Lost in transit

English as a first language

I'm so grateful that English is my first language. I have SO MUCH respect for anyone learning this strange, convuluted, weird and wonderful language of ours. How on earth do they do it?

I deal with words for a living. I LOVE words. I devour them. But every now and then I come across a word that makes me realise the gulf between different cultures, even though we all speak English.

Take for instance a word I heard last week. There was a group of us enjoying a pub lunch, a welcome break from a busy day in the office. The conversation turned to planned weekend activities.

"I'm going to the seaside," said one of my colleagues.

"Oh, the seaside is so much fun," said another.

Me, the token Australian among a group of seven English people, couldn't help but laugh.

"What?! What's so funny?" the seven English people demanded of me.

How could I even begin to explain that the word seaside sounds so . . . well . . . English? Australians would NEVER say seaside. It's just not the done thing. They would say "we're going to the BEACH" or "we're visiting the COAST". Seaside just sounds so old-fashioned and, to be perfectly frank, just plain posh.

Earlier in the week I had discovered a new word on a page that I was proof reading at work. Initially I thought it was a spelling error. But I'm so glad I checked the dictionary first. It would have been rather embarrassing to change SWINGEING to SWINGING. They definitely do not mean the same thing. I had to confess to a colleague that despite the fact that I'm a trained journalist and an avid wordsmith I never even knew the word swingeing existed - until now.

"Oh, that's because it's chiefly British," she said. "This is probably the only place in the world that even uses it and even then it's not very common."

Which got me to thinking about all the weird and wonderful words us Australians use that no-one else seems to understand.

I remember once writing to a penpal in Scotland to tell her I'd just bought some new manchester for my bed.

She wrote back to say that Manchester was a city in England and she had no idea what I was talking about.

Manchester, I had to explain, is a generic term for bed linen - sheets, pillow cases and the like. Turns out that Australians call it manchester because, in the good old days, the only place you could get bed linen from was to import it from the textile mills in Manchester, England.

I won't even mention other Australian-isms such as doona, band-aid, sticky tape, glad wrap, mozzies or dag. Nor will I touch on the vexed dilemma of pronounciation . . . castle or carstle anyone?

An apple a day keeps the ice cream away.

When I was little, ice cream was the reward (or bribe, if necessary) to eat what was being served for dinner. However, I was a stubborn child, and at a very early age broke that problem of being "forced" to eat things I didn't want... I simply wasn't served them anymore.

This meant I ate a lot of ice cream. As in, a scoop of ice cream every evening. I didn't even realize this was abnormal until I moved in with some friends at eighteen, who thought I was insane to settle in with a bowl of chocolate chip or rocky road just about every evening I wasn't at work.

However, our good frenchy friends seem to have a much different idea of what dessert is all about. Ice cream is a special treat, not part of the daily food pyramid. And on those rare holiday occasions where pie is served, don't expect any chocofied goodness... you'll end up with apple, most often (and more like a sheet of crust with some baked apples on it than what americans would consider "pie" to be). However, what will you most likely get as dessert on your normal day?

Yogurt.

Now don't get me wrong. I like yogurt and all, but you know what yogurt is for me? A quick breakfast. A mid-afternoon snack. Something to satisfy my sweet tooth? Absolutely not!

Of course, you do have the option of choosing, I don't know... a fruit. A banana. A kiwi. An orange, anyone? Fruit is a HEALTHY SNACK, people. Fruit is a vital part of the whole food pyramid thing. You are supposed to eat two to four servings of fruit a day. If you ate ice cream four times a day, people would think you were insane. Therefore, fruit is not dessert.

Of course, these crazy food antics come from those who eat buttery, flaky, cream and chocolate filled pastries and call it breakfast. And they think I'm the weird one.

The Oreo Cookie Test

Today we gave Matthew, our five year old son, the Oreo cookie test to see if he was truly part American, or a Kiwi kid through and through.

His father reasons that Oreos are so disgusting, so unpalatable, such a foul substitute for a real cookie that only Americans like them as part of some perverse cultural quirk.

Matthew has been asking for Oreos for weeks. "Mum, mum," he'll say. "I know what to do with Oreos! First you twist them, then you lick them, then you dunk them!" He has been watching the commercial on television .

Michael was skeptical. "He won't like them," Michael reasoned. "Matt's never grown up in America. He'll take one taste and spit it out."

Well, today we tested that theory when we finally bought some. We laid it all out in front of him - the glass of milk and Oreos on a plate - and waited in anticipation.

Matthew screwed the little black wafers apart in his hand and licked his tongue tentatively across the white inside. He sandwiched the wafers together again, dunked the cookie into the milk, and tasted. We waited for the verdict.

"Mum," he said, "These are delicious!" And he dunked it again.

I smiled. That's my boy.

Legacy

World War II claimed two more lives yesterday, Thursday (17 July 2003) when a 250 kg dud bomb exploded while being defused at the Salzburg train station. It was discovered during construction work.

