Compliments come in unexpected forms. I, for one, got one without expecting it. Apparently the compliment thrower didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t intend to be so profuse in commenting on my strength.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
A while back we hired a local woman to do household chores which we hate, things like cleaning, straightening, washing and windows. She did a good job, and we hired her back several times. With the more frequent visits came familiarity.<\/p>\n
Once, in a just-between-us-girls voice, she told my wife that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Art is always throwing the house.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that? I can toss a football with the best of the 69-year-olds; my baseball-throwing acumen is pathetic, and, I throw a bowling ball, well, just like Obama.<\/p>\n
These are objects designed to be thrown, but how does one throw a house? I thought about it and of course realized that Spanish is Julia\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first language, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a slight bridge to cross from one language to another. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thrown\u00e2\u20ac\u009d house in a few graphs.<\/p>\n
Some readers may recall my reactions to public signs that give the wrong message when the sign designers simply assume a verbatim translation will do the trick. Someone who operated a restaurant that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long-since closed advertised \u00e2\u20ac\u0153La hora de la contenta,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d believing it stood for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153happy hour.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Instead, it means something like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the hour of the contented female.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not immune to making faulty translations, and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve memorized the phone numbers of Sarah Harris, a former colleague, and Dorothy Maestas, my current sister, who often advise me. Both have taught languages in college.<\/p>\n
Along the same lines, I photographed a chalkboard on a sidewalk restaurant menu in Copenhagen that contained the words \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Go Away.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Now is that the proper way of welcoming customers? I learned from a Danish host that the words referred not to xenophobic restaurateurs but as a way of advertising take-out food. We buy it and then we go away.<\/p>\n
Now, back to thrown objects.<\/p>\n
The first time time I inferred a special linguistic touch to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw\u00e2\u20ac\u009d came when I returned test papers to my seventh-graders in a language arts class at Cuba High School in the 1960s.<\/p>\n
As a teacher who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d written copious notes on the papers, I was surprised to have been asked by some students, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can we throw them?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It seems that after checking the grade and ignoring the marginal comments, all they wished to do was hurl the papers.<\/p>\n
Well, now, aside from my having personally invested 12 hours per page per student, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want a mess in the classroom. What did they intend to do with the thrown papers? First make paper airplanes? One student explained how they meant \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make me feel better, discovering their obvious lack of interest in my graded comments, other than checking the letter grade.<\/p>\n
Weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they the least bit interested in the several times I wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cliche\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153trite\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the margins, and other markings expected of English teachers? From that time on, I required them to keep all returned papers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d at least until after we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone over them in class.<\/p>\n
Almost all my students in Cuba were bilingual. It is clear that the Spanish verb \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirar\u00e2\u20ac\u009d means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to throw.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But in Spanish, we generally lack the word that gives the expression precision, i.e., not just to throw the paper, but to throw it somewhere, preferably away.<\/p>\n
One could say something like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirarlo en la basura,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d meaning to pitch the paper into the trash, but we usually don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go that far and simply say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
My mother, fond of corralling all five of us children every Saturday morning and announcing that the house \u00e2\u20ac\u0153esta todo tirado\u00e2\u20ac\u009d obviously gave the mess message. She wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly describing our house, on Railroad Avenue, as having a nice, cozy feel and look. But she never used the English equivalent, or at least never said the house was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thrown.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Fittingly, Mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s use of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirado\u00e2\u20ac\u009d comes close to \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but should not be confused with \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the etymology of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirade,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a performance that often immediately followed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirado.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Julia\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reference to my house-throwing shows a slight variation of what my former students meant. The reason we hired the woman was to tidy up our messy house; I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s counter-productive, not to mention plain silly, for us to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unthrow\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the house just before the cleaning lady arrives. Ever met someone who cleans the thrown house beforehand, lest the hired help think the hosts are sloppy?<\/p>\n
I admit to occasionally placing objects on the floor and failing to pick them up, but to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the house stretches things a bit. In Spanish, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tirar,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153make messy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is common. In English, we clutter, but we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really throw houses.<\/p>\n
Samson of the Bible is one of the few who qualify for the honor of throwing a house. And of course, a great actor like Lionel Barrymore or Sir Laurence Olivier might also claim to have \u00e2\u20ac\u0153brought the house down.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Compliments come in unexpected forms. I, for one, got one without expecting it. Apparently the compliment thrower didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t intend to be so profuse in commenting on my strength. Let me explain: A while back we hired a local woman to do household chores which we hate, things like cleaning, straightening, washing and windows. She did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}