Coffee heat rising

It Lives!

As if Dr. Frankenstein plugged in the electric cord… Or maybe whatever parasites were making me sick fell over dead in their legions, like the ailing Martians in War of the Worlds. Suddenly today I felt well enough and had enough energy to confront and conquer a slew tasks that have gone undone for the past six weeks, sitting there and slowly expanding in the manner of mold at the back of the fridge.

Yes. Done today:

Walk the dogs
Clean and backwash the pool
Repair the runners on the outdoor rocking chairs (again)
Glue busted things on said chairs and the metal chairs in front
Write a blog post
Do battle trying to post a link on annoying Facebook
Do battle with Cox, whose $150 modem-router-in-one does nothing to improve the connectivity issue; get them to agree to send another guy to try to fix whatever the problem is
Trim mesquite tree, Luis having fled to Mexico
Cut back the shrubbery around the pool so as to make it possible to clean the pool
Haul pile of debris to alley
Clean out the refrigerator(!!)
Drag plastic trashcan full of garbage to the alley
Clean out the freezer (one of them)
Drag another mountain of trash to garbage
Run emptied containers through the dishwasher
Launder clothes; hang up to dry
Wash fancy Ziploc plastic bags; hang up to dry
Enter data from bank in Excel
Negotiate with potential new client: 12,000 words of Chinglish in 5 days??? Seriously?
Iron clothes
Find lost document, re-send to client
Even write a few words on the proposed new novel

It’s weird. Because every day for the past six weeks or so, along about two in the afternoon I’ve submerged beneath a wave of fatigue: abruptly, as if at a signal, so tired all I could do was crawl into the sack. Today I’ve been flying like a Roman candle since I got up at 5:30.

Oh well. Enough’s enough.

3 thoughts on “It Lives!”

    • Twelve thousand words of Chinglish is about 40 pages of the most amazing, highly sophisticated language you will ever be privileged to read. It can also present some of the most challenging questions of how to phrase an idea in the way the author intended (not in the way you imagine was intended) that you will ever encounter. Like many Eastern European languages, Chinese does not martial articles (such as a, an, and the) in the way English does — causing endless confusion on both sides. Additionally, as all languages do, Chinese has its own approach to word order and sentence structure. Most Chinese speakers who learn English after they are very young learn its sentence structure sort of like one learns math: with concentration and logic applied to specific instances and to general concepts. Language, however, is not always logical: it often reflects the illogical aspects of the human mind, which are as rampant as the logical ones. And English is peculiarly illogical. Thus: “All your bases are belong to us.” Makes sense, at a certain level, eh?

      But often what seems to make sense when something is converted from one language pattern and logical construct to those of another language suddenly becomes…well..the stuff of YouTube videos. 😀

      Thus the editor of English written by a Chinese scientist, mathematician, sociologist, business management scholar, or whatEVER needs to a) know something about the research areas and principles that interest the author; b) become as familiar as possible with the ways those ideas are expressed in English; and c) see and understand as many variants of these as possible, as they are expressed by Chinese authors. It takes a fair amount of time to get to the point where most of the time you recognize the concepts under discussion and remember the English idiom in which they are customarily expressed.

      But THEN you have to figure out whether that which is “customarily expressed” is really what Author had in mind. Often these authors are original thinkers with new insights derived from their quantitative research. Thus it is exceptionally unwise to assume that your interpretation is what Author has in mind. And this means you need to find more than one way to express what you think Author means, so that you can ask “is this what is intended”? In a meaningful way, that is.

      I think of Chinglish as much like medieval or Scholastic Latin. By the Middle Ages, Latin had become the Western world’s lingua franca, as English is today, on a global basis. But the Latin of medieval and Renaissance clerics, diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals was not the Latin of Rome. It was the Latin of many peoples and the Latin of a new age. So it is today: the English of Asia is not altogether the same as the Queen’s English.

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