A mixed bag from the Old Bag

I actually wrote a letter several weeks ago. The kind you put in an envelope with a stamp on it. I thought that the YD might enjoy getting such a thing as a change from emails and WhatsApp and Facetime, much as I appreciate these things and much as she employs them with great éclat. (Spellcheck just refused to give me that last word. It is, oh horror, French! And I am too lazy to go looking for the accent aigue. Hah! Got it.) I mailed it shortly after it was written, February 6th as I recall, and she acknowledged receipt yesterday, February 26th. Not a good venue for urgent communication. The term ‘snail mail’ comes to mind. 

 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.