Hey, Claudio — I’m Trying to Talk to You Over Here

Thing learned today: The Spanish title of the BBC miniseries I, Claudius is Yo, Claudio. I find this hilarious.

See, I’m not even making this up.

Punctuation for the Awe-Struck Spaniard

Few pet interests could out-geek typography fandom. I mean, you’re talking about enthusiasm for an element of life that the vast majority of people see constantly but which they could not care less about. However, I maintain that punctuation marks are interesting, and the following post will either prove or disprove that assertion.

By now, many literary people know of the interrobang, a sort of punctuational hermaphrodite that mashed the exclamation point and the question mark into a multipronged twofer. Perhaps you read about it on this blog back in 2005, when I learned of it and I exploded with interrobang-worthy levels of surprise and amazement. Or perhaps you’re just, like, super smart. In case this word interrobang is new to you, here’s the gist: Instead of lining the end marks back-to-back in the manner of “It’s full of snakes?!” you can instead conserve space by simply punctuating it “It’s full of snakes‽” (I’m unsure what’s a more shocking thing to be snake-full. Your Prius? A pinata? A womb?) The interrobang is handy enough, I say, though I’d imagine less astute readers would wonder what the hell is wrong with that capital “P.” Invented by ad man Martin K. Specktor in 1962, the interrobang actually found a certain level of mainstream acceptance, even getting a spot on certain typewriter models in 1968. Of course, it never made it to the big leagues, but I say it still has a chance. I mean, look how ubiquitous the at sign and the hash mark are today compared to how rarely we used them twenty years ago.

A funny footnote to the story of the interrobang — a story that, were it published in book form, should be titled Huh‽ Wha‽ Really‽ — is that its creation necessitated a second mark for those writing in Spanish. In this language, writers have the odd habit of giving the reader a heads up with a question or exclamation is coming. I’ve always wondered why, exactly, and why the inverted question mark or exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence stuck with Spanish and no other major language. But this is what Spanish does. Thus, if an interrobang were to be used at the end of a sentence — “Esta llena de serpientes,” for example — you’d need an upside-down one at the beginning.

And the name of this mark, by the way, is my word of the week. (Took me long enough, I know.)

gnaborretni (nab-or-RET-nee) — noun: The symbol ⸘ (an inverted superimposed exclamation point and question mark), used in place of ¡¿ in Spanish, Galician, and Leonese.

The etymology? It’s simply interrobang backwards, which seems especially clever until you realize that the gnaborretni isn’t actually a backwards interrobang so much as an upside-down one. But, you know, whatever.

May all your Spanish interrogative exclamations be stylishly punctuated.

You may be wondering why I have included a picture of an orange wearing a crown. You see, the thing is, my intended word of the week was going to be realgar, the name of a pigment once considered to be the only source of pure orange but which fell out of use because it’s horrendously poisonous. In fact, it’s also one of the main sources or arsenic. This story these once-prevalent colors that we no longer use, in combination with orange’s status as the least-beloved color in the spectrum or even colors that aren’t actually colors, like pink or magenta, seemed promising a few days ago but ended up being pretty sucky when expressed by me. But I’d already Photoshopped the orange. Thus, this: King Orange.

Apparently I think punctuation is more interesting than deadly poison.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, padiddle, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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Of Love and Ham

Every actor must begin somewhere. For Penelope Cruz, that somewhere happened to a movie called Jamón, jamón.

That's not a knock against the film. For all I know, it could be a masterpiece. But please just consider this poster --- the gleeful cartoon pig, the prominent text that translates as "Ham, ham," the sexual embrace with her eventual husband, Javier Bardem --- and ponder the meaning of it all.

I truly hope a framed version of this hangs somewhere in the Bardem-Cruz home.

