(0800)
14. Hallelujah, Kari
13. This climate BS must stop right now
12. DAD also sent
Thomas Hood
1799 – 1845
No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon—
No dawn—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing ’em—
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all—no locomotion,
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go”—by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
11. Today’s French lesson
DAD sent this:
Lors d’échanges virulents, des policiers israéliens ont entouré deux gendarmes français, en empoignant l’un d’eux de force et en le mettant au sol avant de l’embarquer dans une voiture de police. Le fonctionnaire, qui s’était identifié, a hurlé plusieurs fois « Ne me touche pas ! ». Les deux gendarmes ont été ensuite relâchés et il n’a pas été précisé pourquoi les policiers israéliens étaient entrés sur le site.
La réponse de Paris n’a pas tardé. « L’ambassadeur d’Israël en France sera convoqué au ministère dans les prochains jours », a indiqué le Quai d’Orsay, ajoutant que la présence de forces de la sécurité israélienne sur ce site de pèlerinage ainsi que la brève arrestation de deux gendarmes français n’étaient « pas acceptables ».
The actual story is that two Israeli police were sent by car into a sensitive zone patrolled or maintained by the French, not unlike in Berlin, way back when. All sorts of fisticuffs ensued. Paris backed its officers etc. etc.
The back story is that in certain zones, e.g. on the Temple Mount, the loony jihadis see it as the green light for the final conflagration, so it’s a red rag to the goat breeders.
That’s not my interest in the article … my interest was in the language. In Russian, there’s an expression “malenki slovarni zapas” … small word store, meaning restricted vocabulary. The issue is not not knowing the rules, most endings etc. but actually finding the words to use.
In reading the two paragraphs above, which were pretty easy really … I think most of you who had schoolchild French, you could do it … the issue for me was “lors”, which really does alter the context. Lors means during and Lors d’échanges means During exchanges, which is similar to how we might say it. Just why I’d forgotten keyword “lors”, in the same way perhaps as “maintenant” … wwweeellll, there are holes in the brain’s “zapas”, no?
