Salut!

An image-conscious man and his umbrella

colin randall — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:24:45 +0200

What is worse? Being paid to take photographs others want untaken, or being paid to stop them being taken?

Dave, above, falls into the latter category. He is a "blocker". Though he may have other duties, his key function this week seems to have been trying with variable success to stop Canadian photographers bringing to the Canadian public pictures of a bunch of B-listers involved in shooting a film called Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

And Dave believes as passionately in the right to get in the way of photographers as he does, or may do, in their right to take pictures in public places. The umbrella is the principal tool of his trade. He probably thinks it as honest a trade as the next.

Our old friend Bill Taylor took this photo of our new friend Dave, though the new friendship is not yet strong enough for us to be able to offer a surname. For more on this inconsequentially amusing episode in Toronto street life, read Bill's account, and see more pictures, at this link.

One way of shopping

colin randall — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:58:29 +0200

Everyone is arriving.

You can tell it from the last two digits that appear on French car number plates: 59 (Nord, the area in and around Lille); 93 (Seine Saint-Denis, but let no one suggest you should therefore mind your valuables); 69 (the Rhone, including Lyon), 44 (Loire Atlantique), 72 (La Sarthe) and, of course, the Dutch, Belgians, Germans and, more than expected given the collapse of sterling, Brits.

Some of these good folk may be Salut! readers. They may also be the people who from now until the end of August will make shopping at Intermarché a bit more stressful.

In a desire to offer a public service to these high season invaders, I warn all against taking too literally the one-way system indicated in the Intermarché car park by reasonably clear direction arrows.

As I remark in this week's East West column in The National, an insistence on driving the wrong way round the car park was, until last week's murder, one of the most antisocial acts you could expect to encounter in Le Lavandou.

It's hardly the most heinous crime in the world. And it is committed mainly by people whose cars bear the 83 suffix, showing them - or at least the cars - to be from Le Lavandou itself or the Var in general.

As I also observe, it may be that you can never hope to be accepted as a real local until you also ignore such trifling details as a one-way road system.

But now it's been drawn to the attention of the people of the UAE, I am sure it will soon stop. Or I'll stop bothering about it. I keep meaning to, but have persuaded myself that one day, one of these clots will cause a prang.

Bahia: not our finest hour

colin randall — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:59:26 +0200

Whether Bahia Bakari is 12, 13 or 14 years old - each age having appeared hundreds of times since she alone escaped alive from the crashed Yemenia Airbus 310 - she has a powerful story to tell, one that would be uplifting and harrowing at the same time.

As a journalist, and as the father of daughters, I would be proud and moved if the task of coaxing that story, in conditions acceptable to her family and those professionally in charge of her physical and psychological recovery, fell to me.

I do not believe that is an unrespectable thought. Nor do I think millions, maybe billions of people around the world should feel ashamed if they were to find such an account of tragedy and survival of immense interest. And I certainly would not blame the father of Bahia, a man of decency and dignity if his public utterances since the disaster are any guide, if he secured Bahia's future by insisting on a substantial fee from Paris Match, French TV or whichever of Rupert Murdoch's organs happened to come knocking, cheques at the ready.

Equally, if responsible people feel such an exercise would be wholly undesirable for a young girl who may have survived but also lost her mother in the accident, that should be the end of it and accepted as such by the media. It is by no means certain, in any case, that even the most sensitive and skilled of interviewers would succeed in prompting Bahia to describe the events of June 28 with any clarity or in great detail.

But one thing I am relieved, again as a journalist, to have had no part in is the short but nauseating sequence in which reporters from 20minutes and France 2, the latter part of the state-owned broadcasting service, were permitted to put idiotic questions to a dazed and apparently weak Bahia on the official flight bringing her back to Paris.

How are you? Did you find the flight a little long? Are you feeling upset?

It matters not a jot that the reporters had discussed with medical staff on board what should be asked, and that Bahia herself was asked if she was willing to answer their questions. It aggravates rather than lessens the sense of disgust that the French secretary of state for co-operation, Alain Joyandet, was also on the flight and at the very least acquiesced in what took place.

This poor girl was about to be reunited with her father. I looked in vain through the hundreds of news items this morning for confirmation of whether she already knew then of her mother's fate.

