This is more of a pretension comeuppance story. My AP English teacher (whom I pitted a while back) was obviously unqualified to teach the class. (She’s never heard of Voltaire, for example, and while she insisted that we memorize a bunch of literary terms pretty much unrelated to the class, she had a student pull out the list during every class because she couldn’t remember them.) Yet, that never stopped her from misquoting Shakespeare, misusing literary-critical terms, and finding piles of literary devices in passages obviously devoid of them. My favorite time, though, was when we were reading the Communist Manifesto, and she claimed that alliteration was used to Great Literary Effect.
Student: Uh, you know that it’s translated from German, right?
Last night, I went to see The Plimsouls at Jammin’ Java, a coffeehouse/bar with live music. (BTW, the f’ing ROCKED!) It was 9:00 at night, and the opening act was playing, adn here’s this guy sitting in the lounge with his laptop out, his iPod earplugs in, and seemingly focusing intently on some stupid spreadsheet. Firstly, WTF? If you have work to do, go to work or home or something. Secondly, I noticed that he would look around if noone was looking, but if he noticed someone looking, he would go back to staring at the screen. I never saw him touch the keyboard or mouse.
Also, like madmonk28, I live in the DC area, and it’s Stuffed Shirt Central. It’s comical to see some smug young “executive”, all dressed up in daddy’s suit, yammering on his cellphone or pointing vacantly at pie charts on his laptop. The reality is, the really hard-working, important people are in their offices, actually doing work, and most of them don’t look like some damn Microsoft Office Stock Photo Ken-doll. Self-important puffery is one of the most irritating things I can think of.
A good translator is not one who translates each individual word to whichever word is closest in meaning; it’s one who chooses, among the myriad possibilities, that which is closer in spirit and devices to the original.
Otherwise Terry Pratchett and the Monty Python, to name two absolutely not at random, wouldn’t sell a penny in languages other than English. (I’m as much a fan of TP’s translator as of TP himself).
Well, I guess since he really wasn’t intending to call anyone, just wanted to act like he was, he didn’t need a dial tone, so didn’t notice there wasn’t one.
And it could be that because the phone was one of those office phones with many lines and buttons to push if he did notice there was no dial tone he would have figured he just didn’t reach an open line, not that the phone wasn’t working.
And even thought they have earned the right to be called Doctor, to insist on it
seems rather petty to me. I am much more impressed with people who I have known for a while and never knew they had a Ph.D. until someone else mentioned it.
A friend of mine is a few months away from her Ph.D. I joked with her that I should start practicing calling her “Doc” now so I would have it down when she became one. She told me she would prefer I not ever call her that. Her opinion was that the people she knew that insisted on it, and brought up the fact they had a Ph.D. anytime they could were people who didn’t really have much else to offer. That was the only thing that made them interesting, and she liked to think she was much more than just that one accomplishment. I think that is a much healthier attitude.
This one will really hit home for the Utah/Mormon crowd. By way of background, most active Mormon men serve two year missions at age 19. When they get back, they’re referred to as returned missionaries or “RMs.” In Mormon culture in general, an RM is considered much more datable/marriageable than a non-RM. Because of this, some RMs will find out ways to drag their staus into a conversation. It’s the Utah equivalent of walking around with a Bluetooth earpiece and barking “buy” and “sell” orders to no one in particular.
Anyway, a few years ago I was in a mall in Provo, UT. I was at the Food Court, in line at the Panda Express with my tray. In front of me were two cute girls who were obviously together, and in front of them was a guy in his mid-twenties in cargo pants and a ringer t-shirt. As the guy paid for his food, he looked with distaste over the selection of forks, knives and napkins. He asked the cashier if she had any chop sticks. As she bent under the counter to find them, he looked back at the two girls and said, ever-so-casually, “I just can’t eat General Tso’s chicken with a fork anymore since I got back from Taiwan.” And he pronounced “Tso” in a way that I’m sure was the correct way, but made him sound like an archsnob.
:rolleyes: <---- x1000
I didn’t say it, but I thought, “Dude. You’re in Utah. You’re probably from Utah, and if you aren’t, then you’re from Idaho. The girl who just took your order is white. The person who made your General Zhoooo chicken was in all likelihood Mexican. Stop being a poser. Pick up a fork, shut the fuck up and go eat your $6 **fake **Chinese food.”
I’ve never been to Asia, but I don’t like to eat Asian food with a fork. It’s like eating spaghetti with a spoon-- it’ll get the job done, but it just doesn’t feel right.
I took a World Lit class senior year in high school, and we were reading something translated from Spanish. There was a passage the instructor was really hot on, where the main character “put on his morning clothes”. He went on and on about the whole “morning/mourning” thing, how the character was really expressing his grief, etc. A student in the class who was a native Spanish speaker raised his hand and said “Mr. House? This is translated from Spanish. There are no words in Spanish meaning “morning” and “mourning” that sound anything like each other.”
He replied “It doesn’t matter!” and continued with his gibberish.
The kicker is, I am Asian. I was born in Vietnam, and while I grew up in America, I grew up eating Vietnamese food more than American. And I eat it with a fork most of the time.
Having said that, I didn’t take issue with him wanting chop sticks, only with his need to preen for the chickies.
A Chinese person would consider it rude to eat a Chinese meal with a fork (especially a knife and fork). I figure why not show some culteral sensitivity even if it doesn’t appear anyone around might be offended and the food is Americanized?
That’s an excellent question. And the answer is: he wouldn’t. He’d go there for cheap food and the chance to impress some girls with his RM-ness. :rolleyes:
I would guess that is rude in the same way that a walmart greeter not saying Merry Christmas is rude. That is to say, its not rude but there people that just want to be offended by something.
A while back a memo at work went out informing all the veterinarians in my agency the correct way to refer to themselves in their email signatures. Apparently, folks had been calling themselves, Dr. Firstname Lastname, DVM.
It’s not rude to eat Asian food with a fork just as it’s not rude to eat American food with chopsticks (cheetos are meant to be eaten with chopsticks!). What’s rude is when Chinese restaurants give forks to Asians dating whites because they assume that if you forsake your culture a bit, you must forsake it all.
If you want pretension, I give you a customer I had who snobbily asked for chopsticks at my Indian restaurant. Wrong kind of Asian, bub!
Just recently, I went to the doctor for a back problem. Very condescendingly, he said,
“do you know what LUMBAR means?”
I said yes.
“Do you know what SCOLIOSIS is?”
I said yes.
“I don’t know if you know what X-RAYS look like, but they’re shadowy pictures of your bones…(etc) have you ever SEEN an x-ray?”
I said yes, I know what they look like.
“Oh, you DO, do you. You seem to know a lot. You must watch a lot of medical shows.” (he says this with a sneer.
I explain that no, I don’t really watch TV at all, and I watch no medical shows whatsoever.
“Oh, do you WORK in a doctor’s office?”
No, I don’t. I wasn’t aware it was a crime to have a relatively good vocabulary. I apologize. Furthermore, it’s not like these things are hidden knowledge, information only known to doctors. They’re pretty common words. Sigh.
