The Wayfaring Wordhack

 Sprout is really something in a lot of ways, as most parents would likely say of one of their children, but when it comes to her feminist streak...let's just say, her streak is a mile wide or more.

I am reading a book with her called Herstory: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook up the World, and while I blubber like a baby at some of the stories, she gets fired up and ready to go to war. It is too late for me to go into a lot of detail about the book or Sprout, but she said something to me today after we watched Aquaman that I wanted to record.

"Mom," she said, "do you want to know what I just made up? The robes of king can fit well on a queen."

To which I heartily agreed.

Then she came back and told me, "Here is another one: In a fight, brain makes more might."

She is in bed, and I can't ask if that second one was her exact wording, but the sentiment is there. 

She might not ever shake up the whole world, but she sure shakes up mine.

...OK, probably not only in Egypt, but it makes for a good subject line.

There is a young man with "interesting" ideas and ethics who works in the boutique on the ground floor of our building. The other day he told Julien, "Hey, I know of a car for sale for 40,000 EGP*. You could pay half, I'll pay half, and we'll split the use of the car. You'll have it during the day, and I'll drive it from 9:00 p.m. on."

Um, yeah, that is not going to happen. Not only for practical reasons but because the young fellow thinks, among other things, thinks it is perfectly normal not to go to his classes and offers his teachers bribes to say he attended classes and give him passing grades exams he never studies for....

Today, our housekeeper told me, "Wow, it's been really cool these past few days." The lowest temperature these days was 34.5˚C (94.1˚F)  Admittedly, this is better than the 42˚C(108˚F) we had when we got back to Egypt, and the 55˚C(131˚F) that hit the country just before our return.

Had another to share, but it seems to have slipped my mind. Maybe I'll remember later.
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*  about 5,100 USD / 4400 euros

I recently blogged about hearing a horse on the street beneath my balcony and had comments asking me to expound on the difference between the sound of a horse or a donkey passing by.

The differences are several.  First is the heavier resonance of the horse's hoof; the bulk of the beast makes a more resounding clop on the asphalt. The donkeys, with their smaller frames and smaller hooves, make lighter taps, and when they are in a hurry the rhythm is smudged between a staccato and a shuffle as they struggle to move their stiff little legs fast enough to suit their drivers. Plenty of drivers allow their donkeys to walk, though, but I cannot think of instance of seeing a horse that was allowed to plod along.  It's as if having a showier creature pulling their carts forces the drivers to put on a show. They hurry their animals down the streets, heedless of how their shod hooves slip, how the speed bumps make them stumble. Speaking of being shod, not all of the donkeys are, so their steps lack the metallic ring of shoes.

Back to the idea of show, I hear more bells and jingles (buckles or trinkets, I don't know) on horse harnesses than on those of donkeys. 

So now you know. May this enlightenment serve you in the future. Or not. :P

I would tweet things like:  I love sitting on my balcony, listening to the clop-clop of a horse's hooves and the jingle of its harness.

Is that 140 characters or less?

Oh, and I can tell when it is a horse coming or a donkey. Their hooves don't make the same sounds. :D

(And NO, this entry has nothing to do with wanting a twitter account or planning to get one. I do not like twitter.)

Arrival

loud, pushing
giving way
demanding
Crowds
funneling through customs
Warm night, hazy air.
Dust, pollution
horns honking
hurtle down the freeway
men on curbs, sitting
standing
horns
Sprout eats Egyptian air by the plastic spoonful
Super Turbo
Cattle in pickup beds, bound for slaughter
3 lanes, drive in lane 2.5
Why pick 1 when you can straddle 2?
Honk, honk, honk
Citadel
Mosques, mean-green-lit minarets*
sheep and cattle penned under an overpass.
Manure, farm smell in the rushing city
cow-eyes glowing in the headlights
City of the dead, squatted by wretched living
rats, running
cats, stalking
Woken at two a.m. by crying.
Cat wailing outside the door with a voice like a newborn baby.
Too hot to sleep


Day 1

Streets almost empty
Holiday
Horns. Horns. Horns.
3 men lounging in plastic chairs, suit vests gaping,
squat, silver machine guns shining on their pudgy tummies
They smile at us.
Wall plaque announces: Presidential Residence
horns honking
On the street corner, one fatted calf, being skinned,
another watching, waiting its turn without even knowing it.
Sprout points at the dead animal, "Horse! Horse!"
Visit two apartments
Pasha prices, not for us.
Take out the trash; a woman comes to me, hand out, begging for my scraps.
Disconcerted, I explain it is cat waste, litter of the worst kind.
Kind woman in the supermarket, buys Sprout a KitKat.
Cheese spread sold in drinking glasses, like the principle of buying mustard in France.
Horns honking
"Noisy en Egypt," Sprout says, pacing in the hotel.

Day 2

Breakfast by the pool
Swimming
Lunch
Napping
Sprout reiterates, "noisy! Noisy Egypt!"
Tea with Papa
Trip to the bookstore
Supper
New friend, Mona, for Sprout.
Mona says, Come all the time! I teach Sprout Arabic!



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* I actually wrote "neon" but I first read my scrawl as "mean"

A conversation in the Faure household:

Julien puts on music while Soëlie and I are in the kitchen, serving up Father's Day breakfast. Motorhead starts blaring through the speakers.

J: Ooh la, maybe Motorhead is a bit much in the morning.

Soon the sounds of Pascale Picard come from the living room.

