my life

Principal and principle

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My wife and I collected a new car today. On the wall of the car dealer’s office was a large poster of the ‘Customer Service Charter’ with the name and photo of the Dealer Principle. Not even the Principle Dealer. (I can’t help noticing these things.)

Principal and principle are related way back in Latin (first, chief, see also prince), but now have separate spellings and meanings, and almost every writing guide warns against mixing them up. I find it hard to believe that no-one noticed. I didn’t point it out. I’m not going to not buy a car because of one mistake (possibly actually two) on one poster. Also, my wife had already paid the money.

Searching through my drafts documents, I found this post, which I had forgotten about, and also that I mixed up principals and principles in another post (which I won’t link), so maybe I shouldn’t cast aspersions on anyone else. But then I’m not a multi-million dollar car dealership. 

Hiring the right person

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Yesterday my wife and I attended the wedding of and two receptions for the daughter of a very good friend of hers. At the second, smaller, more formal, evening reception I was seated next to the bride’s father’s brother who had travelled from Korea. His English is more limited than my Korean, but we got by in my Korean and with interpretation by my wife (interpretation of my Korean into actual Korean, and interpretation of my English into Korean). At one stage he opened the Papago translator app on his phone, said something in Korean, and the app showed “Let’s meet when you come to Seoul”. So far so good.

There were speeches by a friend and sibling of each of the bride and groom, in a mixture of Korean and English. The bride’s uncle was attempting to translate the bride’s friend’s speech, but I noticed that it was mis-transcribing the English, so that any translation was likely to be incorrect, or at best misleading. A few times I said ‘yes’ or gave a thumbs up (meaning ‘that’s what she said’) or ‘no’ or crossed and uncrossed my hands in front of me, flat and palms down – I don’t know what that gesture is called (meaning ‘that’s not what she said’). Towards the end of the speech, the friend said “You’ve done a great job finding the right person”. The app transcribed that as “You’ve done a great job hiring the right man”. No! That’s not what she said!

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Alleluia x 162 (approx)

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Easter Day services feature the word Alleluia/Hallelujah/Alleluya (see this previous post, 4th and 5th paragraphs) a lot. On the train home from church yesterday afternoon I counted 162 (maybe plus or minus a couple) throughout, mostly sung but sometimes spoken. Most notable are the hymn Light’s glittering morn bedecks the sky, which has seven per verse and nine verses, for a total of 63, and the anthem Ye sons and daughters of the King, arranged by Martin Baker, which has six at the start, one plus six after four of the verses and six after the other two, for a total of 46.

I have written a medium-sized anthem using this one word, which has at least 95 depending on how you count them (there are some overlapping entries and truncated words) and a round which could theoretically continue forever, but only has two per repetition of the round, so it would need to be sung 48 times to beat the anthem.

Geez

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When I was a child, I somehow obtained a Disney comic. One character (so far as I remember, Goofy) said “Geez”. It is also possible that school friends said that. At some stage I said it within the hearing of my mother, who explained that it was a short form of Jesus, and that we didn’t say that. I replied that it was spelled geez (at least in the comic) and she said it didn’t matter how it was spelled, it all meant the same and we didn’t say that. As far as I can be sure of my own speech, I don’t say either Jesus (outside of religious contexts) or geez, but definitely have said gee at least several times. A short ponder about words like this easily finds golly, gosh; geez, gee, gee whiz, gee willikers (also spelled with j); crikey, cripes, jeepers creepers and jiminy cricket. In the other direction, there are also dickens, deuce, heck, darn(ed) and dang(ed). There was no comment from my mother about whichever of those I said (definitely golly, gosh and gee at various times). 

In non-religious language, there are also the f-words, the c-words, the p-words and the sh-words, and I’m sure more. This is not limited to English: see the TV Tropes page Gosh Dang it to Heck (real life) (which obviously starts with the religious words but also includes the non-religious ones).

