Katie's discovery of the night: This warning, on the side of a bag of raisins, reads, "It can slip into the throttle of the children."
Consequently, she became very worried about all the children and their throttles.
I'm reminded of some of David Sedaris' hilarious anecdotes on his time living in France from Me Talk Pretty One Day.
This is transcribed from David Sedaris’ “The Sex of French Nouns.”
(Listen at: http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/lists/sedaris/)
There are, I have noticed, two basic types of French spoken by Americans vacationing in Paris - the hard kind, and the easy kind. The hard kind involves the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various words in order to form such sentences as, "I go him say good afternoon," and "No, not to him I no go with him say now."
The second, less complicated form of French amounts to screaming English at the top of your lungs, much the same way as you would shout at a deaf person or a dog you thought you had trained to stay off the sofa. Doubt and hesitation are completely unnecessary. The speaker carries no pocket dictionary, and never suffers the humiliation that invariably comes with pointing to the menu and ordering the day of the week. With easy French, eating out involves a simple, "Bring! Me! A! Steak!"
Having undertaken the study of hard French, I'll overhear such requests and glare across the dining room thinking, "That's Mister Steak to you, Buddy."
Of all the stumbling blocks inherent in learning this language, the greatest for me
is the principle that each noun has a corresponding sex that affects both its articles
and its adjectives. Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is
masculine. "Vagina" is masculine as well, while the word “masculinity” is feminine. Forced by grammar to
take a stand one way or the other, “hermaphrodite” is male and “indecisiveness”
female. I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that
common sense has nothing to do with it. “Hysteria, psychosis, torture,
depression”…I was told that if something is unpleasant, it’s probably feminine.
This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as
“murder, toothache and rollerblade.”
I have no problem learning the words themselves, it’s the sexes that trip me up
and refuse to stick. What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is
masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because, if left alone
for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard. This works until it is time to
order, and I decide for one reason or another a sandwich is undoubtedly feminine.
I just can’t manage to keep my story straight.
Hoping I might learn through repetition, I tried using gender in my everyday
English. “Hi guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paperclips. Or “Hey Hugh,
have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.”
I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn't work out with my wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter...
Nothing in France is free from sexual assignment. I was leafing through the dictionary when I noticed the the French had proscribed genders for the various land masses and natural wonders we Americans have always thought of as sexless. Niagra Falls is feminine and, against all reason, the Grand Canyon is masculine. New England is a she while the vast area we call the Mid-West is just one big guy.
My confidence hit a new low when my friend Adeline told me that French
children often made mistakes, but never with the sex of their nouns. “It’s just
something we grow up with,” she said. “We hear the gender once and then think
of it as part of the word. There’s nothing to it.”
Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two year olds, I started referring to
everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my
problems. In saying “a melon,” you need to use the masculine article. Ask for
two or ten or three hundred melons, and the number lets you off the hook by
replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes.
I started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our
cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner shouting “what do we
need with four pounds of tomatoes?” I answer that I’m sure we can use them for
something. The only hard part is finding somewhere to put them. They won’t fit
in the refrigerator as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I
bought from the butcher the night before, forgetting that we were still working our
way through a pair of pork roasts the size of duraflame logs. Hugh tells me that
the market is off limits until my French improves. He’s pretty steamed, but I
think he’ll get over it when he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.
Yes, we have had our own Sedaris moments... In Turkish class one day, for example, it was my turn at the chalkboard during a translation exercise our teacher had cooked up about "our neighbor Ahmet Bey." I was to translate that Ahmet Bey works at the hospital, has a car but doesn't go to work in his car, and on Sundays he stays home and works in the garden. We had just been working with the grammatical ending that turns nouns to professions, and my mind was stuck on the word "işçi," meaning "worker." Naturally, I thought, the verb "to work" would be derived from this root "iş," and added the proper conjugations to turn it into a verb describing Ahmet Bey. After proudly writing my sentences up on the board, I noticed stifled chuckles coming from my teacher as she sat, tongue-in-cheek, on the divan next to the board. Blushing, she explained to the class that the verb I had so properly conjugated, "işemek," actually means "to urinate," although she expressed that she understood my confusion. So what I had written on the board, in front of the class went something like,
"Ahmet Bey is our neighbor and he is a doctor. He pees at the hospital. He has a car, but he doesn't go to urinate with his car. Sundays, he stays at the house and pees in the garden."
Oh Turkish, you keep me ever so amused.
.....Usually, the best translations come with signs and warnings in touristy areas, as they are often directly translated and provide English counterparts of Turkish grammatical patterns that just don't make much sense.
"It's tobe started to look in the souvenirs' shops here" (From a friend's recent trip to Cappadoccia)
"Having picnic is forbidden." I have also seen "Making picnic is forbidden," a more direct translation...
On the travertines in Pamukkale - "Only for walking without shoes and taking photos." I'm not completely sure what else tourists would want to do on the travertines...
"Entering the travertines is not certainly allowed to protect this amazing natural beauty as it used to be." .....?
