by David Deans
g) Having claimed to be on an important business trip, you sneak back into the office, with the intention of catching up on that filing backlog. In a specially adapted window you espy a neat slatted box device, neither in nor out of the room. You say: “No, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to these apparitions of Mr. Hash either—Oops! Look out! Someone’s trying to defenestrate the __________.”
See also commentary section on Social Convention below. Note that, in this connection, a habit can be seen as a mortally truncated eternal recurrence. Please note also that some of these examples are largely unhelpful. Discuss this with teacher.
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Generally speaking, the “getting used to” form not only ferries us from the strangeness of a novel experience to the domesticated familiarity of the status quo, as Bob so helpfully points out, but it involves a principle of domesticating yin-yang reciprocity too. It is not merely a question of a subject getting used to objects, but a question of objects getting used to subjects in return. On that Cat in the Hat morning, for example, my having to familiarize myself with a new human eye, to chairs, doors, plastic spoons, the topography of the house, the positions of light switches, the ready mastery of bilabial fricatives, etc., was really only half the picture. For while things might have appeared strange to me, how strange I must have seemed to things around me. Tables, chairs, plastic spoons, light switches, throwing quizzical glances at one another, like a herd of stunned gazelles (imagine the hushed David Attenborough commentary) in the midst of whom an old boulder has been suddenly transformed into an affable lion. This tense form was a onetime darling of the turtlenecked, jazz-jiving, chain-smoking, bleak-mongering, rive-gauche, postwar, pre-head-butt existentialists—alas now extinct.
One of the beauties of the “getting used to” form is that it will apply to virtually any situation. It does not apply, however, to the following situation: tragically the milkman is trampled under a cow. His stand-in—the gentleman currently delivering milk to your doorstep for your morning bowl of Cheerios—is your long lost identical twin. On the drive into work your car is overtaken by the electrical milk cart, driven by this long lost identical twin—and you find that you are tailing behind yourself. When you then arrive at your office, you find your twin is already there at your desk, screeching a nice big cheery Morning, Mr. Hash! like some kind of parrot. For the rest of that day, long lost identical twin proceeds to follow you about the office, mimicking your every gesture, repeating everything you say. Hungry or not, he shadows you to the canteen at lunchtime, decides he must have a Belmont Gazette too when you set off to the newsstand—and in any case, most vexing of all, proceeds to read your copy over your shoulder. On the first day this happens, his behavior is a trifle exasperating, to say the least. But when he turns up the next day and the day after that, things with the long lost identical twin only get worse. You cannot and do not get used to those sorts of apparitions.
Please note how there exists an elegant, refreshingly Edwardian variation of “used to” and that is “would do,” as in, say, “When the shops opened, the citizenry would dance in the streets and throw flowers on the keepers”—a more literary form, imbued perhaps with a sense of melancholia, a tinged nostalgia for “times gone by” not found in the more matter-of-fact “used to.” The technical term for this form is the past indicative. Do not confuse the past indicative with the conditional form—for example, “If the shops opened, the citizenry would dance in the…” Note also how the past indicative “would do” form cannot be applied to the verb “to be.” We do not say “I would be” (in the sense of “I was”), but rather “I used to be,” or more simply “I was.” In the case of enduring habits, when the thing we used to do is something we still in fact do, we do not use the “used to” form when referring to the nascent stages of our habit—since this would imply we have given up the habit in question. Please note also how the past indicative form will sooner or later wither away and is therefore not worth learning.
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Canard du Jour…Écoutez et Répétez!
You and your briefcase are in a swanky rive-gauche restaurant in Paris, decorated in Third Republic fin de siècle style, with gilded bell-less mirrors on the walls. From your upstairs candlelit table there are window views of an eminently perchable Eiffel Tower and argonautless bateaux mouches plying to and fro on the river Seine. The strains of a romantic accordion can be heard playing at the bookstalls, locked up for the night on the quayside trottoirs.
For this exercise a small, well-thumbed pocket-size dictionary with phonetic spellings and soup stains has been placed at your disposal.