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Dress

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Last week a colleague informed us that it was Dress in Blue Day, which I later found out is for the cause of colorectal cancer awareness, and pondered whether brown might be a more appropriate colour (or not). As it turned out, I was dressed almost entirely in blue. Another colleague always dresses entirely in blue. The first colleague quipped that he wasn’t wearing a dress. I started pondering the relationship between uncountable dress and a countable dress.

The former is much older, and can still be seen in usages like national dress, fancy/(in)formal/casual dress and dress code, and the related get (un)dressed and (in)formally/casually/well/badly dressed, all related to clothes, and hairdresser, salad or turkey dressing and vinedresser (all from French dresser, arrange, prepare and Latin dīrēctiāre, dīrēctus, direct).

Nowadays a dress is a decidedly feminine item of clothing, but some boys or men wear them for various reasons. A few days ago at my local train station, some passed me wearing a white dress with a blue oriental bird/flower design. My first impression was this it was a young man, but I didn’t have the chance to take a closer look, and it may not have been polite to even if I did. I have otherwise occasionally seen men in dresses for reasons I can’t speculate on, and I have also seen people (men and women) near Gyeongbokgung, cross-dressing in hanbok. 

related posts
frock https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/frock-off/
chemise, camisole https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/indo-european-clothes/
direct https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/wish-quit-directed/ 

Relatives

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Last night I went to a small family dinner/party for my great-niece’s birthday. One of my great-nieces. My oldest great-niece. My oldest sister’s son’s oldest daughter. My nephew is my sister’s oldest child, but not her oldest son, because his two siblings are women. My great-niece is my nephew’s oldest child and oldest daughter, because her two siblings are girls. How much information do we need, and how many relationships do we have words for in English?

At the party were (I started typing all the reasonable ways to refer to each person, but it started getting messy. In most cases I could add ‘one of my _s’, because in most cases I have more than one of each):
my sister and brother-in-law
my nephew, niece-in-law (less used than mother/father/sister/brother/daughter/son-in-law) and great-nieces
my niece-in-law’s mother and father
my niece-in-law’s sister and niece
my niece-in-law’s uncle, cousin and cousin once removed (both female, but we don’t specify that in English)

It’s easier from my great-niece’s perspective, because she’s genetically related to everyone. There were her sisters, parents, aunt, cousin, grand-parents, great-uncles, first cousin once removed and second cousin. 

I usually wouldn’t have to go into this much detail about who was there. In most cases I can just say ‘relatives on both sides of her family’. 

Last week, for Seollal/Korean New Year, the Korea Herald had an article about relationship terms, especially newly-weds negotiating them at family gatherings. As well as my own Australian relatives, I also have my wife’s Korean relatives, who unfortunately I get to see less often. During my second stay in Korea I attended the family gathering without her (she’d visited between Christmas and mid-January but had returned to Australia by Seollal). A colleague who had also married a Korean woman was astonished that I would willingly attend/had willingly attended a family gathering without my wife. I like my Korean in-laws, even though/maybe because I can’t communicate much with them. Food, drink, no conversation, no problem.

As a COVID-time project I joined Wikitree, a co-operative genealogy site. The last I saw, they stated that they had 25 million profiles linked. That includes links by marriage, which obviously increase very quickly. Another brother-in-law’s brother-in-law’s second cousin’s husband is a Very Important Person, but Wikitree doesn’t know about some of those people, because it’s not my place to create entries for them. Instead, it links me to him a longer way around, not even tracing us to our common direct ancestor.

By their books you shall know them

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This morning I left home a few minutes earlier and caught a different train than my usual (living in a major suburban hub, there are trains every few minutes in peak hour). I shut my eyes and maybe dozed, and when I opened them/woke up, there was a young man sitting opposite me reading The last picture show by Larry McMurtrie. I haven’t read the book, but watched the movie on video many years ago. 

This afternoon I was slightly delayed at work and caught a different train than my usual and sat in a different carriage. There was the same young man reading the same book. I tend not to look at people on trains, but can spot a book some distance away. I also tend not to strike up conversations with people, about books, movies or otherwise. 

Who?

