Category: language & communication

basic skills

I think I’ve said before that I am not really interested in all the ‘social media’ sites, but that I do maintain a LinkedIn profile. As well as current and past positions, there’s space to include a summary, experience, qualifications etc. – all the usual CV type information.

I recently got an email from them asking:

Do you have skills that people are looking for? Every skill you add to your profile makes you easier to find.

Which is all very well, but it goes on to suggest that I might want to add ‘writing’ as a skill on my profile:
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constrained contentment

Over the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of translations of texts for websites and I’ve had to deal with one particular Spanish company who provide ‘content’ for a number of clients.

I know that’s what they do, as their staff send out emails with the word “contenidos” in the signature.

padlocked gate

The thing is, though, that the word contenido may be a noun or an adjective. It comes from the verb contener, which is really rather like retener, and I’m beginning to wonder whether these are subtle SOS messages telling me that they are actually being retenidos against their will.
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serious relations

I don’t have many relations. Certainly not many I am on speaking terms with. But some of those I do speak to, probably count as ‘serious’ people.

I was pleased, then, to find this advert brought up on my gmail account recently:

"verified ladies" for "serious relations"
I’m sure that if I were to want to give any of my serious relations an Asian beauty as a gift, they would rather the lady were verified than not.

But what should I get for the more light-hearted members of my family?
 

progress

relleu, alicante

Hemmed in by mountains,
they built church spires –
antennas to speak to God. Now,
high-rise office blocks and flats
impede the signal.

 

(The village in the photo has grown enormously since I first visited seven or eight years ago. The pine on the left of the picture kindly obscures the crane perched up on the heights in the north, while the one on the right obscures the modern apartment blocks that remain unfinished to the south east, victims, apparently, of the crisis in the Spanish construction industry.)

thank you for your feedback

Those who blog with WordPress will be used to the fact that each time you add a new post you get a post-published feedback page telling you how many posts you’ve made, how many words the latest one has, as well as suggesting tags, offering possible topics for the next post etc.

My previous post was greeted with this:

Wordpress post published feedback: "This is your 494th post. Bomb!"

I know it wasn’t the most inspired of the posts I’ve ever made, but I didn’t think it was so dreadful it deserved to be greeted with a bomb.
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