Amy and the synonyms (sounds like a band name, doesn’t it)

The other day, I was reading Amy a book about Mog the cat, and one of the points of the book was that Mog loved her lavatory behind the tree in her garden.

I asked Amy whether she knew what a lavatory was, and she said no, so I said it’s another word for toilet.

After we had finished the book, Amy asked whether we had a lavatory, too, and I said, yes, in the bathroom. No, she said, do we have a lavatory behind a tree like Mog? No, I said, just the toilet one.

She seemed to think it was funny that there were two names for that, and asked why some people would use another word. I said that some words are used more in some places than others, so people who grew up hearing “lavatory” would tend to use that word and people who grew up around “toilet” would use that. I said some people even call it a “loo”.

I said that there are several words for it in German, too, and she said, really?

I said, sure; for example, what would you say? “Ich muss mal auf—” “Klo.” “Right; how about: Ich muss mal auf die—” “Toilette.”

See? You do know, and use, more than one word. Ah, she said, but in German there are two words for it, but in English there are three!

No, I said; German doesn’t only have two words. For example, some people say, “Ich muss mal auf das WC.”

“Really?” she said. “What does WC translate to in English?”

Well, I say, all the words mean pretty much the same thing, so you can’t match the German and the English words up one-to-one. Instead, WC could be translated as any of lavatory, toilet, or loo, as could the other words.

Whereupon she decided that from then on, she’d call it “lavatory” instead of “toilet”. Or, on second thoughts, she could use a different word every week! She’d call it “lavatory” this week, “loo” next week, and “toilet” the week after that.

---

She really seems fascinated by the concept of more than one word for the same thing. She has a similar reaction when I mention that Americans tend to call X what she calls Y (either because we come across word X in an American book or film, or because I happen to think of it).

“Please help me expunge my name from the Internet”

I got an email recently asking me to remove a webpage or at least remove or obscure a person’s name on that page.

Unfortunately for that person, the webpage in question was an archive of a 2001 message to a mailing list; the person had sent a message to the list, and I had replied to the list, CC’ing that person.

So, since it was not my archive, there was nothing I could do—and the nature of mailing list archives being what it is, I found at least two other places where that message was archived, so even if I had been able to remove the first archived posting, it still wouldn’t have helped the person “expunge their name from the Internet”. (The third site I found even had our email adresses in plain text.)

Poor person; I wish them luck in their success, but I suspect this is a case of opening a can of worms: you’ll never get the worms back into the can, nor your name off the Internet—especially not if you landed in a mailing list archive.

Schweizer „Tageskarte Gemeinde“ aus Deutschland bestellen

Summary for the German-impaired: link to an article which explains (in German) where one might get Swiss day tickets as a German.

---

Eben habe ich einen Artikel gefunden, der beschreibt, wo man Schweizer „Tageskarten Gemeinde“ aus Deutschland heraus bestellen kann.

Diese Tageskarten sind sehr praktisch: einen Tag lang erlauben sie die freie Fahrt in der ganzen Schweiz auf praktisch allen Bahn- und Buslinien; bei einigen Bergbahnen gibt’s zumindest Ermäßigungen. Ist im Prinzip ein Generalabonnement (GA) für einen Tag.

Ausgegeben werden die Karten über die verschiedenen Gemeinden (daher der Name), die ein bestimmtes Kontingent bei der SBB gekauft haben – meist 2 oder 3 Karten für jeden Tag, manchmal auch mehr. In erster Regel sind die dazu da, der örtlichen Bevölkerung zu dienen, aber viele Gemeinden verschicken die Karten auch per Post – und teilweise eben auch ins Ausland. Bezahlt wird meist mittels Überweisung (was aber entweder hohe Gebühren bei Überweisungen in CHF oder einen nicht bestimmbaren CHF-Endbetrag bei Überweisungen in EUR nach sich zieht); gelegentlich wird aber auch die Zahlung mittels Kreditkarte angeboten, was natürlich am besten ist: geringe Gebühren für den Empfänger und Rappen-genaue Einzugsmöglichkeit für die Gemeinde.

Ich habe die Tageskarte Gemeinde auch schon genießen können; freundlicherweise hat mein Schwiegervater erlaubt, dass ich die Karten auf seinen Namen (bei seiner Gemeinde) bestelle und er hat sie dann dort bar bezahlt und abgeholt und uns gegeben, als wir da waren. Aber es hat natürlich nicht jeder einen Bekannten in der Schweiz :)

Daher fand ich den Artikel sehr praktisch.

And then he said to me, “La plume de ma tante est sur la table”; or, quoting and languages.

Amy seems to feel fairly strongly about quoting someone in their exact words—including the language.

So, for example, she might say to me, “Erik said to me, ‘Iss das nicht, sonst wirst du krank!’” rather than, “Erik said to me, ‘Don’t eat that; it’ll make you ill!’” Which makes sense, I suppose, since my translation is already a bit of a paraphrase rather than a sort-of-direct quote.

I think she’ll use reported speech without respecting the language of the original (à la “Erik told me I shouldn’t eat that because it would make me ill”), so I suppose it’s limited to a desire to make direct speech be an exact quotation.

Interesting. I’d usually translate a quotation, even if my interlocutor understood the language of the original, unless I’m drawing attention to the specific words used rather than to the content of the utterance.