No, I’m not in Hawaii. Just wishing I was.
Elsewhere:
Joyeux Noël
Frohe Weihnachten
God Jul
Feliz Navidad
С Рождеством
Merry Christmas
Those are the only ones I know by heart. (And I don’t really know much French, but that one is commonplace.)
The Norwegians really have a gift for minimalism. (“God jul”). I loved to watch old American movies in Olso with Norwegian subtitles. There’d be a cowboy movie where the sheriff would deliver some prolix exhortation like “Let’s vamoose, boys, and cut ’em ornery varmints off at the pass,” and it would be translated into Norwegian as “Kom.”
I found the opposite in Italy. A film character might say, “Why not?” and the Italian equivalent would require a full page of translation, followed by an ellipsis, with the translation continued on the next slide.
I’m oddly cheered by this post, U.S. I do hope to waste some of your weekend with a moment of my meandering blather. I just returned from Hawaii, the Beguile Land, acrost the Pacific, on Pearl Harbor day. Following my 11/11 doc appt… I wowed the doc’s asst by noting it’d be Veterans day — I’d always found the poetic “eleventh day of the eleventh century” memorable… We set off to reach my disabled A.F. vet kid bro’s homestead in the shadow of Kahlua, or Killer Whale, or whatever the natives call that volcano. He’d been disgorged from his homes in Puna twice in the past few years, in & around Pahoa village, a Hilo town suburb.
We’d arranged to gather there for 11/19, my Mom’s 85th. Lemme tell ya, it rained miserably for 3 weeks. Historic storm a day before departure. Wind & cold & even snow on Mauna Loa — a blizzard.
Jungle paradise, I tell ya. In hindsight, I really shoulda rented a 4wd. “Hawaiian Paradise Park” his latest community is called.
Anyway, I had occasion to draw from my useless knowledge learnt in Linguistics. As in, I was able to apply my little-used skills to note a few regularities in Hawaiian, though I neither know nor understand a lick, really. Here’s what I decided about “mele kalikimaka”.
Alternations: R –> L, y –> e, k/s –> ka/ki.
The ‘k’ thing is familiar to me from Japanese “syllables”. They don’t have naked consonants. Each combination with a vowel is a distinct “character”. Hence English k = Japanese ka ki ke ko ku.
Whence “mele kalikimaka” is a straightforward transliteration from its English form of “Merry Krismas”. I can now understand this as a purely phonetic equivalent. Hey, I never said I was a genius.
Yup, I just found out as I was writing this post that Mele Kalikimaka is not a translation of Merry Christmas, but merely a transliteration into the Hawaiian language. It looks so little like the original phrase because it is very difficult to transcribe foreign words into a language that has only seven consonants and requires every appearance of every single one of them to be followed by a vowel sound.
Wikipedia covers in some detail how the phrase moves from English to Hawaiian.
To Mom:
I’m working on a good Burgundy here, so I’ll lift a glass to Admiral De Grasse (Battle of the Capes 1781) right now.
In the spirit of the season, I must admit (despite my earlier trash talk) that even though they lost tonight, the Browns are totally a football team.
Who probably need a better QB. The last pick was pass interference but the first three weren’t.
They’ve had this really weird bad-luck season with all the alternating COVIDs and injuries but it is still a good deep roster. I was amazed how well the defense played with 4 DBs including Ward missing.
All sorts of talk about trading for a big-name QB. Oh well they’ll be in a better drafting spot than anyone would have thought.
And this is one fuck of a nice Burgundy. Think I’ll lift one to Lafayette now.
The unknown Thomas Graves is probably as responsible as anyone for the existence of the United States of America. If ever we should build statues to our enemies, this guy should get the biggest one.
Merry Christmas all. And I hope the new year is happy.
Merry Christmas to all and a Happy My Birthday (January 1st).
I’m hoping my family will be willing to let me visit with them by my birthday. Some people get nervous when they find out you had a cold and a couple of negative tests aren’t enough to reassure everybody. So what if I haven’t gotten to see my nieces in 2 years. Kids don’t change much in only 2 years, right?
I will say this in all seriousness. I got my vaccinations and my booster as soon as they were available. But I hadn’t gotten a Covid test until this past Monday. Yeeeowwww were those uncomfortable. If I were “vaccine hesitant” and was told I needed to either be vaccinated or be tested weekly, it would only take one test to convince me to get the vaccination. For the past several months, I’ve been getting these injections in my retinas. (The doctor told me the shots were optional but the other option was going blind.) I’m not sure which was worse. The injections hurt more but are over way sooner. I am going to express a controversial opinion now. Covid sucks.
Same to yinzes (a possibly spurious 2nd person plural of the famous Pittsburgh yinz).
The French. A politician with the very French name of Jack Lang embarked on a Francaise enforcement campaign when he was Minister of Culture. One area of concern was French pilots and traffic controllers using English terms. After it was pointed out that there is a need for brevity in this line of work and an example pointed out of the proper French term for “jet” being “avion de résistance aeronautique”, his people backed off in that particular area.
Oh sure it’s fun to rip on the Frogs, but…(sorry, I have no second half for that sentence)
They will always be cheese eating surrender monkeys to me.
You don’t read much European history then. Until around 150 years ago they were considered the most ferocious, badassest people in Europe hands down. 1940 is at odds with just about everything else in their history.
…and without them, we wouldn’t be a country.
The French blew one specific, tactical assumption. They ignored the Ardennes woods bc it was “impassable”. It didn’t occur to them that tanks could knock down trees.
Just as the British redcoats spent a century perfecting musketry into 3 rows firing, reloading & tamping. Only for muskets to be obsoleted by rifles in 2 separate ways. 1) Spiral grooves. A spinning bullet exited in a consistent direction, upending the teaching not to shoot “till you see the Whites and they rise”. 2) Repeaters. Rounds & magazines eliminated all the shooter’s time-wasting chores between shots.