The Whole Enchilada, Etymologically Speaking

Yes, this is a post about enchiladas running on Siete de Mayo. And yes, it would have been a lot more appropriate on Wednesday, Cinco de Mayo, the day when many Americans put limes in their beer without really knowing what’s being celebrated. But that would necessitate a level of planning that I’m barely capable of when it comes to my actual life much less regarding this blog in particular.

But enchiladas. Enchiladas? Yes, you love them. Everyone does.

Despite being a Mexican dish I’ve known about all my life, I’d never really considered where the word enchilada came from. Only this week did Spencer point out to me that the word is actually just the past participle of enchilar — literally the words for “in” and “chili” made into a verb that means “to season with chili” or “to add chili pepper to.” Back when I was taking Spanish in high school, the first verbal adjective I can remember learning was also a word people would be likely to see at a Mexican restaurant: cerrado, which would probably be hanging on the door facing the diners inside, which means “closed” and which is also a verbal adjective — a form of the verb cerrar. But all this time there was another one staring at me from just about every Mexican menu I’d ever seen: enchilada. (Why enchilada is feminine and cerrado masculine, however, I’m not sure.)

Aside from the usual “Oh, that’s why we call it that”-type realization, I enjoy that Spanish has a word specifically for the action of adding chili to something. (Enchilar, by the way, has two figurative meanings as well: “to sting” and “to become red in the face.”) I mean, sure, it makes sense that Spanish-speakers would have that word, since they’d be more likely to need to express that idea of adding chili than, say, a Swedish-speaker, but I’m in favor of any language having terribly specific vocabulary. And on that note, Spanish has another specific yet useful food-related verb: salpimentar, “to add salt and pepper to.” Now this is one I think just about every culture could benefit from. Really, why are we English-speakers wasting valuable seconds with extra syllables when the idea of putting salt and pepper on food could be mashed into a single verb?

¡Happy Siete de Mayo, everyone — and may your ever exclamation point be matched with an upside-down one!

Men Who Love Translation Oddities

Well, one man, anyway: me. I’m sure there are others, but I’ll refrain from speaking for all of them.

This weekend, I was looking at a bookstore display for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, the first two books of the late author’s Millennium trilogy. I’ve only read the first. The version of it that I bought — yellow and green cover with a Chinese dragon design — seems to be the most widely distributed one. It looks like this:

 I say it’s an effective cover, even if the colors displayed prepared me for a different sort of story than the one told in the book. Before I picked up my copy, I knew nothing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — not that it was originally written in Swedish, not that it took place in Sweden, not even that it was a detective story. Just judging the book by its cover, I imagined that the titular tattooed lady was herself Asian, some vampy stereotype existing in a previous decade, maybe someone who could have existed in Robert Towne’s Chinatown. A dumb decision to leap to, in retrospect, but that’s why we’re cautioned against this very activity. Dragon Tattoo is bleak and graphic and, since it begins in the dead of a Swedish winter, not exactly colorful, at least in the literal sense. It grows and changes and eventually gets splashed with quite a bit of blood red by the end, and by the time I finished the last page I was glad I’d read it. Nonetheless, the cover caught my eye, and I don’t feel embarrassed to have the book resting on my shelf.

In the bookstore, I saw plenty of copies with this good version of the book, but also several of the Spanish translation, which, inexplicably, had a far worse cover — chromatically appropriate, maybe, but overall poorly designed and downright ugly.

See, rather than abstracting the titular character by focusing on her tattoo, whoever designed this garbage chose to depict her as a tattoo-less waif, distorted and cartoonish to the point that she looks like a failed attempt and drawing a realistic Natasha Fatale from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Clearly, someone hates Spanish-speakers and wants to deter them from reading the book. I also wonder why the title would have been rendered Los hombres que no amaban las mujeres, literally “The men who do not love the women,” instead of something using a form of the verbs odiar or detestar, which both mean “to hate.”

