Alaskan Range: Evanescent
...My Texas accent remains somewhat pronounced, despite twenty years in Fairbanks. Those with southern pronunciations are often considered slow or ignorant by non-southerners, so I keep a handy copy of "The Illustrated Texas Dictionary of the English Language" in my office. Written in 1967 by Jim Everhart, it clarifies terms such as "small" ("to assume a facial expression indicating pleasure"), "fair" ("a distressing emotion aroused caused by impending danger"), "Heidi!" ("an expression of greeting"), and "Tom" ("any specific point in a day, month, or year")....
Wordsman Greg Hill tells of some words which cannot be translated into English - or Texan.
A list titled "10 Words That Can't Be Translated To English" is knocking around the Internet, and it includes some good ones. The Dutch word "uitwaaien," for instance, means "to take a brief walk in the countryside to clear one's head," and the Danish term "hygge" means "a complete absence of anything annoying, irritating, or emotionally overwhelming, and the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle, and soothing things." I need to get me some of that.
Two other foreign words fit our present state of hyper-politicalness: "qualunquismo," Italian for "people who don't really care all that much about politics and issues in society," and, in 2004 a BBC survey of 1,000 leading linguists determined that the hardest word in the world to translate is "ilunga," Bantu for "a person willing to forgive abuse the first time, tolerate it the second, but never a third time."
English has its own doozies, and in 1940 a professor of French named Howard Chace wanted to show that how English is spoken is nearly as important as the words are in conveying meaning. Chace used "homophonic transformation," the use of words with similar sounds but different meanings, in poems and stories that demonstrated his theory. The most famous was "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut," his version of Little Red Riding Hood. Sometimes Chace used a single word to replace several others (changing "if it isn't" into "evanescent"), and other times replacing longer words with several shorter ones ("unfortunate" into "on forger nut"). The results are amusing, as in "O Grammar," crater ladle gull, "What bag icy guts! A nervous sausage bag ice!" You can enjoy the whole thing online at www.mit.edu/~jcb/humor/ladle-rat-rotten-hut.
Pronunciation is important. StraightDope.com tells how John Wayne unfortunately insisted on portraying Genghis Kahn in Howard Hughes' 1955 blockbuster fiasco, "The Conquerors." When Genghis' sidekick, Jamuga, urged him not to attack a caravan carrying Susan Hayward, Wayne/Genghis replied in his familiar drawl, "There are moments fer wisdom, Juh-mooga, then I listen to ya, and there are moments fer action, then I listen to mah blood. I feel this tartar wuhman is fer me, and my blood says, "Take her!"
My Texas accent remains somewhat pronounced, despite twenty years in Fairbanks. Those with southern pronunciations are often considered slow or ignorant by non-southerners, so I keep a handy copy of "The Illustrated Texas Dictionary of the English Language" in my office. Written in 1967 by Jim Everhart, it clarifies terms such as "small" ("to assume a facial expression indicating pleasure"), "fair" ("a distressing emotion aroused caused by impending danger"), "Heidi!" ("an expression of greeting"), and "Tom" ("any specific point in a day, month, or year").
Tom's easier to tell at Noel Wien Library since the Geochron's back. The Geochron is "an intricate analog clockwork mechanism," according to Wikipedia, "that shows the month, date, day of the week, hours and minutes, the areas of the world currently experiencing day and night, and the meridian passage of the sun." Our Geochron lives in the right-hand side of the large display case since being donated when Noel Wien opened in 1977, and it faithfully showed the annual arrival and leaving of sunlight until it broke last winter.
The Geochron was invented in 1965 by Luxembourgian Jim Kilburg, creator of the automobile cigarette lighter, automatic-dialing telephone, and automated maraschino cherry pitter. Geochrons are still hand-made in Portland, Oregon, with each of its gears being "individually hand-cut to ensure synchronization" and the world map features "state-of-the-art lithography printing which uses specially formulated inks" that resist ultraviolet light. It's won many awards, and President Reagan gave one to Gorbachev.
The library has no Geochron repair budget, but the Fairbanks Library Foundation came to our rescue. The Foundation raises money through the sale of commemorative book tiles, gold cards, and posters and notecards drawn from William Berry's "Alaska Fairy Tale" mural. They paid the $ 900 shipping and repair bill, and a rebuilt Geochron again adorns the library's entryway, complete with all the new countries that sprang up since 1977. The Fairbanks' libraries are better places thanks to our Library Foundation's "zalatwic," a Polish word meaning "the use of friends … personal charm, or connections to get something done."