The bomb had a delayed-action chemical detonator, considered by bomb squad people, according to local newspaper articles I have read, to be the most dangerous to defuse.

There are 122 sites in and around Salzburg where more old bombs are suspected.

I live in a small village outside of Vienna. Several years ago the town built a new soccer/football field and turned the old one into building sites for single-family homes. But before people could build, authorities had to dig up a bunch of old shells and grenades the mayor (who had been a young man during the war) remembered had been buried there after the war.

For 50 years, they had been playing ball over live artillery shells.

Random Observations

Traffic lights in California change faster than those in New York. In California, after the cross-traffic light turns red, yours snaps immediately to green; in New York, it lingers on red for a couple of seconds in solidarity with its perpendicular brother. In Prague, lights click slower or faster, depending on their color, for the benefit of blind people. Prague, however, has plenty of other strange things, like the the beggars who ask for money kneeling face to the ground, palms of their hands joined in an alms cup over their heads. They stay still for hours at a time.

Random observation after traveling in Europe: every large train station in Italy, Germany and France has luggage carts. The station in Amsterdam doesn't. Apparently, the junkies stole them all.

Wallyworld, Here We Come

Our plane tickets arrived in the mail yesterday. The kids and I will be spending almost five weeks in the States, Han will join us for the last two. The minute I recognized the envelope as holding the tickets, I went into Henny-Penny mode : we leave in three weeks ! Oh me ! Oh my !

Mike and Sally remember our trips to the States well enough, but now I have begun refreshing Meg's memory. You just can't wake up a three year old one day and say come on, we are going to the States. We talk about the things that we do when we are in the States , favorite being a trip to Wallyworld. About going to the lake in the afternoons ( here I mention the names of the relatives, so that when she sees them, they won't really be strangers), about the different birds ( cardinals, hummingbirds) and animals ( chipmunks, raccoons, squirrels) in Grandpa and Grandma's yard.

We talk about the foods that we like in America ( top on the list : hot dogs and marshmallows), things that Grandma makes that are special favorites ( cookies, her potatoes, cheesecake and pecan pie) and how America has the best ice cream in the world.

We plan what gifts to bring everyone ( coffee cups that have ' Oma 'and ' Opa' on them, boxes of Leonidas chocolate, cookies and coffee for Grandpa), what we shall take, what we shall buy while there.

Ah, what we shall buy while we are there... do you know the best part about traveling with three kids ? You have a luggage allowance with no end. We could- if we wanted to- travel with 10 footlockers of booty, and come pretty close to doing so.

What do I buy ? Top on the list : sheets, all those lovely American sheets that one doesn't have to iron. Fluffy towels, a rainbow of colors to choose from. Lamps ( believe it or not), chunky peanut butter, Miracle Whip, bags of chocolate chips. Printed t-shirts for Mike, sneakers all around, socks, socks, socks.

I like shopping. This will be fun.

disappearing mummies

Today's edition of our newspaper has an article about the ongoing search for the body of the last Mongol monarch, the 8th Bogd Khan. The piece starts like this - "The last Bogd Khan (1870-1924), before he died, asked his astrologer-lamas when he would be reincarnated on earth and the lamas said that in the black horse year of 17th sixty-year cycle of lunar calendar (ie. 2002) the Bogd Khan would be with his disciplines again. But last year the Bogd Khaan did not reappear."

You gotta love it. So they can't find the Khan's mummified body, which was removed from a temple by the Russians in the 1930s and buried in a grave elsewhere. But that grave is empty, as is the grave of the Russian consul's wife Galya, where the body was also rumoured to be buried (don't ask). So now they think some of the Khan's disciples (maybe reincarnated ones) dug him up and buried him on a site somewhere in the third microdistrict of Ulaanbaatar, probably where the Orgoo cinema is.
I can just see some construction worker fixing the pipes somewhere out in the third microdistrict and coming across the mummy (the Russian soldiers cut open the bandages when they took the body out of the temple and the flesh looked like 'dried meat' apparently) and smuggling it to China in the back of a Russian jeep, exchanging it for three hundred bottles of vodka and a few cases of apples.
This reminds me, albeit in a roundabout way, of a moral dilemma I've been grappling with lately. Wandering around markets and museums and antique shops, I keep coming across things that really shouldn't be for sale. Beautiful and exquisite and bizarre things that should be in museums - Bronze Age arrowheads, fossils, 18th century handcuffs, and Buddhist relics like bowls made from human craniums and horns made from the femur bones of eighteen year old girls. You're not supposed to take anything pre-1930 out of the country without a customs certificate but the bribes are cheap. I don't think these things should be for sale, but if they're selling them for three dollars at the market, wouldn't it be better for someone to take them home and treasure them? Would they sell them if people didn't buy them? Chicken or the egg?
I suspect buying a mummified Bogd Khan would be a bit different from buying an 18th century silver knife though. Wonder what Australian customs would make of a cranium bowl.

Happy Canada Day