But the interview, short as it was, should never have taken place. France 2 and 20minutes should not have put the least pressure on their reporters to obtain such material. The minister should have intervened, even if that meant overruling well-meaning but misguided medical people, to stop any such thing happening.

The breakdown of human decency on this occasion brings a little shame on all concerned.

My view seems to be shared, incidentally, by whoever runs a French website called de source sure, which talked about the "le trash" following le crash. The reason I offer no link is that the same high-minded piece, which noted that France 2 (unlike 20minutes) had not even blurred Bahia's face, also felt the need to illustrate its item with 11 video clips.

Mark my words: dash it all, do we really need hyphens?

colin randall — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:50:00 +0200

Yves*

Very well, I got over my distaste for exclamation marks, perhaps as befits someone whose websites all have Salut! in their names. But will I ever learn to live with hyphens? Keith and Bill, two of Salut!'s most prolific contributors in terms of comments posted, jointly inspired this week's My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

A former colleague who regularly comments on the content of this column once asked why I thought it necessary to include a hyphen in the phrase "little-known fact".

From another former colleague came this answer: "With the hyphen, the words clearly refer to a fact that not many people are aware of. Without the hyphen, it could refer to a small fact that is widely known."

Although my second correspondent was correct in explaining the distinction, both had a point. As the original commentator observed, only the obtuse would misinterpret the phrase even without a hyphen.

Despite my use of it in the phrase under discussion, I have no fondness for what seems the most annoying of all punctuation marks.

This view leads me into controversial territory. For all my certainty that clarity is invariably the best guide, plenty of people militantly spray hyphens around at every opportunity.

Most of us would probably agree that someone who is 28 is a 28-year-old person, and that we re-cover a seat if giving it a new cover but recover it if it has been lost and then found.

But hyphens also pop up in the oddest of places, and there is no straightforward split on the issue between different users of English. Americans do occasionally impose them with bewildering zeal, sometimes two at a time or as dangling hyphens (eg "fifth- and sixth-century art"). But the British cling on to them in compound words when other anglophones would do without.

The French also demonstrate an insatiable appetite. A walk on the Left Bank of Paris might start in the Place Saint-Michel and continue along the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, though none of those four hyphens would pass my test of strict need.

The authorities I have consulted confirm that no hyphens are needed when adjectives have already been modified by adverbs ending –ly, as in highly paid or happily married, but we have all seen them slotted into such constructions.

At least there is movement on both sides of the Atlantic towards removing hyphens except when absolutely necessary, a development I warmly welcome.

In my style guide for The National, I suggested that when in doubt, writers and editors should check modern editions of a good dictionary, our preference being the Concise OED.

But I added a warning that colleagues must expect inconsistencies. Why does the Oxford dictionary hyphenate counter-espionage but not counterterrorism? Why should we seek to counteract something but, if things turn nasty, counter-attack? Why, indeed, should my style guide resist hyphenation for vice president and secretary general when many other sources, literary and journalistic as well as academic, include the mark in one title or both (vice-president, says Oxford, but vice admiral, vice chamberlain and vice chancellor)?

We know roughly what hyphens are for: to separate syllables of the same word, join two or more words, provide a break in a word that overruns a line, emphasise meaning. In practice, they can be as confusing as their use is variable.

Wikipedia has a detailed entry in which several instances of supposedly correct and incorrect usage appear. In some cases, the need for hyphens is not in doubt. There is obvious if amusing ambiguity in saying a fun-loving person is fun loving, and removal of the hyphen would alter the meaning of “how to wire-transfer funds”.

But in the absence of definitive rules acceptable to all, we are back in the realm of personal or institutional choice. I would go so far as to say no one should lose sleep over the role of the hyphen, but suspect there are some teachers and editors who will go on tossing and turning for a while to come.

It's raining papillons de nuit

colin randall — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:59:22 +0200

At least it is not just us.

Initially, we wondered what we had done at the house to attract not just a few gaily coloured butterflies, which present a welcome enough sight, but also countless creatures that look like common or garden moths but apparently glory under the name papillons de nuit.

They are especially busy around our heads when we sit on the terrace for lunch but also invade the house, preferring to settle on walls or fly straight into windows than to fly out when the windows are opened for them. Mme Salut! has decided that this makes them quite stupid.

