Posts by Tom Beard
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to linger,
(i) if you’ve borrowed the word into English, then you’re under no obligation to keep the macron; this is consistent with the disappearance of accent marks on French borrowings such as deja vu.
I wasn't aware that the diacritical marks had disappeared from déjà vu. I'd certainly use them, except in a very quick message on a system that didn't easily let me add them.
Accents are important on English words that are derived from other languages: a café is different from a cafe. And in Māori macrons are even more vital, since there are many more opportunities for meanings to change. It's just a pity that the scholars and missionaries chose a diacritical mark that's less common in European languages, and hence has become difficult to type on most computer systems.
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This may be late to the party, but just in case anyone's not yet had their Gravy Rainbow fix:
Warning! Earworm alert! But most intriguingly, among all the cover versions, response clips and general WTF?-ness of the reaction, comes the suggestion that it was influenced by an obscure, icily-minimal German electro act from 1983. Or is Soße-Regenbogen a cover ... of the future?!?
But I still can't get enough of this old Disasteradio clip, partly for the name ("International Deviance"?! Where do I sign up?), partly for the fez dispenser (every bar should have one) and mostly for the lyrics, which could serve as a to-do list for any good night out.
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Muse: Hey Greg O'Connor, Krup You!, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
no matter how paradisical Tauranga is
Obviously you use the word "paradisical" very differently than I. Tauranga is like the North Shore without Auckland.
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An equally important question: "when are you from?", not literally but figuratively. A lot of my friends would be from the sixties or seventies, even if they weren't born then. Family First followers would say "the 1950s". Me? I'd like to think I'm somewhen between 1890s Paris and early '60s New York.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
I think home may depend on just how much you have invested in it, not money but things like time, family history and landscape
Exactly, and the flip side of that explains I don't build those "home" connections so easily. I have moved around a fair amount, so haven't always spent a lot of time in any one place; I don't have much of a feeling for family history or even of "family" at all (since I don't know anyone I'm related to); and the environments I most connect with are built ones rather than "land". I can understand it when people like you, Jackie and Michael King talk of "a spiritual connection to the land" in the way that Maori do, but I will never feel that.
That's partly because I think that "spiritual" is a meaningless word, but mostly because my connection to a place is based more upon people and their stories than the land itself, and the networks of people and their stories spread across the globe from city to city, rather than being exclusively grounded. And the land? 95% of the land that I spend my time on has been reclaimed, asphalted, excavated and/or built on, and if anything it's the stories of those interventions that interest me rather than anything about the land itself.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Emma Hart,
I have a theory that'll never be more than that, that our weakest or most resisted "fromness" is for the place where we spent our teenage years.
Interesting: I can relate to that myself, but for some it seems to be the other way around. For some people, the networks and rituals of high school seem to define the rest of their lives, and they're amazed that none of my Facebook friends are old high school buddies ("but, but... isn't that what Facebook's for?"). For others it's university, since that's often a place of self-definition, but I guess that for me, a lot of my interests, tastes and persona were fixed after university, when I moved to Wellington and took up my first job.
In many ways, I'd love it if people asked "where are you going to?" rather than "where are you from?", since someone's future seems much more important to me than their past. But it's hard to ask that without sounding like a new-ager or some sort of NLP creep, and besides, it's part of my own sense of self that I don't know where I'm going to.
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An interesting question, and it highlights the fluidity of the word "home". It took me less than a year of living in Wellington before I was no longer "from" Christchurch. In some contexts, when people ask where I'm from I'll presume that they've noticed my vestigial accent, so I'll say "London" (despite having no conscious memories of my time living there). When I was travelling a lot for work I used to say that "home is where the cellphone charger is", and it was true in a sense: if I said "I'm heading home now" I meant that I was going back to my hotel.
But I'm still surprised by the number of people who ask towards the end of the year "Are you going home for Christmas?", I tend to answer "yes, I'm going home to my apartment in Willis St". I could understand it from young people who have only just moved out of the family home, but isn't there something sad when supposedly independent adults don't consider the place that they live to be home?
Of course, I know it's different for me: I was born somewhere different from where I grew up, we had no extended family there, my parents have moved out of the house I grew up in (into two completely different suburbs that I never knew well) and I was never exactly the type to get parochial about a sports team. But it still seems odd to say that you're "going home" rather than "going to visit the family".
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Andrew Stevenson,
I believe that @thomasbeagle was trying to get the data made public. Having the info on a LIM is alright if you are a buyer or owner. But how about if you are a tennant, employee or your children will go to school or creche in one those buildings?
The earthquake-prone letters that go to building owners from WCC have the following text: "Information regarding the potentially earthquake prone status of the building, including this letter, is publicly available on request and will be included in Land and Project Information Memoranda (LIMs and PIMs)". While LIMs cost money, the wording suggests that it should be available, possibly en masse, via a LGOIMA request. Given the recent proactive release of GIS data by the council, one might hope that such a request would be expected. Also, most (perhaps all? it's not my field) earthquake-prone buildings have to display the notice externally.
Bear in mind that the assessments are largely based upon a combination of external visual inspection and plans lodged with the council, so the engineers have to make a lot of assumptions.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
Possibly, at least from people I know. Same with spinach in the teeth (highly unlikely in my case), BO and undone fly.
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I completely understand the aversion to being told how to look or dress, but ... if I'd got a haircut with a particular look in mind, and it didn't suit me, I'd rather people told me rather than snigger behind my back.