Having established, malheureusement, that oversize portions of hamburger and fries do not appear on this evening’s menu, you have asked the waitress (in an abysmal hee-haw accent) for what you hope to be something close to traditional beans on toast. If all has gone well, the waitress will now bring you—
a) Rôti de petit lapin à la moutarde, or
b) Foie gras chaud poêlé aux blancs de poireaux, or
c) Canard Flaubertien à la rouennaise, or
d) Col de perroquet farci accompagné de mange-tout “à la façon de Mme. Hash,” or
e) Croque madame accompagné des haricots blancs à la charentaise
While waiting for the waitress to bring the order, the student should pair the remaining menu items with the appropriate translation listed below on the napkin:
Stuffed parrot neck with Mrs. Hash–style beans/roast baby rabbit in mustard sauce/duck in nice dreamy sauce/fried duck liver with leeks in a sherry sauce.
The correct request for beans on toast should of course have been item e—the croque madame avec haricots blancs à la charentaise. Unfortunately, the waitress seems to have brought you what looks more like a fromage de tête with a side dish of cèpes à la sarladaise (brain cheese with edible boletus). In order to remedy the situation you should now say which of the following:
• Je ne croyais pas que j’avais commandé un potage de cerveau, ou
• Vous n’avez certainement pas écouté comme il faut, ou
• Du fromage, donc, ou
• Yuck—take it away!, ou
• Est-ce qu’il faut que j’attende le croque madame—par hasard?
Having toyed with the fromage de tête with a silver fourchette, the student should now:
a) order another fromage de tête with a side dish of cèpes à la sarladaise ou
b) ask the waitress if she would like to join you on the midnight bateau-mouche trip, ou
c) demand a canard à la canardaise—compliments of the chef, ou
d) leave the restaurant abruptly and seek out the nearest Le Fast Food, ou
e) have the fromage de tête tactfully replaced with a croque madame
As you wait for your croque to come, ask for the sommelier’s wine list, from which after great deliberation and detailed debate regarding vintners’ soil husbandry, feet hygiene, the socioeconomic impacts of methods of calibration of pH and sucrose levels, etc. (all in French; exaggerated hee-haw accents permitted—up to a point)…you decide to stick with your original order of a brown fizzy drink with bubbles and high sugar content with which to wash down your madame.
When the croque arrives, you readily ascertain that it does not quite meet your expectations of what a real croque madame ought to taste like. Once more with the help of your handy pocket-size phrase book, upbraid the waitress for bringing you the deficient repast. Stress that the recipe for a genuine croque should use processed cheddar and not Gruyère, and that the egg (or “oeuf”) should remain “à cheval.” In addition, the chef would do better to avoid sprinkling in fragments of coquille at the scrambling forchette phase. Ask her to forward your comments without further delay on to the house chef, Monsieur le (petit) chef—a short Dijonian dwarf whose erect starched chef’s hat you have been watching pass back and forth at the serving hatch with industrious frequency. Have her make him understand that while that kind of croque may be acceptable to th
e indigenous gourmands, for the more discerning palate of the passing tourist such fare will simply not be tolerated.
“Monsieur ’Ash, c’est (pas) moi!”
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What a pity that the author of such a toothsome contribution on edible comestibles cannot be here to join us! What dainty dishes the cook, the author—the thief!—has left on our table. No, garçon—don’t touch that napkin—let’s keep a place set in case he manages to make it after all.
For the monocular, monochromic monolinguist, however, this latest offering heralds a less palatable, less digestible possibility altogether: that Bob might be about to extend the reach of his mischief beyond the realm of his own native language. Not long ago, I expressed a concern vis-à-vis the appropriate use of the sky, stating, not unreasonably, that it should remain the preserve of the naturally airborne—aware perhaps of the danger that exposure to foreign tongues might give Bob bright ideas about new playgrounds for discombobulatory prankage. (“I’m off to Acapulco to brush up on my Spanish, back in the office on Monday.”) But really, to tell the truth, this was an idle concern. The fact was that Bob already had ample enough access to other languages as things were—without having to so much as leave the runway tarmac at Belmont International Airport.