Me, to S: Listen to that, honey, Papa put on music from the woman he would leave me for.
J:  Listen to who's talking.  If Val Kilmer came along, inviting you to run off with him, you'd go in a heartbeat.
M: Would not.
J: Yes you would. "Oh, Val! Of course I'll come. Let me be your Willow!"
M, with raised eyebrows: Your Willow? Um, as in: Let me be your male dwarf?*

J says that Mr Kilmer has not aged well, but I assert that Madmartigan was hot, and give me Iceman any day over Tom Cruise.
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* Sorry if this is not the accepted term for little people. It is what popped out of my mouth.

 I enjoy music; i always have.  But Julien *loves* it. Every week, sometimes twice a week, he goes to the library to check out CDs, discovering new artists and reconnecting with old ones. His hard-drive is chockfull of music, so full he's going to have to get rid of some to make room for other things (like photos of his daughter. :P).

I'm not as obsessive as he is, but when I do find something I like, obsession seizes me in a different way.  I listen to the same songs over and over and over and...yeah.  Drives Julien batty.  I've shared before about songs that I listen to on repeat, like Johnny Cash's Hurt  (turned you on to a good thing, didn't I, asakiyume ?).

I especially like music I can think or write to, and it was with that in mind that I followed Julien into a music store in Christchurch, New Zealand last year. The saleswoman was very well versed in the music available there, and there was a lot of it. I explained to her what I liked and she turned me on to Over the Rhine, specifically their Trumpet Child album. I knew that I probably wouldn't listen to it obsessively and probably not while writing, but it was fun, interesting, catchy, well-written music just the same. Flirty and thought-provoking by turns. Really, the lyrics are a delight, especially "Don't Wait for Tom."



Sadly the video is just a fixed image, but this is the best recording I could find. The live versions I viewed don't appear to be professionally filmed, so the sound quality is poor.  And you really need to be able to listen to the evocative words:

He wears a tuxedo made of sackcloth and ashes
Has a tattoo of a girl who can bat her eyelashes
Down on the river he was fishin’ with a sword
He knocked off John the Baptist for a word from the Lord

He takes his coffee with the blood of a turnip
Blushes his cheeks with an Amsterdam tulip
Choppin’ up a rooster for a pullet surprise
If the gravy don’t getcha he’ll getcha with his eyes

This from an interview on their website:
(frigg , there is absolutely NO way you can say this is pot-smoking music, so don't even try!)

Hanoi is, hands down, the noisiest city I've ever been to. It also has the most daredevil motorists (mostly scooter drivers) of any country I've yet visited.

We have it on good authority that Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is twice as bad. Thank goodness we aren't going there. I've had about all the honkhonkHONKing I can take.

That's all I hear now. Horns, horns, and more horns.

Someone, please make it stop!

First a disclaimer: I'm not sharing this to make fun of someone's level in English,* but because I think it could be helpful to the writers on my flist--that would be most of you. :P

So some thoughts on language...

Our hostess at the hotel was driving us to the bus station, and we were complimenting her on the hotel and how charming we found it, especially the bathroom.  She replied:

"Oh, thank you very much, but we need mechanic for repairs. It very hard find mechanic here."

When trying to make foreigners sound foreign in our fantasy books, we (er, I) often conjugate their verbs incorrectly, drop articles and prepositions (something I know was hard for me to master in French and is VERY hard, with phrasal verbs, for the French when they learn English), and so forth.  In the quote above, you'll note a verb is missing altogether, as is a preposition and article.

From the example above--even if you didn't know that I was in Thailand at the moment--you probably could have guessed that the speaker's native language is not English and that it could be, at the risk of sounding like an idjit by broadly lumping some pretty non-similar languages together, Asian. 

Why could that be a reasonable guess?  Because most of us have heard a real Asian accent before, and if not a real one, then a parodied one. Accents are easy to parody because the sounds and grammatical errors tend to be consistent. That's important for me, as a fantasy writer, to remember: for an accent to ring true, the same mistakes must be made *consistently.* And to know which mistakes would logically be made by my characters, I really need to know a little bit about how the foreigner's language works as well as the language that is "translated" into English on the page.

If, for example, prepositions don't exist in Derfan'qah but are in overabundance in Huri, it's a logical conclusion that their usage will cause all sorts of trouble when a Derfan'qahi princess tries to express herself to a Hurite prince. 

Ugh. Grammar.  Too much work. That's what some people think. (Not moi; I quite like it). But it doesn't have to be just about the grammar as our hostess so clearly showed me.  I do, on occasion, give my characters an apt "wrong" word like our hostess used, but not, I think, often enough. Not-quite-right words can add a lot of spice, and they are likely to be easier on your readers than pages and pages of grammatically incorrect dialogue.

Vocabulary can be a wonderful way to give someone an accent on the page, that and word order. You don't have to put apostrophes in place of your Gs and other dropped letters and resort to all sorts of wonky, phonetical spellings to get foreignness (or lack of education) across. Note that I did not resort to "imitating" our hostess's accent with "tank you vewy mush...it vewy har fi mechanic..." even though that's what it sounded like to my ears.

Our conversation with her continued, and we realized that she had misunderstood our compliments and was taking them as criticisms or suggestions.  We struggled to make her understand, and she replied:

"Thank you very much for your recommendations. We always try do better."

Yep, misunderstandings can also be good.  Not only do they provide conflict; they smack of veracity.  If you've never had a single misunderstanding while chatting with a non-native speaker of your language, then you are different and fortunate, indeed. 

Those are a few random thoughts I had on language.  Have any you want to share?
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* As a speaker of a second language, I know what it's like to make mistakes, and I wouldn't presume to mock anyone who speaks in a language not their own, neither for their accent or their syntax.