The Spanish version is a translated version of the original Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, “Men who hate women.” Since the novel concerns various awful things done to several female characters, it’s actually a better title for the story, even if it wouldn’t have sold as many copies in the U.S. (Worst case scenario: Man with rage issues buys Men Who Hate Women thinking it’s a self-help book, only to get some awful, awful ideas.) Furthermore, as far as the first novel goes, the tatted-out Lisbeth Salander isn’t really the main character; she shares that responsibility with Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative reporter who’s less sexy and overall less interesting than Lisbeth. (I’ve not read the series any further, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Larsson ultimately made the series Lisbeth’s story.) Putting Lisbeth at the forefront certainly seems to be the tactic employed by the people who marketed the Swedish-language film adaptation. Lookit:

There they are, Lisbeth and Mikael both, but it’s clear that Lisbeth gets more emphasis, just by virtue of where she’s situated in the photo. For this film’s subtitled, English-language release, however, the poster uses the same photo of actress Noomi Rapace but omits the actor playing Mikael entirely:

And, again, the title was changed to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because it’s simply grabbier to us English-speakers.

The English title also fits better with the structure of the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire. In the original Swedish, it’s basically that: Flickan som lekte med elden. The theme doesn’t hold, however, with the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, as the original Swedish has it as Luftslottet som sprängdes — “The Air Castle that blew up.” The Spanish titles for these books, by the way, are La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidon de gasolina (“The girl who dreamed about a match and a gasoline can”) and La reina en el palacio de las corrientes de aire (“The queen in the palace of the airflows”).

Translation, previously:

• Darkwing Duck’s catchphrase in different languages
• An English translation of the original German lyrics to “99 Luftballoons”
• What the Portuguese lyrics mean in “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex”
• Felicity Shagwell around the world
• How the Street Fighter II bosses got their names switched and why it’s better that way

Lola, Laura, Miracle, Milagro

Eric Crapton jokes aside, the tendency to confuse the letters “L” and “R” confusion when translating between Japanese and English does happen. I don’t know why this happens, but I’d bet someone with a background in linguistics could explain it. The phenomenon is not specific to East Asian languages. I recently noticed that it happens in Spanish in a way that is noticeable when you compare some Spanish words to their English cognates.

I was watching Dollhouse this week, and I noted that the actress who plays Mellie is Miracle Laurie. Aside from sounding like an improved version of Regular Old Laurie, the name is notable to me because I’d never heard of anyone named Miracle before. I had, however, met a few Hispanic women with the name Milagro, Spanish for “miracle.” You can easily see from their similar structure how the words miracle and milagro might be related — and indeed it seems that they are. I don’t have handy resources for Spanish etymology, but a simple Google search did turn up a few documents indicated that milagro comes from Latin via a rarer Spanish word, miraglo. (Yes, it sounds like a new floor-cleaning product and perhaps it should be, especially in Spanish-speaking countries.) It should be noted, however, that none of the Spanish-to-English dictionaries I checked included miraglo, so perhaps it’s obsolete and therefore not of use to the rudimentary Spanish-speakers who would use these online dictionaries.

My question is this: Why would Spanish switch these sounds/letters around? When you’re talking about people who grow up speaking Japanese (or other East Asian languages), the explanation for why “L” and “R” get moved around is that those sounds don’t exist in those languages, at least not in the same distinct way they do in English. In Spanish, however, they do. Is there something about these sounds that lends themselves to getting confused/merged in multiple languages? All languages?

The Blustery Day

It may never rain in Southern California, but it gets windy occasionally, and, really, it’s those days you have to watch out for.

I doubt I would have ever let windy days in Santa Barbara rattle me if I hadn’t taken the job at the newspaper. For the oblivious and urban, I’d imagine, this type of weather means minor inconveniences: wide wakes of dust near open windows and assaulting specks in the eyes during the walk from the parking spot to the office.

I no longer think this way.

