My latest online column Comment Magazine
One Friday night in the early 1990s, my family rented an old black-and-white foreign film for our weekend's entertainment. I don't recall the movie's title, let alone what any of us thought of it when we viewed it, but I remember very clearly a bit of promotional copy on the front of the VHS cassette's cardboard slipcase, in the space usually reserved for Siskel and Ebert's thumbs: NOW WITH YELLOW SUBTITLES!
My latest online column Comment Magazine
A few days ago I followed a link to Omniglot, a treasure-trove of comparative linguistics for laymen and the lovers of global alphabets, of which I am both. The page I landed on was titled Translations of Hello in many languages and featured a giant three-column table offering standard greetings in 182 languages, scrolling from goeie dag (Afrikaans) all the way to sanibonani (Zulu). Perusing this chart brought two questions to my mind. First, why do I have a link to Kanye West's blog on my browser's toolbar, but not one for Omniglot? And second, wait, a three-column chart? For along with "Language" and "Hello" there was the distinct-yet-apparently-essential column labelled "Hello (on phone)."
My latest online column Comment Magazine
During my last two years of college, I lived with two roommates, and we furnished our rooms pretty much exclusively with things we found in the trash. We were none of us poor, but we were all quite cheap, and for two years running the luck of the draw had placed us in our dormitory's "garbage entryway," a dingy, be-dumpstered archway where the garbage and castoffs of our entire 800-resident undergraduate house was left pending weekly pickup.
The downside of this was, of course, the occasional smell and gloom brought on by the persistent shadows and the huge wrought iron gate locked every day but trash day. But the upside made it almost worth it: if anything good was being thrown out, we would know about it, and, given need and space, would give it a second chance at college life.
A few years ago, a friend of mine was going through U.S. customs at the Blackpool Border Crossing on the highway that runs south from Quebec into New York. He said he had nothing to declare, but then, as the sidearmed customs agent ran through the list of possible contraband (weapons? cash? drugs? agricultural products?), my friend made a fatal pause and then, the question repeated, fessed up: "I have some fruit in my backpack. Is there any way I can bring it in?"
The agent checked the list. Fruit wasn't on it. "I'm sorry, sir; you're going to have to either eat them right now, or give them to me." And so my friend celebrated the return to his home country by sitting on the curb by the side of the bus, glumly splitting, peeling, and eating piece after piece of delectable tropical fruit—fruit he'd meant to share, in part, with me.
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