Lo...and behold: Italian Grammar Errors

Grammar irritations are multilingual and today I'm a Grammar Fascista.

I've just finished reading The Villa Triste by Lucrezia Grindle on my beloved (plain ordinary, no colours or music) Kindle. You can find the book HERE.

It's a good read and I found it horrifying to discover that I apparently knew nothing about the fate of the Italian people during the war. As one commentator (well, OK, my husband) said "It was two enemies fighting each other. We didn't care". Clearly my history teachers didn't care because I don't remember Italy being discussed at all. Without giving anything away it's a story of the Italian "partisan" resistance and how their lives intertwine with a murder in the present day. You can read as much in the Amazon reviews and mine will be joining them shortly.

My beef with the book is this: There is a character referred to many times in the story as a ghost because no-one evers sees him. The author gives him the Italian name "il spettro".

OUCH!!!!

Spettro is correct - our word spectre comes from the same Latin root -  but it would be lo spettro, not il spettro since il (the masculine definite article) becomes lo before an " S impure" and other combinations. Basically a "sp..." sound is an s impure and can NEVER go with il.

We had a very good Italian teacher at our school and she took the trouble to spend virtually a whole  lesson on this, making sure we knew that combinations like il spettro would sound so wrong it sets your teeth on edge. This gaff really set my teeth on edge throughout the book.

I don't know if Lucrezia Grindle speaks Italian. Her first name sounds Italian but the bio says she was born in the US. If she speaks Italian then she speaks it in another universe. If she doesn't then she should have let an Italian read her book before publication and it would have had a big red circle around "il spettro". Even if - and I doubt this happens anywhere - there is some part of Italy where "il spettro" would be the spoken version it shouldn't end up in text that way.

Surely any book about the Italy during the war should have had an Italian eye cast over it anyway? It's now bothering me that the authenticity of the story is somewhat lacking and that's completely spoiling my enjoyment of the story.

Your career is standing still ...

I was wandering through a few "meeja" blogs, like you do when the Paralympics has finished and people are just annoying on Facebook, when I came across one prospective student of journalism who remarked she loved buying "stationary". My quotation marks, needless to say. Her friend remarked that she liked buying stationary too. What does this tell us?

1) Journalists are as capable of writing utterly tedious posts as the next blogger.

2) Spelling DOES matter!

Here's a tip for remembering this one: STATIONERY has an E in it, as in E for "envelope". Or you could just bottle out like my American friends and call stationery "office supplies". I feel this needs a stationery-related scrapbook layout, made with my "office supplies" kit. Maybe later.

All the pretty horses

The Olympics requires the watching public to catch on to some tough words like keirin, peloton, pommel. Aquatic, synchronised and equestrian might give some folk trouble but they seem to manage. Yet we are deemed to be too thick to work out what asymmetric bars are, even when the visual clue is before us on the screen.

Brushing aside the temptation to launch into a Latin versus Greek argument, temporarily at least, there seems to be no good reason for calling them "uneven bars" other than some committee bod's opinion that the word asymmetric is too difficult for us. The apparatus has not changed, as far as I know. My knowledge depends on how well I can retain information for four years since the BBC, for all its patronising talk about a sporting legacy and hourly "maybe now people will be interested in this sport" statements-to-camera, does in fact only show us football.

My problem with "uneven bars" is bigger than being thought thick by some committee bod. I can almost hear my Dad, an engineer, complaining about it. "Uneven" suggests a number of potential problems with the bars:

1) They are not an even diameter along their length.
2) They are crooked ie each bar is not parallel to the floor.
3) They are not of equal length.

I'm sure Dad would have found more. The word asymmetric explains perfectly what they are, that is why some other committee bod a long time ago chose the name. Why introduce doubt? We have learned a lot of words during the Olympics. I'm rather proud of "keirin". That's the cycle race where they follow the little putt putt thing. Goodness knows why. No matter, since we seem to be able to cycle very fast in every race. Asymmetric is another word people could have learned if they didn't know it already.

Shame on you, committee bods.

Freezing June

I need to do something about this blog. Like using it for serious experimentation with fancy blog templates ...

The last post was at Christmas and here we are in June with the temperature even colder than it was at Christmas. John has two weeks off - the first part taken up enjoyably with the street party and Mum's birthday - with the idea of beach days and trips out being tourists or working on the house. It looks like it's going to be working on the house the.

Here's visible proof (digital kit is World's Greatest by Connie Prince). We've had the same horrible handle on the cupboard door since we moved in. It wasn't even on straight. Today John removed it. There's no indication of when the new handle will be fitted. It was very entertaining though when John discovered, AFTER he'd sealed up the door with masking tape, that the sandpaper he needed was inside the cupboard.

2011 News

It's pathetic that I haven't used this blog. So here it is attached to my website (a veritable scrapbook fest ...) with a cyber version of the Christmas letter. I don't hold with sending ecards and Facebook messages instead of Christmas cards, though those are fun for "as well as" and I join in. Peeps like to receive Christmas cards and letters and not sending them ignores the lonely and elderly who don't have the internet.

