Diacritiques

My landlady here in London — I’m renting her spare room while looking for a more permanent place — left for a week-long business trip early this morning. So I wasn’t surprised to find a message from her with last-minute instructions. Understanding it, however, posed an unexpected problem.

The first half of the message was clear enough — an invitation to help myself to any vegetables left in the kitchen. Very nice. The second part, though, read as follows:

Pocket go big bag on kitchen floor can be pulled off stems and 10 mins soak go cold water will revive it

My esteemed readers are probably just as baffled as I was. But I had two or three additional pieces of information at my disposal which, after a minute’s contemplation and a search of the kitchen floor, allowed me to unravel the mystery:

1. My landlady is a native speaker of English and an editorial writer by profession.
2. She is an avid gardener and very much into fresh home-grown food.
3. The message arrived via SMS (”text message”) on my mobile (AmE: cell) phone.

From 1. we conclude that this was not another case of wood flower picks sea cucumber hoof, but simply the result of her being in a hurry.

Number 2 confirms or at least suggests that the topic of the message was garden vegetables (as opposed to, say, voodoo).

Finally, 3. sends us on the right track as to what went wrong. Indeed, over here in the UK, most mobile phones are equipped with predictive text input systems, T9 and the like. And these systems are usually rather crudely based on global word frequencies, without taking context into account. I’ve noticed myself that whenever I’m texting “me”, my own (Nokia) phone will invariably prefer “of”. And the other day, I nearly replied to a text inquiring about my whereabouts saying that I was “at H&M buying rocks”. (Do people really text so much about rocks?)

So “go” isn’t “go” at all — it’s “in”! Furthermore, the key with the letter P also houses Q, R and S. And wouldn’t you have thought it, under the kitchen table there was a carrier bag filled with a huge bunch of rather sorry looking greenery. Resolving two textonyms was all it took.

I’m typing this from the kitchen table — three cheers for wireless broadband — while the rocket (also called arugula or rugola, French: roquette, German: Rauke or Raukelkohl, Italian: rucola, ruccola, ruchetta or rughetta) is recovering in the sink. Here’s a photo of the revivification process about a third way through:

Enough salad to feed an army. Not to mention the other huge bag full of Swiss chard (French: blette, German: Mangold). I think I need a recipe.

Oh, and does anyone have an idea what that exotic fruit to the left of the tap might be, and how to prepare it? It doesn’t look like it’s going to survive the week either…

[The spell-checker didn’t know: texting and textonym; and it’s indeed arugula, not jugular.]

The latest batch of news from the “talking animals” department, and the exasperation it is met with by the linguabloggers reminds me that I neglected to post a particularly expressive keyphrase for a search engine hit that brought someone to my site back in January 2006:

talking seals|rats|dogs|unicorns|horses|animals language log

At the time, I thought this was better than Mark Liberman dopebook or occitan autocollant [autocollant means “sticker”] or apostrophe europe or couilles epingles [épingles means “needles”, and you can look up couilles yourselves]; and more constructive than chirac en prison mp3 download or les angicismes - un problème? or horiflamme shape or chinese words such as serendipity.

(And then there’s the search term that asks the thorniest question of all, and that, unsurprisingly, keeps returning in various guises: nutella masculin ou feminin. Dear visitors: it’s supposed to be masculine, but why, I don’t know.)

(I swear on my copy of CGEL that all these search terms are authentic. And I particularly liked the unicorns.)

(Beautiful French neologism to note down: googleries.)

Mon ami et conseiller personnel en matière d’Unicode, Patrick Hall, s’est mis à la création BD. (Son activité blogosphérique principale est de mettre au point une plate-forme qui permettra, on l’espère, à des bénévoles ou (semi-)professionnels de traduire des articles/billets pêchés dans des fils RSS — un sujet pour un autre jour.)

Je veux bien admettre d’avoir participé à la recherche du titre, mais l’idée de mettre en scène les caractères du vaste système Unicode, en les nommant comme le fait cette norme, « U+ » plus un chiffre hexadécimal, est la sienne à 100%.

Jetez donc un coup d’œil sur Loonicode et faites comprendre à Pat qu’il ne faut pas qu’il s’arrête au numéro trois…

(Reproduction de Loonicode+0003 par Pat Hall avec permission de l’auteur.)

For our second instalment let’s turn our attention to a bit of syntax. This sign adorns a narrow footpath from Charing Cross train station down to the river Thames: If we give the first sentence its final punctuation back and try to group together what goes together, we get, on the surface, this: [It [is an offence […]

Il est toujours intéressant d’observer ce qu’il est possible de déduire d’une erreur. Cette boutique sur Portobello Road (où il y a les célèbres marchés en plein air d’antiquités et de vêtements) possède trois ou quatre petits panneaux écrits à la main indiquant les prix de leurs differents modèles de « scalf » […]

For once there is a good excuse for this latest bout of silence on Diacritiques: For the last month I’ve been in London, after a somewhat hurried move across the Channel. Indeed, if everything goes well, I’m here to stay. I manage to be insanely busy just settling in, searching for permanent work and in […]