Category: language & communication

the wrong message

Facebook is in the news again, with its new messaging service – here’s the report from the BBC site. There is just so much I disagree with in the comments and attitudes reported there that I don’t know where to begin. Here are just a few details from the article:

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook co-founder): “Maybe we can help push the way people do messaging more towards this simple, real-time, immediate personal experience.”

Leaving aside the fact he sounds as if he wants to push people into doing things his way, the phrase “simple, real-time, immediate personal experience” catches my eye. To me, that sounds like a description of conversation. I have a phone for that. And when I have time, I try and actually meet up with the people I want to have a “personal experience” with.
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a week is a long time in science

poster - semana de la ciencia

When I went to university, it was still obligatory for all students to have basic maths and English qualifications, whatever they were going to study. Even today, I’d be surprised if you could become “a scientist” (whatever that might mean) without knowing some simple arithmetic.

So how come the Madrid Science Week is scheduled to last from 8th to 21st of November? My calculations make that 13 nights/14 days, which is a lot longer than a week.

(Note that isnt really a ‘fortnight’, though, as that would be 14 nights, equivalent to the Spanish quincena which is 15 days.)

anti-social networking

What’s the good of having a personal blog if you can’t use it occasionally for a personal rant? Today is one of those occasions.

Yesterday the subject line of an email urged me to PASS IT ON; the content of the message was simply:

VIRTUAL FRIENDSHIP IS AN OXYMORON

I loathe the impersonalisation of communications on the web. If someone wants to tell me that they’d like to keep in closer touch, I’d like to see something in the message indicating that it was intended for me personally.
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hoy por ti

chestnuts

The first time I heard the phrase Hoy por ti; mañana por mí I was amazed at the no-nonsense approach to helping others that it seemed to encapsulate.

The closest we seem to come to it in English is “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”, though I don’t think that’s quite the same, as the English idiom implies a real one-to-one reciprocity.
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winter approaches

When the white clouds lifted, they left behind
a hint of snow along the mountain ridge. The sky
is blue as any summer’s day and I walk to the village
in unbroken sunshine. On the way back, a neighbour
eases his donkey from amble to pause and greets me.
He wants some windfall apples “pa’ el guarro”. I agree,
but would so much prefer to let the patient burro
mumble fruit from my palm, not help to fatten
the squealing pig for Martinmas.

 

(First draft – which means I’ve only rewritten it half a dozen times and juggled the line breaks back and forth and to and fro, but haven’t added in additional material or stepped back from it very far.)
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