It’s odd that we picture French military history so inaccurately. The cliche about the French is that they are brilliant thinkers, cowardly warriors. That’s pretty close to the opposite of the truth. In general French troops have fought with valor and their leaders have let them down with ill-designed strategies.
In the war against Russia, the French troops won pretty much every battle, and took Moscow itself, but their numbers gradually dwindled down from 600,000 to 100,000, as they struggled against partisans, freezing weather, impossible supply lines, and the vast distances they had traveled inside a hostile land. General Kutuzov, despite holding a losing hand, completely outsmarted Napoleon at every turn. And then there was the whole matter that invading Russia in the first place might have been the single dumbest idea in the history of the human race. The whole risk/reward ratio made the idea utterly nonsensical.
Similar observations could be made about WW2. There was nothing wrong with the French fighting spirit, but their leadership was … well, I think that calling it deeply and obviously flawed would be a superb example of litotes. MyKey noted their failure to anticipate the Ardennes offensive, but it was more than that. There was just a general breakdown in their political and military strategies. Their highest-ranking general was suffering from severe mental illness and/or dementia, reportedly brought on by an advanced case of syphilis. He was constantly dismissing his commanders rather than owning up to his strategic mistakes. Their politicians were more interested in fighting each other than the Germans. In general, French leadership acted like the cartoon portrayal of Frenchmen in Monty Python skits. Indeed, the whole French build-up to WW2 would make for a great comedy movie, were it not such a tragedy for their country and the world.
Back when kings were expected to lead their armies in battle, the French really crapped out in that department, I can remember exactly one really major victory won by a French king – Philip “Augustus” at Bouvines in 1214(?). That battle just may have kept France from becoming a collection of provinces with a nominal ruler like Germany, not to mention leading to Magna Carta in England. Louis XI was a brilliant strategist, but generally preferred to let others, preferably Swiss, do the actual fighting. Their English enemies: William 1, 4 of the first 5 Henrys, 3 of the first 4 Edwards, etc. Then when kings started staying back in the palace, no prob for the Brits – Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington in a 100-year period. The French finally even up things by bringing in a ringer who didn’t speak French until he was eight.
Well, many good points there. Still, I’m not gonna walk back my claim. But lemme clarify what I meant.
There’s reasons the term “blitz krieg” caught on.
The French saw the German threat. They made elaborate preparations. Spent a ton of money. Not all of it was waste. Everywhere they’d built up, their defenses were all but impregnable. Yet, be it water, ants, or slime molds, if there’s a way thru, nature tends to find it. People do, too, sometimes.
In the case of the Ardennes route, the Germans emerged in a position that split the French forces & enabled rear attack. Defenses all along the line were surrounded & overwhelmed, overnight. In a blink of the eye, Paris was undefended & the Germans at the gate. France’s war was over. Just like that.
Obviously WW2 didn’t end there. But it ain’t like the surrender-monkeys had better options.
To your other points, among the many ways both the French & Brits screwed up post-WW1, I’m with the MS view that the biggest was political myopia WRT making the Gerries suffer. A gradual but systematic process of forgiveness or at least reconciliation would’ve been in Europe’s interest, overall. But their leadership & I suppose their public was driven too heavily by hot emotion to heed cool logic. Not to mention blinded by fear/denial in the face of a threat emerging in German politics.
Two things on this.
1.In regards to World War II: I’ve often thought that after Germany invaded Poland that France and Britain should have taken the offensive against Germany rather than waiting for Germany to attack France. People say that France and Britain weren’t ready, but in addition to France having a large number of troops already equipped, it’s not like the German military was fully ready by 1939 either. This would have likely meant that most of World War II would have been fought on German soil rather than over Europe.
2.In regards to the Treaty of Versailles, a large part of the intransigence was due to American demands that France (and Britain) pay their debts to the U.S in full. That was part of the obnoxious sanctimony of U.S President Woodrow Wilson (after he had recovered by from whatever was afflicting him in Versailles) ‘You really do need to forgive the Germans and not demand so much in reparations, but obviously you have to pay us back in full.’
You aren’t the only one who leans toward that analysis. In some ways the German army was poorly equipped, despite a pretty solid array of tanks and planes. As Wikipedia sums it up: “In 1939–40, 45 per cent of the army was at least 40 years old and 50 per cent of all the soldiers had just a few weeks’ training. The German Army was far from motorised; ten per cent of their army was motorised in 1940 and could muster only 120,000 vehicles, compared with the 300,000 of the French Army. All of the British Expeditionary Force was motorised. Most of the German logistical transport consisted of horse-drawn vehicles. Only 50 per cent of the German divisions available in 1940 were fit for operations, often being worse equipped than the German army of 1914 or their equivalents in the British and French Armies. In the spring of 1940, the German Army was semi-modern; a small number of the best-equipped and ‘elite divisions were offset by many second and third rate divisions’.”
Churchill wanted the allies to be aggressive even before the invasion of Poland. He felt that the allies should have defended Czechoslovakia, not just because it was a democracy, but because it featured mountainous terrain inimical to German Panzers.
Of course we have the benefit of hindsight. Heaven knows what we would have thought at the time. Many people felt (or hoped?) that Hitler’s ambitions would reach no further than the Sudetenland, and perhaps we would have been that naive. Churchill always said that was a delusional position to anyone who had read Mein Kampf, but people always hold out hopes for peace, no matter how baseless.
My friend caught a war movie in Paris. There was the scene where the guy looks through the binocs, sees a line of tanks approaching. He turns to his buddy and says, “Tanks.” The subtitle said “Merci.”
A warm beachy Christmas to all
Well, it IS the thing to say…