au Bangladesh. Ce sont des braves êtres humains qui, malgré des difficultés inimaginables pour nous, font un effort admirable pour survivre et cela même en gardant leur dignité.

La dignité, c’est exactement à quoi je m’attendais comme principe de base quand je vous ai confié de construire mon nouveau chez-moi il y a maintenant dix ans. J’ai alors fait l’expérience que cette attente n’a pas été honorée de votre part.

C’est donc avec cette carte que j’espère vous transmettre un message concernant le respect des personnes qui vous font confiance, et ceci en investissant beaucoup plus que leur modeste fortune. Mon espoir est de vous faire comprendre ce message.

J’espère aussi que votre foi, quelle qu’elle soit, vous pardonnera et vous donnera la force pour connaître la dignité et le respect, et les faire croître à un point qui vous permettra de développer la capacité d’ en montrer aux autres.

Et j’espère aussi que les montants importants que je vous ai versés, à part ma confiance de laquelle vous avez si grièvement abusée, vont au moins servir à financer des beaux cadeaux pour vos enfants, mais que vous leur apprenez aussi que les plus beaux cadeaux ne sont pas ceux qui coûtent de l’argent, et surtout pas de l’argent sale.

Les aveugles au Bangladesh qui ont mis tous leurs efforts à faire cette carte que je vous offre, eux le savent.

Pour une année de prospérité et de croissance personnelle.

La connaissance de soi-même de l’administration communale…

Unintentionally amusing advert?

This woman does look happy…

Kritzelart

Mein Beitrag zur „Kritzelei der Woche“ in Die Zeit…

Entstanden ist diese Kritzelei bei einem internationalen Workshop in Berlin zum Thema EU-Recht, -Wirtschaft und -Politikwissenschaften. Nicht dass ich mich langweilte, aber diese Themen sind so gradlinig, dass ich Angst hatte, meine Gehirnzellen würden sich in parallelen Reihen ordnen, und um dies zu vermeiden, habe ich dann kreuz und quer gekritzelt, allerlei kleine Bildchen und Symbole, die mir eingefallen sind. Während einer Pause hat eine Mitstudentin aus Kosovo — ich selbst bin ein luxemburgischer Däne, was man sicher auch aus meinen grammatischen Fehler sehen kann — das Blatt geklaut und einige ihrer eigenen Kritzeleien zugefügt. Deshalb sind einige Details am Rande des Werks viel künstlerischer als der Rest.

 ©2013

Dystopia on the big screen — How man closes his own circle

So… I have signed up for this online course at the University of Edinburgh, on eLearning and digital cultures. It is the second Internet-based academic course I am attending, although this one at Edinburgh is rather different from the first one, a master degree in European Union studies, which is more like a classic academic course, just using the Internet as the main communication means.

Already after reading the course description and all the ‘how to’ stuff, checking a few of the fora, and watching the first of four videos that constitute the core of the first course week, I see chaos installing itself. Students who are lost in the microcosmic cyberspace of the course website and all the subsites and websites it refers to.

What strikes me as well is that whereas the language used by the course managers (I am not allowed to quote from it, so I won’t) is very abstract and what I call ‘unnecessarily over-academised’, the instructions are pretty straight-foward, perhaps even too simplified to be comprehensible. Er, I mean understandable.

The clear question we, the (six-digit number of) students have been asked in the first week, is to think of an example of utopian and dystopian stories about technology told in popular films, and describe or share it, for example on one’s blog. Well, I have thought. And now I will share. And describe. A little.

In fact, two of my favourite films come to mind, and they both tell rather dystopian stories.

Pink Floyd The Wall has sequences of how mankind is becoming so inhuman that everything we love about being human is destroyed. Any artistic creativity, any feeling is not only taboo but also forbidden. A quote from one of the final scenes (and thus songs, as Pink Floyd The Wall is in a way one long music video) is:

The prisoner who now stands before you
Was caught red-handed showing feelings
Showing feelings of an almost human nature
This will not do!

Alien — The 8th Passenger needs little further presentation. It is a little more ambiguous than Pink Floyd The Wall in its dystopian message, but one thing that I would like to point out is how The Company — which in this first part of what is by now a pentalogy, if one counts the recently released prequel Prometheus in, is not known by any other name than simply The Company — has powers that seem to reach beyond that of a nation state as we know it today. As The Company wants to capture the alien lifeform in order to use and possibly develop it for its weapons division, a creature of nature actually becomes, or is intended to become, technology.

Last but not least, a recommendation for those who like to watch something alternative: Try to get hold of the Belgian film Thomas Est Amoureux. The whole film is seen through the eyes of a man who lives his life through his computer screen. In other words, we only see the screen. While this may sound unbearably boring, the film is actually a fantastic attempt to show how human can become a slave of its own creation: the machine. Watch it! (pun intended)

Oh, I almost forgot: Of the four videos that we students are supposed to watch this first week, I rather liked this one. Watch it too…



#edcmooc

The (digital) right to pretend

‘Let’s throw some sand into the cogs of the machine-readable life and just pretend now and then. Life without creative friction is an ideal of economists, but not a reflection of what makes us well-rounded, curious humans. You have the right to be silly or silent, the right to be inventive, the right to say no to algorithms, and most importantly, the right to be left alone, to have space to think about who matters to you and what not to share.’

from ‘Fake It! — Your Right To Digital Self-Defense’

The Erasmus Experience — 25 portraits from 25 years of success

This autumn, I was commissioned by the association ANEFORE, via Luxembourg’s coolest publishing house Maison Moderne, to interview 25 former Erasmus students (well, including a current one and a professor) and write up a short portrait of each of them telling tales of their individual experiences.

