Three Things That Are Possibly Interesting

[lisa_goldstein]

1. In Stephen King’s Billy Summers, the title character disguises himself as a Hispanic gardener and writes down some Spanish phrases he might need to know.  King does pretty well with the Spanish until he tries for “I am a deaf-mute,” and instead writes, “Mi es sordo y mudo,” which literally means “My is deaf and mute.”  I mean, come on, "I am" isn’t just Introductory Spanish but the first week of Introductory Spanish.  There are eighth-graders laughing at you here.

What’s even weirder about this is that when King writes about the war in Fallujah he gets all the minute finicky details right (or at least he seems to.  I mean, he might be wrong about this as well, but I wouldn’t know).  Yet for some reason he couldn’t spend five minutes on Google Translate, which would give him “Yo soy sordo-mudo.”

On the other hand, some friends of ours came over for dinner and brought a Spanish wine called Gravedad (gravity).  And despite all these years of Spanish, I still read it as Grave Dad.

2. Quote of the day: “The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.”  G.K. Chesterton

3. The vet took Bonnie’s splint off so the wound on her pad could be exposed to the air.  At first it looked worse than I’d hoped, sort of like undercooked meat.  Fortunately it’s getting better, though very slowly, and she’s not limping as much.  I’m hoping to be able to take the cone off at the end of the month.  At that point she’ll have had the cone for two months — she might even think it’s permanent.  Poor dog.

(The doughnut someone recommended to us wouldn’t work for her — she’d still be able to reach her paw with it on.)

Comments

[sergebroom]

You'd think he'd talk to someone fluent in the language.
His sentence's translation reminded me of Monty Python's "Romanes Eunt Domus".