We were a little reassured to find that it was the same wherever we went in Le Lavandou. The supermarket car park, the narrow streets behind
the seafront, the car salesman's office at the garage where we were reflecting on a possible car purchase (of which more one day not too distant) and the bank (a visit forcement related to the last item).

In other words, they're everywhere.

The delightful lady dealing with our modest financial affairs at BNP Paribas had further words of reassurance.

"It was even worse a couple of winters ago," she said. "We had a mass invasion of frogs, really quite big ones."

Knowing how hard times have been for French restaurateurs, I am not sure I would have enjoyed the spectacle of thousands of one-legged frogs, perhaps on crutches, hopping nervously about town after having one limb each removed for culinary purposes.

Forget Michael Jackson and Madoff: there's murder on our doorstep

colin randall — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:01:42 +0200

Salut! has not been in hibernation. It has just been busy.

Perhaps I should have written about Michael Jackson.

Instead, I paid my dues by being stuck in a car for long spells with French radio playing his music or running news and features about his death in wall-to-wall fashion. And even though that music left me cold (at least since MJ's voice broke), I did allow myself to be dragged, with a daughter and friends, to one of his concerts, years ago, at Wembley.

Bernard Madoff and Florence Cassez? Just two recent manifestations of the particularly immature penchant of certain judicial systems for imposing prison sentences in excess of what anyone can reasonably expect by way of lifespan.

It may be that Madoff deserves to spend the rest of his days in jail. His spectacular frauds had real victims and required exemplary punishment.

But if courts wish defendants never to be released, they need only pass life sentences, stipulating what in the UK is called a "whole life tariff" if necessary. Coming up with figures such as 150 frankly makes them look idiotic.

Florence Cassez is also entitled to relatively little sympathy assuming she is guilty, which she denies, of complicity in kidnappings in Mexico.

I still cannot get it out of my head that it must take supreme effort for a judge to keep a straight face when sentencing a woman in her early 30s to 96 years' imprisonment.

In the Cassez case, the light of forgiveness has shone brightly enough for the term to be reduced to 60 years. Listening to the Mexican ambassador to France justifying the penalty, it was clear that his government had refused to send her home to serve her sentence in a French prison because it knew perfectly well that France, without being any kind of soft touch, would inject sanity into the verdict.

The ambassador also said, if I am right, that Mexican law allowed no hope of parole in her case. Even so, I shudder to think what danger to society she may still represent at 93.

If this world of celebrity dying and serious crime seems an awful long way from Le Lavandou, this morning's Var-Matin made me think again.

Down on the seafront yesterday afternoon (Tuesday), Vladimir Zakharchenko, a Ukrainian businessman, was shot five times as he walked back from the beach with his family towards his car. He has since died from his wounds.

"He's no mafioso," a friend is quoted as saying. "I believe he just didn't want to pay, that's all."

If Zakharchenko was hardly a celebrity, he was well enough known in certain international business circles. The friend describes him as a "Red Army veteran .. very good-natured, adorable" but admits that he had a previous "problem" in Russia and was the target of an earlier murder attempt in Germany.

Remind me to strike out "tranquil" and "peaceful" as appropriate adjectives for Le Lavandou. Why, Bill Taylor may even be re-thinking his plans to stop here for a few days next spring ...

one other thought on the crime may seem sightly at odds with my misgivings about Judge Denny Chin and his meaningless calculations of the appropriate prison term for Madoff. It is that among the murdering classes, hired assassins don't come so far behind genocidal war criminals, child killers, serial killers and jump-out-of-the-bush rapists (when they also kill) in challenging my lifelong opposition to capital punishment.

Mark my words: language à la carte

colin randall — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:56:00 +0200

Everyone has a favourite menu mistranslation. The colleague editing my column for today's edition of The National, Abu Dhabi remembers being offered "rubbish salad" in Greece. Perhaps Salut! readers can improve on his example and mine ...

In the sleepy French Alpine town of Sisteron, perhaps because everyone seemed to be taking lunch so early, the plat du jour at the Brasserie des Cascades was sold out long before 1pm.

Fortunately, that left a wide choice, from which I considered, before deciding against, the "pavement of salmon" or the "warm goat", delicious as I am sure both would have been.

