on Englishness and britishness: I have long had not much truck with this.(Freudian slip or what-I edited this post.one of the mistakes was that I wrote brutishnesss instead of brutishness-maybe I should have left it that way.its the way it feels) mostly the only person I discuss it with is Linda,my wife and we disagree. the other night however,i had a discussion with another dear friend,who is not English/british born-so we came at the discussion from a very different approach. it did set me thinking again....... our language English has a very wide reach,seems very flexible and inventive,if complex,quirky and with rules that often are not rules which must be perplexing.very colloquial,idiomatic...and when we cant or dont make it up ourselves we steal it from somewhere else. German for example has a number of long words with complex,detailed meanings and short ones too that are inimitable so I hope we have just stolen them.... some favourites include schadenfreude and sturm und drang,which whilst not directly or easily translatable are powerful words or expressions very worthy of standing as they are. I understand the meaning of both.but then I came across this,and wonder whether it translates as trauma machine or something else.whilst I didgerman in my teens,i was never much cop at languages.my friend is multilingual in at least 4 languages and puts me to shame.....which remains in my experience typical of white English people...... youtube/watch?v=6sI1uYixC0A
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:35:38 +0000
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