Mì querida

Mì querida

Q: Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this phrase?

A: Mí is a direct object pronoun. The possessive pronoun used above should be written as the accentless “mi”. And there is no “mì” -- Spanish uses acute accents as a rule; this mì has a grave accent, which is not used.

It’s a little copy editing thing, but it threw me right out of the narrative of a book I was reading the other day.


Unrelated: overheard on the train tonight: "She's a beringer of bad news." A bearer of bad news? A harbinger of doom? A Napa Valley vineyard of bad news?

Welsh in Wales

Check out this bit in The Economist on the Welsh language in Wales. The first comment is lovely, I think.

I shouldn't listen

I am a bad woman. Last night at dinner, two young men came in to the restaurant and asked for job applications. While they were filling them out a few seats over, one of the waitresses came up and chatted with them...in Russian. I could catch phrases and pieces of their conversation. My Russian is nearly gone, but I could still figure out some of it, basic stuff about where they were living and how long they'd been here and where they'd worked.

More crossword vocabulary

The smallest unit of DNA was the clue. I ended up backing into the word. The dictionary definition includes a little more information, though.

muton: n. The smallest unit of DNA at which a mutation can occur; a nucleotide.

An ostrich-like bird? It ended up as "maa". The definitions I found were not quite consistent with the clue, though. An abbreviation for Master-At-Arms; an ethnolinguistic group in Vietnam; macroaggregated albumin (???); and a common European gull. Unless European gulls are significantly larger than their American cousins, the "ostrich" clue seems a bit off.

Pali's clue was a Sanskrit dialect. More specifically,

a dialect descended from Sanskrit, and like that, a dead language, except when used as the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in Farther India, etc.

Who knew that an echidna was an egg-laying mammal? Not I. Here's a more precise definition:

Either of two nocturnal, burrowing, egg-laying mammals of the genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, having a spiny coat, slender snout, and an extensible sticky tongue used for catching insects. Also called spiny anteater.

the penny drops

I forgot that padre has more than one meaning until the Word of the Day reminded me.

padre, adjective: tremendous; terrible

Apart from referring to fathers, you may hear padre used in informal language to emphasize a noun.

Okay, this makes a snippet I heard on the bus the other day make a little more sense to me. The woman sitting in front of me was telling her companion about una pelea padre. At first I thought she was talking about a fight with her parents, but that didn't make sense.

Yes, I know, eavesdropping is bad. But conversations on public transportation are hard to keep private.

Muger?

I just read Georgette Heyer's The Spanish Bride, which worked well enough as a military narrative. Heyer's use of Spanish bothered me, mostly because it seemed inconsistent with what she told me (as a reader) about Juana and Harry Smith's daily life. This is one of my pet peeves in books and in movies. If the audience is made aware of the other language but the text remains in English, please be thoughtful about how that other language is conveyed. Scattering Spanish phrases in with English dialogue when you've told me already that they are always speaking Spanish feels fake, forced and awkward to me.

Orthographically speaking, how long has mujer been mujer? Was it muger in the 19th century? Heyer spelled it that way several times in the book, and now I must go find out the history of the spelling and pronunciation of the word.

Expanding my English

Sometimes I despair of being truly fluent in any language, including my native tongue. There are always words, phrases, colloquialisms that are new or old or just different.

Recently discovered words:

kapok, meaning the silky down that invests the seeds of a silk-cotton tree (kapok tree), Ceiba pentandra, of the East Indies, Africa, and tropical America: used for stuffing pillows, life jackets, etc., and for acoustical insulation.

Discovered via the crossword puzzle -- it was spelled by default when I filled in the surrounding words, and I had to look it up to see if it was real.

hustings: (before 1872) the temporary platform on which candidates for the British Parliament stood when nominated and from which they addressed the electors

A character in a novel was standing near the hustings, and I couldn't set the scene in my mind until I learned what that mean.

sador: a stringed Indian instrument.

Another crossword discovery. I wanted to wedge "sitar" in that spot, but the surrounding words didn't make sense if I did so.