Faux amis are those literal translations that turn out to be wide of the mark. The genre has already been discussed in this column, but within the family of these false friends is a special place reserved for restaurateurs and their well-meaning efforts to present menus in different languages.

What could be more natural, the patron of the brasserie must have thought, than to translate pavé as the French-English dictionary translates it, namely as a paving stone? In Collins, the first dictionary that I consulted, the culinary definition came almost as an afterthought, as in a slab of steak or biftek (Collins preferring that mouth-watering early example of Franglais).

The warm goat came into the reckoning with the help of a misplaced comma separating the goat - and its body temperature - from the cheese (chèvre chaud). Needless to say, there was no evidence visible from my table on the terrace of pavements being dug up or goats warming themselves in the sunshine

The night before this meal, at our little hotel perched high on the mountainside above the town of Barcelonnette, the choice of desserts had included something translated as "cut of ice two balls". I know I make much more serious errors in French. But it was in a spirit of trying to be helpful, rather than in a fit of pedantry, that I mentioned it to the hotelier. With the exception of the number, every component of the phrase was wrong, even though most customers would quickly realise, even without a word of French, that they were being offered two scoops of ice cream.

Anyone who has eaten out abroad often enough will be able to call to mind amusing translations of menus or hotel services. At his blog ojohaven.com, an American francophile, Phillip M Eberz, has a "linguistic fun page" on which a correspondent reports finding, near Calais, pâté de maison offered alternatively as "our pie". Mr Eberz tells of a Polish hotel inviting orders for "limpid red beet soup with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger", "roasted duck let loose" and "beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion".

An early translation of Coca Cola in China – pronounced ke-kou-ke-la – apparently meant either “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax”, depending on the tone, and even the drinks company’s ingenious staff had to search long and hard before coming up with ke-kou-ko-le, phonetically a close match and conveniently defined as “happiness in the mouth”.

Among the UAE's cosmopolitan population will be plenty of people who can point to the process working both ways. My wife remembers, from her earliest days in England, teaching French to a young girl who, during one lesson, declared herself amoureuse du fromage, by which she almost certainly meant she was fond of a piece of Cheddar rather than in love with it.

But then, I could remind her of our first evening out at a restaurant. In keeping with French preferences for red meat to be cooked very rare, that is to say barely threatened with a frying pan or grill, she ordered a "bloody steak". It is a matter of dispute between us, but I could swear I heard the waiter reply: "And I suppose you want some ******* chips as well."

Mark my words: that'll learn 'em

colin randall — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:11:00 +0200

If you thought center, theater, labor and traveler bad enough, think again. If old Noah Webster had had his way, it would have been worse still. The father of Americanised English is discussed in this week's My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

Noah Webster, who would have been 250 years old last October, has a lot to answer for. That was my first thought about a man whose name survives on the covers of some of America’s best known dictionaries.
My second thought was that, give or take a little bickering, we might actually have got on rather well.

Webster was, after all, a newspaperman and passionate about words. That describes me, too. He was also a teacher and a lawyer, but two out of four is not a bad start.
Had we lived at the same time, the bickering would have begun whenever conversation turned to spelling, or the use of particular words.

According to a biography attributed to the Encyclopedia of World Biography – the spelling of encyclopaedia offering an immediate clue to that work’s origins – it was Mr Webster’s irritation with British textbooks that inspired him to write his own. He evidently possessed “too much pride to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to learn our children”. Indeed, it is quite likely that his use of learn for teach would have provoked our first quarrel.

Another account of his life, at the official website of Merrion-Webster, the publishing descendant of his work, says his 1828 epic, An American Dictionary of the English Language, had 70,000 entries and was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson’s 1755 British masterpiece “not only in scope but in authority”.

The only part of that statement with which Webster would have disagreed is the assessment of Johnson’s effort as a masterpiece. To Webster, Johnson was “naturally indolent”, reports Caroline Taggart in her book, My Grammar and I; he seldom wrote unless driven by need and was therefore obliged to “prepare his manuscripts in haste”.

Some of Webster’s views seem highly eccentric, perhaps designed more to incite controversy, and consequently interest in – and sales of – his work, than to be taken literally. He wanted spelling to be consistent with sound, producing center for centre and theater for theatre; there would be no place, in Noah Webster’s world, for the silent u in valour, candour, labour and so on.

