I first started using email when the ED (E is for Elder, sorry) was in Great
Britain, either as a grad student or newly married. She and her spouse set it up
for me, I think as a birthday gift. Later, when her marriage broke down, the
email was a lifeline between us, for me anyway, as I heard from her pretty well
every day and knew that she was surviving and managing and at least a bit okay.
This drama took place before the cell phone era arrived out here. I had a ‘bag’
phone in the car to use in mobile emergencies, but it only was viable in Canada.
When we had the big ice storm in ’98, the landlines went down for lack of power.
No internet either, of course. I was frantically worried about the daughter and
tried to phone from the car phone. Bell Canada held me up for most of a day and
I had to prepay a preposterous sum to get overseas coverage, but I did manage it
and we got through to the ED, who had flown back to the UK during a lull in the
ice storm, and she was okay. After eleven (as I recall) days, we got the power
back and email back and I got back in touch with my world.
I was thinking about that phone when I wrote the quick post about the car phone conversation that is
the one below this one. ‘Plus ca change’, and all that. Spellcheck blue lines
again. Hah! I got ‘ca’ but without the cedilla, but am called out for the
placement of ‘plus’ which Spellcheck thinks is English. I am now going to go
back and put that in single quotation marks and see if the blue underline
disappears. Nope. Still there. Spellcheck, or whatever the correction program in
Word is now called, is anally retentive sometimes. “After an introductory word
or phrase, a comma is best”, it pontificates. Now that the computer geeks are
bringing AI along, I look forward to having an AI doing the spelling and grammar
review. That should be instructive.
And here is a just-for-fun instructive
aside.
French has much nicer words for the various kinds of quotation marks than
we do in English. I love ‘accolades’, and ‘crotchets’, both of which are also
words in English. Here are the terms for your reading pleasure.
« » guillemets
(m) quotation marks, inverted commas
( ) parenthèses (f) parentheses
[ ]
crochets (droits) (m) (square) brackets
{ } accolades (f) curly brackets, braces
For my pleasure, I have just read a post in a blog I follow that has a couple of
paragraphs of pure gold – an analysis of some of the author’s writing skills. In
another blog I read regularly, the writer is a really skilled photographer and
frequently posts about how he sets up and why and how he edits. I learn
something almost every time. There is also a blogger in PEI whose posts are full
of information about the coast, the birds and the laneways of that lovely
island.
And then there is me. I try all of these themes from time to time but ….
JOATS do most things, but none of them all that well.
There is very little in
here that is even brass, let alone gold. But sometimes, just sometimes, the
words flow, pour off the ends of my tapping fingers and arrange themselves
gloriously on the page. Sometimes. (I just substituted a word in that
penultimate sentence and will probably reread it a multitude of times before I
finally post it. I did much the same process with the letter to the YD.) And, my
goodness!, how I do love my parentheses. Yeah, okay, brackets.
There are a lot
of functions up there in the drop-down menus. One of which is, it appears,
translation. The sentence below is provided by Microsoft Translator and says,
essentially, that I could translate if I knew how.
اگر میں چاہوں تو اس کا عربی
سے اردو میں سینتیس زبانوں میں سے کسی ایک میں ترجمہ کر سکتا تھا۔ یا مجھے لگتا ہے
کہ یہ دستیاب ہے. کاش میں جانتا تھا کہ یہ کیسے کرنا ہے. And now I do. There are
approximately three dozen language options, from Arabic to Urdu, the last of
which is the one I chose. The things we can do!
Anything, it appears, except
stop the carnage around the world that is taking innocent lives daily, in
various horrible wars and accidents. I had to stop there and go out and watch
the snow fall and calm down. When I think about what is happening in so many
places in the world today, my reaction is rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. It
should be stopped, it must be stopped. Why cannot it be, simply, stopped. I will
stop here. More snow fall needed.