Here is the result — downloadable, free of charge! I hope you will enjoy it …and do contact me if you have writing or editing tasks for me!

« Merci et au revoir. »

Courriel envoyé à la chaîne luxembourgeoise de supermarchés Alima (info@alima.lu)

Madame, Monsieur,

Hier, à 16h13 selon le ticket de caisse, j’ai fait mes achats dans votre magasin près de la Bourse comme je le fais régulièrement. Je suis passé à la caisse 5 (de nouveau selon le ticket de caisse; sur celui-ci aucun nom d’employé n’apparaît). La dame à la caisse ne m’a même pas regardé — pourtant on me dit que je suis pas mal pour mon âge ; mais bon, cela dépend du goût personnel — ni salué. Elle a ignoré mon « bonjour ». Les seules mot qu’elle a prononcés étaient « onze trente », ce qui était le prix total de mes achats (si modeste parce que vos ampoules électriques sont très chères en comparaison avec d’autres magasins). Ce « onze trente » n’était pas accompagné d’un « s’il vous plaît » ; la réception de mon paiement pas suivi d’un « merci » ; et mes organes auditives n’ont pas détecté de « bonne journée » ou même de « au revoir ». Bref, Madame Caisse 5 m’a adressé que le montant.

Si un tel comportement — ou manque de comportement — se reproduit je me réserve le droit de choisir entre deux scénarios : ou bien attendre à la caisse sans payer, sans rien faire, jusqu’à ce que l’employé en question arrive à prononcer les mots si difficiles ; ou alors simplement laisser mes achats (d’habitude beaucoup plus nombreux et encombrants que les « onze trente ») et partir. Après, je vous enverrai bien sûr ma facture pour avoir gaspillé mon temps dans votre magasin.

Comme Alima n’est pas connu pour la politesse de ses employés, je vous suggère de mettre un panneau à chaque caisse, dans les cinq langues du pays, soulignant que vous chargez un supplément de politesse de base de 20 % (minimum 5 €) ; pour une politesse normale de 30 % (minimum 10 €) ; et pour le niveau VIP de 50 % (minimum 25 €). Cela vous permettrait aussi de mesurer si vos clients qui sont, après tout, le gagne-pain des employés aux niveaux inférieures ainsi que supérieures de la hiérarchie, se considèrent comme des VIP ou non.

Pour moi, chaque client devrait l’être.

Pour votre information, cette lettre est aussi publiée sur mon blog public.

Sur ceci, comme dit le ticket de caisse : « Merci et au revoir. » (le nombre de mots et 200 % du nombre de mots de Madame Caisse 5).

Réponse reçue le 22 novembre :
Monsieur,

Nous avons bien pris note de vos remarques et nous nous excusons pour le comportement de la caissière.

Notre souci est de servir nos clients aux mieux dans tous les rayons. Et particulièrement le dernier contact à la caisse qui est très important.

En espérant pouvoir vous servir bientôt dans notre magasin.

Meilleures salutations

Romy Hansen
Gérante

alima 

Worth a shot

Looking for, er, people

This classified-ad page is from 1968 and was published in the Observer and Gazette.

Notice how distinctly employers advertised for women or men, depending on the nature of the position to be filled. Today this would not only be unthinkable but also illegal. The Kodak advert even clearly lists which vacancies are for women, and which ones are for men.

(Click on the picture to see it in a larger and more readable version.)

Free

I want to write something
But don’t know what
Don’t I feel anything?
Is nothing the matter?
Have I lost my talent?
Or just my mind?
‘Just’ my mind… ha…
As if that isn’t a big thing
Anymore
Furthermore
That’s all that’s left to lose
Everything else is gone
Squeezed like a cola can
And thrown away
Into a bigger can
Too much trash
Too little meaning
Now that I’ve trashed it all
There’s no meaning left at all
No mind
Except for one going mad
Slightly
Slowly
But surely
That’s all there is to write about
A mind that was
Am I out of it?
Out of my mind?
Or of everything?
I feel like I’m here
And yet only exist
Nothing more
Not alive
Even less dead
Just existing
Here
But not really now
Only the day after tomorrow
So what I gotta fill in
Are these lines
And tomorrow
And today
Now
Here
Where I am
After all
Here with me
With my words
That I didn’t find
Until now
Here
Where were they?
Where was I?
Where is my mind?
Was I with it?
Was it with me?
Is it with me?
Now?
Here?
Are you?
Are we?
Where — I don’t see you
I don’t see us
I only see me
Part of me
My fingers
Moving on the keyboard
Expressing what I thought
Was an empty mind
Empty thoughts
On an empty screen
Not anymore
Now it’s full
Of thoughts
But where are the emotions?
What is the matter?
Apart from dark
Intangible
Lost
Or never existing
At least not now
At least not here

©2012 Bjørn Clasen