See how it's done
colran

That is already more than enough to appal users of British English, but it did not end there. He also wanted yung for young, masheen for machine, reezoning for reasoning, even arguing in favour of wimmen for women on the grounds that this was the “old and true spelling”; no wonder some Americans found all of this a bit far-fetched and took to mocking him.

But the less contentious category of changes entered everyday American usage, ensuring that those of us charged nearly two centuries later with monitoring the use of English in the early days of The National faced a stiff task, given how many admirers of Webster’s preferences we seemed to count among our colleagues.

For Caroline Taggart and her co-author, J A Wines, Webster was “single-handedly responsible for most of the differences between British and American spelling that survive to this day”.

We should not forget that he also gave his country words of its own: skunk, hickory and chowder offered as examples by Merriam-Webster. His role in the development of a “distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation and style” was immense. In repeating that phrase I am to blame, or to be applauded, for the removal of Merriam-Webster’s Americanised punctuation after the word “pronunciation”, even if it is known as the Oxford comma, .

The legacy of Noah Webster is that even as I typed this column, red lines appeared at various points where the American spellcheck had the impudence to suggest I was mistaken even though it had detected words I knew I had spelled correctly.

The murdered earl, the hunted informant and me

colin randall — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:54:31 +0200

Yesterday was a busy day in the life of a journalist much sought after by the electronic media.

It started with a two-and-a-half hour drive to St Paul de Vence to be interviewed by France 2 about the sad affair of the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, murdered - a French court decided - by the brother of his third wife, who did not wish divorce to get in the way of a tidy inheritance.

Why I ever agreed to do it is a mystery. French TV, rather like much of the rest of the world of broadcasting, proceeds on the basis that newspaper journalists are there to be tapped for whatever knowledge they have, free of charge. I thought No but said Yes, OK when they asked, so have no one else to blame.

The events under discussion occurred five years ago. A lot has happened in my life since and I made simple errors of recollection in my responses. The very amiable crew did reimburse my petrol and motorway tolls, and even paid for lunch, unappetising as it turned out to be, but I was still left wondering why I had let myself in for it.

Then, a friend in the North East of England rang from BBC Radio Newcastle. Would I go on a teatime programme to talk about the 10th anniversary of an attempt to murder Martin McGartland, who had been exposed as an informant whose tip-offs on IRA plans had saved the lives of dozens of intended targets?

The BBC seems to have taken to expecting these things for free, too. But it was a friend that had asked, so I readily agreed. Again, my memory was occasionally a little dodgy, though it had been refreshed to some extent by my elder daughter's role as publicist in promoting the recent film about McGartland's exploits, 50 Dead Men Walking.

Luckily, very few people who know me will have heard my ramblings on BBC local radio. Still fewer will tune in when France 2 gets round later in the year to screening its special on the killing of the Earl of Shaftesbury.

And the next time someone asks, maybe the head will rule the heart.

Like sheep

colin randall — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:30:14 +0200

... la transhumance. What a great word, talking - as we do here sometimes - about words.

For the unitiated, it is that time of year when the sheep farmers of the Alps drive their flocks to higher grazing land.

Above Barcelonette, we saw the road ahead blocked by the start of the process (for one farmer) and stopped the car, having little choice. Someone else had already pulled up; a young woman was running up the road, camera in hand.

"Nous sommes commes les moutons," I admitted as I caught up with her, my own camera in hand too.

At our hotel in Pra Loup, we were told a little more about this annual event. The transhumance and the loup are linked, of course. The wolves are not like sheep, but they do like sheep, to eat.

The wolves represent the principal danger to the sheep in the coming three months or so. But if I am right, the sheep have less risk of being eaten by them than of being frightened by them to such an extent that they then jump to their deaths in any handy ravine.

None of this is much appreciated by the farmers. The wolves are protected species, so must not be killed just because they kill (or set in train events that lead to death); if - again - I am right, the farmers are duly compensated.

And they can always laugh at the tourists who suddenly find that as the sheep rise, the flies descend. I am told it is like night following day. It certainly makes for a noisy, touchy-feely reveille as the blasted things buzz around your bed, settle on your face and generally make themselves such a pain that you get up far earlier than you ever intended.