Pandemonium

Let’s learn a new word today: pyrrhic. According to two dictionaries:

1885, from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who defeated Roman armies at Asculum, 280 B.C.E., but at such cost to his own troops that he was unable to follow up and attack Rome itself, and is said to have remarked, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

Pyrrhic Victory
A victory in which the victor’s losses are as great as those of the defeated.

Collins English Dictionary, Millennium Edition, © 1999 Harper Collins

Why do I think we need this word? Because yesterday I saw an episode of Boston Legal in which they talked about “victoria empírica”. Thinking it was a bad translation, I switched to the English audio and heard them talking about an “empirical victory”… The victory was pyrrhic because although the defendant was found guilty, she didn’t even go to jail.

So, failing grade for the American scriptwriters who don’t know their own language and failing grade for the Spanish translators who didn’t see the lack of logic and just translated the sentence.

P.

Just opening the newspaper means a source of inspiration for this blog.

Cinecittà is burning down, the famous studio where movies such as Ben Hur or La dolce vita were shot. Images of this terrifying fire are dwarfed by the absurd sizing:

It’s only about 150,000 square miles in the heart of Rome… Anyway, Spain is barely 200,000 square miles including the islands…

P.

You always think the grass is greener somewhere else, specially when it comes to your language. You always believe there is no way someone will make the mistakes in your adopted language that you’re accustomed to see in your own language. Until something like this comes up:

This past week they have released Anna Nicole Smith’s private diary. It’s bad to be dead and to have your privacy invaded like that, specially when mistakes are abundant…

P.

In one of the professional mailing lists I subscribe to there is an ongoing polemic about correction when writing messages. While some people think that form is not too important, others think that professional lists are a reflection of who we are. I am among that latter group and I am going to explain why.

We work with languages and we try to earn a living with them. I believe it is important to offer a correct image when addressing messages to a professional list. You never know who is reading you, you never know where your next project is coming from. It is important that your audience, so many times silent, gets the following two ideas:

1. That you bother to check dictionaries before making a query.

2. That you are able to express yourself with grammatical, orthographic, and semantic correction, both in questions and answers.

Is it too much to ask for proper punctuation (in Spanish that includes opening question/exclamation marks)? Is it too much to ask for proper spelling (like their/there/they’re or it’s/its in English)? Is it far too much to ask for writing that adheres to the most basic grammatical notions?

This reminds me of a friend of mine, who used to shower and wear clean underwear whenever she went out for a drink in the evening, in case something happened and she ended up in a hospital.

This is something similar. It doesn’t cost you any money to look professional in these lists, just a little effort.

P.

I was just zapping around, checking what they were showing on TV and what’s bad is not these programs full of yellow-press people, a plagiarist doing a boring interview (Lucía, honey, start by spitting out the chewing gum, so that we may understand you), of uninteresting people doing their dirty laundry in public thanks to Big Brother… The worst in this TV is to see what I have seen in big letters in my 25″ screen: “El coraGe de un campeón” (A Champion’s Courage; in Spanish, this word is spelled with J, although they don’t seem to know it).

With all the money this public channel gets from burrowing into our pockets, didn’t they have enough to hire a proofreader for titles and subtitles?

One thing is to be contaminated by English (courage and garage instead of coraje and garaje) and something very different is to show such blatant ignorance…

A little bit of education, please, it makes us all look “prettier”.

P.

We have a couple of sayings in Spanish that illustrate the idea of calling things by their name: “Al pan pan y al vino vino” (to call a spade a spade, literally to call bread bread and wine wine) and “No tener pelos en la lengua” (not to mince words, literally not to have hairs in your tongue). Both illustrate the behavior of a speaker who wishes to make his intentions clear. I find it very praiseworthy: to say what you mean.

The problem arises in this world of political correctness that imposes a gag, though. Suddenly the wine becomes watery and the bread is whole wheat. It is not good manners to hurt the feelings of those who listen, but it seems in good taste to distort, cut, manipulate, and change the meaning of what we mean, in general.

Let me give you a harmless example: “collateral damage”. Collateral damage refers to the innocent victims in a war, as we are tired of seeing in print. Wow! It seems we are talking about things…

I’d award the Lady Macbeth Prize to whoever came up with this unfortunate expression.

P.

I read an ad requesting an Argentinian to teach Castilian in a European city. I think so much political correctness has confused many people; for not wanting to call it Spanish (what it is indeed), we request an Argentinian to teach Castilian…

The language is called Spanish, no matter how many people seem to feel sick when they read that. And within Spanish, we have different dialects, such as Castilian, Mexican or Argentinian.

Worst thing about it is not the conceptual mistake in the ad, but that it was placed by a translator…

P.

For those of us who translate professionally into Spanish, there are certain persons, like Martínez de Sousa, who make our lives easier. His manuals are among our most prized assets for several reasons: His explanations are clear, intelligent, and practical. Among others, he has a dictionary of doubts, an ortography, and a style manual where to find and dispell the doubts we were left with by the Academia.

I have been lucky enought to attend a 10-hour seminar on ortotypography imparted by him and organized/sponsored by Asetrad, and the seminar has not dispelled all my doubts (in fact, I have a full cartload of those), but I have loved returning to the atmosphere of listening to an intelligent person and learning from him/her, something that does not happen frequently in a field such as mine, where most communications and discussions are in written form.

Then, back at home, I realize that Spanish is a language of ellipses. In one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, there are some doubts on the gender of certain words in Spanish. What is the gender of “coche”? That’s easy, it’s masculine. But in reality it can be both masculine if we are talking about “un (coche) Ford”, “un (todoterreno) Ford”, etc., or femenine “una (furgoneta) Ford”, “una (camioneta) Ford”, etc. There is no possible doubt with the makers. Ford, Chrysler, Toyota or Ferrari are all femenine words, because we suppose “la (empresa/compañía/casa) Ford, Chrysler, Toyota o Ferrari”.

And we end up landing in one of the thorniest words right now: Internet. First I check the dictionary of the Academia, which indicates that it can be both masculine and femenine, and that it’s usually written in caps, as a proper noun. I always think of the Internet as a femenine word and I realize the ellipsis is even larger: When I talk, I leave out (la red [de]) and I only utter its name, Internet, that becomes a proper noun.

:-) Who said Spanish was easy?

P.