During the 1980’s, I shot for MacDonalds in various countries including France. I had to become familiar with ‘Le Big Mac’, “Les Fries” and so forth. Fries were never French fries in France, just as the Spanish waiter in Fawlty Towers was never Spanish on Spanish TV - there he was Italian.
In France I had to get Le film developed and they had a hell of a time with English words inserted into their language.
On Oct 29, 2013, at 6:56 AM, Howard Leigh wrote: French is similar, in that some 'intellectuals' and politicians think that the purity of French must be maintained against the constant adaption of English and other languages' words! And recently a school in London has decided that no student must ever use 'fillers' such as 'like' or 'you know' etc. All languages modify, adapt and even undergo major changes over time. That's the beauty of language. I find similarities within the 'Art' and Photography worlds. My experience is that the more challenging (unintelligible) the work, the more challenging (unintelligible) the language becomes. Art is a means of non-verbal communication: if it fails for me, expert comment without jargon may help. But obtuse, jargon filled texts merely confirm that (mine?) failure. David Dyer-Bennet < dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote: On 2013-10-26 17:37, Jan Faul wrote:
ON JARGON: AN ILLUMINATING HISTORY OF SPECIALIST SPEECH
by Brian Dillon
Sounds like a fascinating book, maybe I'll find time to read it.
And this looks like a good opportunity to quote James Nicoll on the
"purity" of the English language:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
(Back to me)
There are areas of English where we have four terms for something,
derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the Norman French, the Greek, and the Latin.
"Jargon" is mostly these days taken to mean specialized, probably
technical, terminology. I'm a computer programmer and a science fiction
fan, which puts me squarely at the source of a lot of the more annoying
jargon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries -- we've been busily
inventing so much new stuff, we needed ways to talk about it. (The old
jargon.txt file from the ARPAnet, later expanded and published as The
Hacker's Dictionary, shows how strongly SF fandom's jargon influenced
computer jargon.)
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info Nikon DSLR photo list:
http://d4scussion.com
Art Faul
The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Camera Works - The Washington Post
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