Saturday 5 April 2014
tunnel vision
francophone
The French tend to be perceived as lingual purists and practise a healthy disdain for outside influences that threaten to dilute their language and heritage into some sort of pidgin, especially when there are already perfectly good native words, without the need for borrowing from other sources.
The guardians of the lingua franca, however, are entertaining submissions for candidates to be incorporated into the lexicon. The Local's French edition features some of these entries, which are unquestionably authentic in character and could already pass for common-parlance: some of the best include equivader—a French approximation of the concept of procrastination (for which there is no exactly equivalent), combining the words for chatting and avoidance to describe those easy distractions, se mรฉmรฉriser (from the term mรฉmรฉ for grandmother) means to dress like a granny, and oubliophobie to describe that sinking feeling of loss or dread that we have forgotten something when that experience comes too often as to seem like a malady.
zapadnik
catagories: ๐, networking and blogging
Thursday 3 April 2014
stรผtzpunkt
Germany has called a special commission in order to hopefully seriously investigate the surveillance activities of the USA and the UK, and perhaps most importantly, German complicity in the process. One rallies for outrage with a tremolo-heroism but perhaps most realised that this was always the case and the wages of the modern world, whether willingly or otherwise, despite however one might feel about his or her situational-awareness as compared to the lolling public.
If faith was neither granted nor stinted or even comes as a surprise is a question for the individual, mostly dependent upon convenience and voluntary disclosure. An artificial mystique (though a code easily broken yet infinitely adaptable) of allegory and spindled metaphor has developed to augment and improve insider-messaging, which can be accessed by outsiders still. Concurrently, however, comes the revelation that the revelation that German was also the base for a sort of extraordinary rendition (the speed of light does not out-strip national jurisdictions). A satellite installation of Ramstein not only monitored the continent of Africa but also the whole world around. Though such studiousness is typical, I do not think such behaviour is as ultimately productive as protocols, or consignment, suggests.
wallflower or standoffishness
Most do not have have the patience to suffer negotiation and are quick to disdain the how process as show and an odious, bureaucratic necessity and as the stuff of foregone conclusions due to an unlevel playing-field. Most of the outcry has only produced an effort to bring the remaining part of Ukraine into the folds of NATO and a sloppy batch of sanctions that are prone to backfire, whether in ones backyard or on ones stoop, and the perception that Ukraine only exists as a sort of football to be exchanged between opposing sides. Realpolitik has been endowed with an unstoppable inertia back to Cold War thinking, without considering the question of governance—self-determination being accorded as something inviolable, despite performances given endless plaudits, regular standing-ovations, for results that did not necessarily need encouragement nor merit an encore. Could any one else administer the whole of Ukraine or parts of it any differently? Is the Western limning of the spheres of influence an assumption too far? It is impossible to say, I feel, without meaningful dialogue.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐ท๐บ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, foreign policy