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Thus spake the seraph, and forthwith
Appeared a shining throng
Of angels praising God, who thus
Addressed their joyful song: 
(etc)

When I was young, I vaguely understood that the entity doing the addressing was God, so that addressed meant heard, even though addressed never means heard in any other context. (In linguistic terminology, that the antecedent of who is God, being the word immediately before it.) At some point I realised that the entities doing the addressing are the angels, and that addressed means pretty much what is means in any other context. Certainly the default place for a relative pronoun (who, which etc) is immediately after the noun or pronoun it refers to, but there seems to be some flexibility, especially in poetry (a ‘split relative pronoun’????) The first equivalent sentence I was able to devise was “I met a group of mothers carrying their children, who waved to me excitedly”. 

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Κιμπερλυ

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A man in a train had a large tattoo on the outside of his forearm reading Κιμπερλυ. I could decipher Kimperly and assumed that was meant to be the name most often spelled Kimberley (more often a female name and less often male). Greek has both π (p) and β (b), so I would spell it Κιμβερλυ (or Κιμβερλι). Google’s first result for Κιμβερλυ is Ελληνική Βικιπαίδεια (Greek Wikipedia)’s page for Κίμπερλι Γκίλφοϊλ (Kimberley Guilfoyle, the US Ambassador to Greece) (spelled with π). Elsewhere there are occurrences of Κιμπερλυ, Κιμβερλυ, Κιμπερλι and Κιμβερλι, so there is no settled transliteration and this man’s Κιμπερλυ is not immediately a mistake. (Chinese character tattoo fails are well-attested, but I even less knowledge of Chinese characters and couldn’t decipher them on a train.)

Auraji

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In a recent post I described a train/bus trip from Seoul’s Cheongnyangni station to the village of Auraji, in Jeongseon county, Gangwon province. Even a moderate familiarity with Korea place names shows that Auraji is a very unusual place name. Overwhelmingly most Korean place names have two syllables, while a few have three (Panmunjeom, Uijeongbu, Cheongnyangni, Seogwipo). The hangeul spelling of 아우라지 doesn’t help. 

I searched and found this page on the Visit Korea site, which explains: 

Its name is derived from the Korean word eoureojida, meaning “to meet” as the waters of Pyeongchang and Samcheok unite in this area.

(Korean wikipedia uses both spellings: ‘아우라지’는 어우러진다는 뜻으로서 (Auraji means to come together).)

But meet is 만나다 (which word I know). eoureojida is the transliteration of 어우러지다 (which I didn’t), which means get joined together, be well-matched, blend in. Two questions arise: why did that particular confluence get that name when thousands of similar others didn’t (similarly, a small town in Australia is named The Rock), and which came first, the pronunciation and spelling 아우라지 (as in the place name) or 어우러지(as in the verb) (or is 아우라지 a local variation)? Place names often retain older spellings and/or pronunciations. I will probably never know the answer to those two questions.

I asked my wife what Auraji meant, and she said it didn’t mean anything, it was just a place name. I showed her the Visit Korea page and she said “Oh, maybe that’s right”.

Slightly related, and not worth a post on its own: on my last evening in Korea, we met a niece, her husband and two daughters, one of whom I’d met on my second trip and the other of whom I’d only seen in a video call. The younger is about 4 and attends kindergarten. I asked 친구 많아요? (manh-a-yo, friends many > Do you have many friends?)  to which she answered 네 (yes). But I might have actually asked 친구 만나요?  (man-na-yo, friends meet > Do you meet your friends?). Korean speakers can probably speak and hear the distinction, and I probably can’t. Both questions are relevant, though any kindergarten child might reasonably be expected to meet their friends, whether they have many or few. Do you meet your friends at kindergarten? Of course. Do you have many friends? Yes or no.

PS 28 Nov I asked my wife about the comparative pronunciation of 많아요 and 만나요. Without getting technical, the difference is basically that the first vowel in 만나요 closes to the consonant quicker than 많아요: mahn-a-yo v mah-na-yo. Apparently I pronounce 많아요 closer to 만나요, but there’s no telling which pronunciation our great niece understood. I might have disambiguated by saying 친구가 많아요? (with 친구 as the subject) or 친구를 만나요? (with 친구 as the object).