I hope you like the Christmas photo - it was taken on our cruise to the Canaries recently. The hats were added digitally - Santa hats were not part of the formal dress code! You can see the rest of the work-in-progress scrapbook on my website. It was good to get away to warmer weather (thought not as warm as last time we were there) and, more importantly, more hours of daylight. Since I have trouble sleeping and don't get up until late I have great difficulty fitting in the things I need to do in daylight. Sometimes the poor bunny gets her hutch cleaned when it's almost dark. Bunny Molly and cat Sophie are both about 90 in human years and both have health problems. It looks as though we might lose them before long. We lost Dolly this year and it was frightening how upsetting it was to lose a small furry creature we'd only had for a couple of years. I wrote about her HERE.

Mind you, it did come a week after losing Uncle Bill. We had a nightmare journey in horizontal rain and thick fog only to get to the hospital just as he died. It was like losing Dad all over again. Their voices were so similar that talking to Uncle Bill always seemed like a connection to Dad. It was very sad to update the family tree site and watch the black line move slowly over the corner of his photo.

We have more and more members on the family tree site (which is HERE for those who haven't been nagged about it. It's a private site now so that everyone feels comfortable putting photos on there. You just ask to join and if you're obviously family or a genealogist working on our family tree we let you in. Please join!

As many of you will now, Mum had major heart surgery in July, a coronary by-pass and valve replacement. She recovered well but then became very ill due to being allergic to the medication. This set her back a lot but she's beginning to get better again now.

I'll try and remember to add more to this blog. In the meantime there are always lots of new photos and scrapbooks on www.sharonhorswill.com

Have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Here's a Smilebox for you (turn speakers up):

Personalize a digital scrapbook

Make Mine Chocolate!

Molly says:

Mum says, "It hardly needs saying but buying your child a rabbit for Easter is a really dumb, stupid thing to do. Rabbits are not the easy pet people think they are. They can live up to 12 years. They're not easy for a child with small hands to hold. They need lots of space and room to run around and a CLEAN hutch. Anyone who puts rabbits in a small guinea pig hutch and then never cleans it (and I have a neighbour who did that ...) deserves a special place in hell.

Don't do it! Buy chocolate. Even better, teach your child about Jesus so they learn the real meaning of Easter!"

Mum loves this Jesus bloke. I think he probably loved animals too. Apparently His Dad made us all.

Did you know there is a Facebook page for the Make Mine Chococalte campaign? You can join HERE.

Mum made this digital scrapbook page for us bunnies. She says it was made with Libby Weifenbach's Cottontail kit:

What's in a (day) name?

Yesterday was Good Friday, the day Christians - whether they are believers or simply subscribe to the traditions - commemorate the day Jesus Christ died on the cross for us. Southampton marked this in a splendid way with an outdoor passion play. We couldn't get to see it since a stupid decision to fight to get onto a cold beach brought back my cough. Instead we sat in the garden and listened to Bob "Warm up man for Jesus" Pearce from a mile away and heard loud Hosannas as the procession went to Jerusalem. It was a wonderful moment I will not forget in a long time. As readers might gather, I am one of the believers.

I was stunned and actually offended when some companies and individuals on Facebook decided to wish people happy Earth Day and ignore Easter entirely. Some silly decision makers in the marketing field thought this was wise. That way they wouldn't offend those who don't celebrate Easter. Is this some kind of sick joke or something more sinister? Birmingham City Council tried to remove Christmas a few years ago and the public were outraged. They also got in trouble with every religious leader in the city.

Why is it that no religious group is to be offended in any way and yet the Christians are fair game? Maybe it's because we're supposed to turn the other cheek. Well, Easter is the time to stand up and be counted, folks! No-one takes that away from us.

Today is St George's Day. St George is the patron saint of England. England is that small country not allowed to have its own National Assembly and its citizens are meant to be meek and quiet and call themselves British and not show national pride.

Sod that for a lark, to use a time honoured English phrase. You can see my English page from my 2011 UK Census scrapbook HERE.

The Daily Telegraph, in its customary tedious and joy killing manner, tells us today is NOT St George's Day in this article. I don't care. That all looks like a good way to lose St George's Day despite the opposite intentions expressed. I'm celebrating St George's Day, along with Shakespeare's birthday, today.

There are, naturally, those who protest that there were no birth records at the time and Shakespeare (Shakspere?) was probably baptised on 23 April and therefore born earlier. No matter. He also died on 23 April. Is it cool or weird to die on your birthday? Cool, I think.

I see that the Lands End Facebook page neatly avoided Good Friday altogether but is celebrating Shakespeare's equally neat Hatch and Despatch. They ask for our favourite work of Shakespeare. I don't have a favourite work, as such, but my favourite words are from Romeo and Juliet:

"Night's candles are burn't out,
and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top".

English to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.