Especially in early, dry autumn, I think about fires. Twice, now, I’ve had Independence Day ruined: last year’s Zaca Fire last year, which actually started on July 4, and this year’s Gap Fire, which was sparked on July 1. Plans for holiday relaxation and beachside fireworks-viewing went up in smoke, so to speak, on both occasions. Zaca and Gap may have resulted from human actions, but both blazes nonetheless became hot and sassy centers of my universe during their respective lifespans.

I have the house to myself this weekend. If some horrible firebeast showed up and consumed my plans — and, hell, maybe my house — then we’d have established a pattern, wouldn’t we? We just might. Today, both the county fire department and the Los Padres forest service announced that they would be temporarily increasing ready-and-able staff as a result of hot, dry winds blowing on a hot, dry day over wilderness that, by and large, is also hot and dry. Bad alignment of the stars.

It seemed important to me — and probably only me — that these two notes of caution referred to the winds differently. The first called them Sundowners — or, specifically, “Sundowner-type winds,” which Sundowners most assuredly are — and the second called them Santa Anas — or, specifically, a “Santa Ana wind event.” (It’s diction like this that also gives us “male subject” in police reports when the author actually means “man.” You have to love the law-and-order approach to English, which is at least better than the Law & Order style to English.) At some point, I learned the differences between these two types of winds — or “wind events,” if you want to be formal and therefore verbose about it — but I couldn’t remember today and looked them up.

Wikipedia describes the Santa Ana winds as strong, dry offshore winds that characteristically sweep through Southern California and northern Baja California in late autumn into winter. It goes on to note that they can be either hot or cold but are often thought of as being warm because their arrival can bring the highest temperatures of the year. For obvious reasons, they can also turn a small fire into a large problem.

The term Sundowner, conversely, refers to a wind phenomenon that occurs in Santa Barbara. This I did not know. I thought the term was much more widespread. Probably as a result of its limited habitat, the Wikipedia article on Sundowners is much shorter than the one on Santa Anas. It explains them as follows:

A Sundowner is an offshore wind which occurs when a region of high pressure is directly north of the Santa Barbara area, the part of the California coast which trends east-west. When the pressure gradient is perpendicular to the axis of the Santa Ynez Mountains, which rise directly behind Santa Barbara, the winds blow with greatest force. These winds often precede Santa Ana events by a day or two, as it is normal for high pressure areas to migrate east, causing the pressure gradients to shift to the northeast.

Given this, I suppose that both press releases could be correct: The first was sent only to Santa Barbara media, while the second one went to most outlets in Southern California. And I guess I shouldn’t quibble: I myself apparently am inclined to pronounce “Santa Ana” as “Santee Ana,” possibly because it’s just easier to say and possibly because my hometown sits beneath a mountain whose name is often pronounced by second-, third-, and fourth-generation residents as “Santee Ana Peak.” Either way, it’s a Southern California shibboleth: I sound like some bumpkin awaiting Santy Claws on Krishmush.

In spite of the fact the wind has been blowing all day in Santa Barbara, the origin of Sundowner seems obvious. Wikipedia makes no mention of it, but it goes into some depth for “Santa Ana,” whose origin is stranger than you might think. Despite the existence of the Santa Ana mountains, the Santa Ana River and the Santa Ana Canyon in Southern California, no one sure whether the winds took their name from these geographical features. The origin is obscure. One especially fun theory traces the term to a corruption of the Spanish term for the phenomenon: “Santana winds,” from the Spanish vientos de Satán, which, in turn, comes from a translation from some unspecified pre-Spanish language. The devil, I guess, really is in the details, at least for the topic at hand.

