h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I quite liked Reloaded. It was funny in places, which really helped. And though there was a lot of pseudo philosphy in it (or as I prefer to call it, "bull$hit"), but you could make out vestiges of Existentialism if you tried really hard, what with the emphasis on choice and control.

Yes, well, but, gawd didn't they just spell out the heavy philosophy in neon letters ninety feet high and then lay it on with a dump-truck. Will and choice, but...guess what????Lerve conquers all. Well, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a better take on that one ( if you ever watched and saw the weirdly witchy Willow get all the power-mad-badness loved out of her! ) What a confession, I've watched Buffy!!!Well, I was zonking out in front of the TV this evening and flicking the channels, and lo and behold, there on Beeb 2 was Buffy, and WWW getting all that badness just lerved out of her! Serendipitous timing, or what?

Now, shall we be serious for a moment?

Naah.

Certainly naah.

Is that a tautology, or an oxymoron? Sounds like the uncertainty principle is inherent in "naah." Can "naah" be anything other than certainly not, or subtly uncertainly yes? You see how uncertain I am? You can nail down my position, but not my velocity, unless you collapse my wave function, whereupon I will be obliged to take a quantum brush to the remaining waves in my thinning hair. Naah.

Naah: a dismissive noise. No principles discernible therein, nor any moronic oxen, taut or slack.

Sam Beckett on quantum: "The horse-leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary."

I think that "naah" is a bit like "no comment". In that you are certain that you mean "naah", though what you mean by "naah" is not certain.

This is getting to sound like Mandarin, in which language there are literally fifty different meanings of the word "li," depending on tone and context ( Mandarin is a seriously sound-deprived language ). However, there are fifty different characters for each of those "li"s. So unless we had an ideogram/character for the precise "naah" variant we want, we will always be stuck with that "naah" uncertainty. That's the principal uncertainty of the "naah" uncertainty principle.

If naah didn't exist we would have to invent it.

If naah became definite we would invent a new one.

Naah . . . maybe that's overstating it.

Using Bill Bryson's "The Story of English" as my source, the Beijing dialect of Chinese is even worse off. There are about two hundred meansings of the word "yi", based around tone and context.

Looks fiendishly like the same word to me -- but then I couldn't tell a ptarmigan from a tarmacadam.

So, is your drive covered in feathers?

It's not actually the Story of English actually. It's "Mother Tongue". Contains such interesting anecdotes as when the President (I forget which one) of the US's translator translated "I want to learn the desires and wishes of the Poles" as "I desire Poles carnally".

Which must explain the origin of the US strip-club tradition of pole-dancing.

. . . and the phrase 'up the Pole' for pregnant?

And a little gem about an airline that was allowing people to fly en cueros (nude) rather than en cuero (on leather seats).

How's this for a translation. Satres' play LES MAINS SALES (A2 French text) is literally "The Dirty Hands" but is also translated as The Assasin (giving the plot away in the process! )

It didn't look that hard to traanslate . . . unlike Anouilh's "Le Bal Des Voleurs" which translates all right as "The Robbers' Ball" but this doesn't show the transcription fault -- it turns out to be a miswriting of "Le Bal des Fleurs". Perhaps "The Fouler Dance"? Naah.

Have you just finished A2 French? I'm just about to start it. We're doing "Boule de Suif" though, which is, well interesting. Ish.

There's a word in latin that translates as both guest and host.