Parallel to Bob’s picture book world there exists, under the Acme Institute’s dependable aegis, a range of parallel picture book universes, each corresponding to a different language, each more or less taking the same basic format as Forward with English!, each presided over by their own folklorish equivalent of Bob. (We might note in passing that only Forward with English! is presided over—in tandem—by a parrot.) Now, not only did Bob already have ample access to this mutually exclusive material (arranged in an inviting lamplit display case in the office foyer), but he was already able to commune with his real-life counterparts, who, for cost-cutting reasons, had been installed by Acme no farther afield than on Remington Drive. We’ve already met Señor Gonzalez from the Spanish version with his orange tree and hammock in the garden, located not as some might have thought in some well-watered suburb of Madrid but in fact just two doors down from Bob; we have alluded more than once to Signor Brambilla from the Italian version (coat over shoulders in traditional disinvolto manner, milk cart thwarting Ferrari in the driveway). And now here’s Monsieur Lafayette in his Breton pullover and beret (baguette under an arm, and a string of onions draped over the handlebars of his bicycle) with his expert knowledge of recipes.
If Bob ever fancied importing the odd mangled foreign phrase into his own course, all he had to do was borrow one from the front desk and rip off. To flesh out some exotic detail or add a little “foreign color” to his examples, he could rip off—or parrot—one of the foreign course books. It was as easy as nipping over the fence to bring back a badly aimed Frisbee armed with notebook and pencil.
On the other hand, if Bob thought that by sneaking over the fence into the neighboring yards and plundering those Acmatic siblings to Forward with English! he’d be able to derail this editor in chief—then I’m afraid he has underestimated the use to which his mascot had been putting his own free time.
It is a well-known fact that when a parrot is left alone for some time, a talking device of an electronic nature should be left running in the room. To the parrot, a humble wireless set, a left-on TV, can provide an endless source of amusement—the devices proving not only great companions in themselves, but often proving instructive to the bird’s education itself. Adhering to this fine tradition, the Hash household enjoyed a regular ebb and flow of freebie foreign-language learning audiocassettes via Bob’s workplace (borrowed from that lamplit display cabinet in the foyer) and, in addition, it subscribed to a mail-order company (a subsidiary of Acme) from which it received audio novels, read out by voices that sounded suspiciously like members of the cast from Forward with English!
As she was usually the last to leave the house in the mornings when she set off for the shops, it usually fell to Matilda to slot a tape into the cassette deck and leave it switched on (continuous loop facility). It is in large part thanks to Matilda’s thoughtfulness that I have thus far been able to defuse Bob’s cheap literary peccadilloes when they appeared on the horizon; it is thanks again to Matilda that I will now be in a position to disentangle any polyglot miscegenation that Bob cares henceforth to peddle.
Let us now brace ourselves for an onslaught of this new breed of tamper!
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Phone Exercise
“Können Sie mir auf der Karte zeigen, wo meine Golfschläger sind—machen Sie schnell!” = “Can you show me on a map where my golf clubs are very quickly?”
Now you have to imagine that you’re going on a golfing tour of the Scottish links, renowned for their rugged seacoast views and treacherous bunkers. At the airport in Belmont you check in your clubs and board a flight to Prestwick International. However, on arrival at Prestwick, you are told that your golfing equipment has been mistakenly directed to Hamburg.
Student is given use of the customer service desk at Prestwick and put through to the lost property desk at the Hamburg airport—the task being to explain the situation, in German, to the Hamburg luggage assistant, stressing that you have a seven thirty tee-off on Monday morning. At student’s request, a Bakelite phone apparatus (with exterior mounted bells) may be supplied to enhance authenticity of the exercise.
Before picking up the phone, student might like to look over the following useful key words and phrases:
die Golfschläger = the golf club
der Golfball = the golf ball
das Fenster = the window
es ist ein Unfall passiert = an accident has happened
ich füsselte mit der mit Luft Stewardess = I played footsie with the air hostess
er kann sich gut in andere Leute einfühlen = he is good at putting himself in other people’s shoes
(slang) Nur schwätzen kanste, da steckt nichts dahinter = all you do is blather on; there’s nothing behind it
nachplappern = to parrot
Gott im Himmel = goodness to Betsy
Student should also bear in mind possible pitfall puns involving the word “link”:
linkisch = clumsy
Augennach links = eyes to the left
and
weder links noch rechts schauen = not to let oneself be distracted
None of which has anything to do with golf courses along the rugged windswept coastal regions of Scotland.