I should note that Wikipedia is politely questioning the accuracy of this claim with a little superscript “citation needed” floating beside the paragraph that contains it. I don’t know why the Spanish would have said vientos de Satán instead of vientos del diablo. (I do know, however, that Carlos Santana just recently played at the Santa Barbara Bowl, so he may well be involved in this as well. I’ll keep you posted.) This point is further complicated by the existence of yet another meteorological term, Diablo winds, which refer specifically to Santa Ana-like winds that occur around San Francisco. Wikipedia claims that this term arose much more recently: in 1991, when area media coined it in connection with the firestorm in Oakland that year. It may have originated, Wikipedia continues, “from the observation that the wind blows into the inner Bay Area from the direction of the Diablo Valley in adjacent Contra Costa County, and [because of] the fiery, sensationalist connotation inherent in devil wind.”

Any discussion of the connection between breezes and Beelzebub should rightly mention the superstition that the Santa Ana winds make people act bizarrely, violently, angrily, and unexpectedly. Strangely, Wikipedia makes no mention of it on the Santa Ana page itself, save for in the section labeled “Santa Ana winds in popular culture,” but I could swore that Joan Didion did in that one book she wrote. (You know — the one where she writes beautifully about some element of California? That single one?) Supposed mood-altering properties are, however, discussed in the entry for foehn winds. (I know, I know — yet another wind. It’s a little tedious to me too, at this point, though the addition of this one makes for four winds, which is also the title of a Bright Eyes song that happens to mention “The Great Satan” as well as the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem, which was also the title of a Joan Didion book and could very well be the one I’m thinking of.) Also known as föhn winds, Foehn winds — which, as I understand them, occur in Central Europe but are not restricted to that area — are believed to cause some sort of mental illness. In German, the word for this affliction is Föhnkrankheit, which would be altogether wonderful from a verbal standpoint if it wasn’t associated with some major negatives, such as a 10 percent increase in suicides. The discussion of Föhnkrankheit is fairly limited, and any scientific explanation has yet to be proven for it and its apparent cousin illness, Sanatanakrankheit.

At the moment, the winds seem to have died down somewhat. I don’t feel crazy, although the scraping of tree branches against the metal gutter and the spectral swinging of my neighbor’s screen door may push me to that point if the air starts moving again. I’m not presently on fire and, if all goes well, I’ll get a full, unscorched weekend of solitude out of this yet.

Low-Down Rose Sucker

En route to Hillary’s parents’ new house this past weekend, I passed a street sign that made me laugh: Chuparosa Drive. A childhood populated with the likes of the Chupacabra and Chupa Chups* — and really just those two things and nothing else, sadly —taught me long ago that chupar is the Spanish word for “to suck.” (This knowledge has proved useful, mostly by allowing me to know when I was being discussed in a defamatory manner.) But chuparosa? Who sucks roses? And, more to the point, who sucks roses to the point where they should get a street named after them? Rose-sucking sounds painful, and perhaps the kind of activity people in other countries accuse each others’ mothers of doing. “Your mother sucks roses and you dad chews on nickels!” Something like that.

My Friend The Internet tells me that chuparosa — which is more frequently spelled chuparrosa — actually means “hummingbird” in Mexican Spanish. I am comfortable with this, for if anyone should be sucking roses, it should be the mythical half-bird, half-bug. I don’t remember learning this term for hummingbird back in high school Spanish, however, possibly because teachers decided that colibri was superior by virtue of not giving students reason to use any form of word “suck.”

Other equally amazing compound Spanish words that use some form of the chupar:

• chupamangas, literally “sleeve sucker,” translated as “suck-up,” and considered vulgar for some reason I don’t understand
• chupasangres, “bloodsucker”
• chupatintas, literally “ink sucker,” but meaning something close to the English term pencil pusher
• chupamirto, literally “myrtle sucker,” but again meaning “hummingbird”
• chupaflor, yet another term for “hummingbird”
• chupagasolina, which I think is the Spanish equivalent of the English term gas-guzzler
• chupacirios, literally “candle sucker,” which sounds like a euphemism for a certain English expression but which actually means “a sanctimonious person” for reasons I do not understand

* Would have loved to find a webpage explaining this apparently bygone lollipop brand but found nothing online. Am I crazy? These existed, right?