diplomacy and other ramblings
Feb. 14th, 2005 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesI swear, the first commandment of diplomatic language is: If thou hast a clause that should follow another, thou shalt reverse their order. (Thereby rendering everything "to which" and "of which" and "in which", and tying my brain in knots trying to make sure that the second half of the sentence still refers to what was said in the first half of the sentence).
Is it just me or has there been more of an advertising avalanche for February 14 this year than the last couple of years? (If you ask me, there shouldn't be one day to celebrate love in the first place. If you love, or are loved, celebrate it every day.)
I think tomorrow I'll treat myself to a trip to the used bookstore. I have some books I want to sell anyway.
It occurs to me that even if anybody wanted to buy me flowers, or if I wanted to buy them for myself, I wouldn't have anything to put them in. I still don't own any vases.
Tomorrow, by which I mean after I've slept for a while, I have to go clean up some more of my case study. I'm not sure cleaning up a shaky translation isn't more work than translating it correctly in the first place, but I was without dictionaries when I did the first draft and some of my guesses were wrong. I have what I suspect is an Anglophone's phobia; every time I run across a word in French that looks like a word in English, and I don't know for certain that it isn't a false cognate, my immediate instinct is to say it is a false cognate. So then I have to look it up, and more often than not I find out I was being overly paranoid, and kick myself, and go on translating. And then I trip over a word I know the meaning of, but doesn't mean in context what it means in the dictionary, and I kick myself for that when I find out what I did.
Nap time. My contact lenses are starting to make my eyes complain.
Is it just me or has there been more of an advertising avalanche for February 14 this year than the last couple of years? (If you ask me, there shouldn't be one day to celebrate love in the first place. If you love, or are loved, celebrate it every day.)
I think tomorrow I'll treat myself to a trip to the used bookstore. I have some books I want to sell anyway.
It occurs to me that even if anybody wanted to buy me flowers, or if I wanted to buy them for myself, I wouldn't have anything to put them in. I still don't own any vases.
Tomorrow, by which I mean after I've slept for a while, I have to go clean up some more of my case study. I'm not sure cleaning up a shaky translation isn't more work than translating it correctly in the first place, but I was without dictionaries when I did the first draft and some of my guesses were wrong. I have what I suspect is an Anglophone's phobia; every time I run across a word in French that looks like a word in English, and I don't know for certain that it isn't a false cognate, my immediate instinct is to say it is a false cognate. So then I have to look it up, and more often than not I find out I was being overly paranoid, and kick myself, and go on translating. And then I trip over a word I know the meaning of, but doesn't mean in context what it means in the dictionary, and I kick myself for that when I find out what I did.
Nap time. My contact lenses are starting to make my eyes complain.