Student now will be ready to pick up the receiver and translate into German the following inventory of his missing golfing equipment: a Bennington pouch golf bag with a soft-brushed matte black leather trunk; a set of Dunlop LoCo 450cc woods with titanium-reinforced graphite shafts; a hook- and slice-reducing good luck mascot Deacon Brodie “spoon” with a persimmon shaft and blackthorn head protected by a tartan sock; a full set of Wilson Deep Red irons (for green approaches and rough management); in the left-hand zipper pocket of the bag itself there will be half a dozen brand-new apostolic dimpled Precept D-Force guttie 392 octahedron-pattern golf balls with velocity-enhancing ionomer cover and patented in-built Bergsonian time-warp effect; in the right side pocket there will be a Footjoy stay-soft golfing glove with an advanced, long-lasting, performance-enhancing leather grip; in the central upper pocket (or sporran) an assortment of Brush T wood professional tees in a variety of handsome impressionist’s pastels together with several impressively birdie-rich scorecards and a partially nibbled cuttlefish (ein Tintenfisch) belonging to your pet parrot.
As you come to the end of your flawlessly translated descriptions, Heinrich at the lost luggage desk in Hamburg happens to catch sight of an unidentified golf bag emerging through a flap and trundling along the rubberized conveyor belt in front of his desk. Hauling it off (clatter of lugged clubs heard on the other end of the phone line), Heinrich now launches into an itemized listing of the bag and its contents. Here, the student’s task is to translate any phrases remaining in English into simultaneously
rendered German:
HEINRICH (dismantling conveyor-belt golf bag): Ach so, wir haben sie hier ein dubbin-waxed, vermilion-hued, Ping Hoofer with mesh sleeves containing a three-quarter set of torque reducing boron-shafted Billy Knights…
YOU (interrupting Heinrich before he goes any further): Nein. Das ist nicht meine Golftasche!
Undeterred, Heinrich appears to have espied another golf bag on the conveyor belt and has now brought it forth for a similarly delivered description….
HEINRICH: Ja, we have now ein Titliest polymer golf bag with a weatherproof travel cover, a full complement of Fastrax clubs, a set of Slazenger XTC overrun golf balls with a 408 dimple two-piece solid core—
YOU: Nein, nein! DAS IST NICHT meine Golftasche!
A veritable parliament of golf bags seems by now to have mounted the conveyor belt and is circling magisterially and unclaimed in front of the luggage assistant. One golf bag after another is lugged off the belt and described to you over the phone in flawless German. Surely one of zeez [sic] golf bags will turn out to be yours!
HEINRICH: Here ist ein Titliest opal polymer-bolstered trunk containing a somewhat depleted set of Future steel shafts, flight wing pockets containing seventeen Top-Flite Infinity golf balls. In the tee slots seven unused Eco tees—
YOU: Nein, DAS IST NICHT meine Golftasche.
HEINRICH: Okay. We have here also a set of Mitsushiba T-Pro betas in an albino white Bunker Ping Professional—
YOU (doodling on golfing scorecard with a tiny pencil): Nein, DAS IST NICHT meine Golftasche!
HEINRICH (helpfully): Or what about this ladies’ set of Ogio O-Zone pink-shafted brassies with fur-lined cosies and an ovule-rich pouch of marsupial Volvik Crystals and a packet of emergency tampons? (The image of the Ogio O-Zones and the pink-shafted brassies recalls to mind the gently molded morphology of an inland course with wooded glades, smooth mown fairways, where, of an idyllic summer’s afternoon, the student was once invited to make up the numbers on a languorous two-ball ladies’ foursome. Student stops doodling and with spare non-telephone hand starts practicing “air swings”—sending imaginary Volvik Crystals through wistful parabolas into the Prestwick airport concourse with his trusty invisible niblick.)