From "The Rabbi's Cat" by Joann Sfar

"You know what?  We should live like hermits in a cave...

"No, Allah wouldn't be pleased.  We'd be like Jonah, preferring things to people"

"So?  Can't we say we've served others, they wear us out, we're old and want peace?"

"No."

"When you see new things, look and don't speak right away.

....you could look in silence"

"neither speak nor express an opinion?  I've never done that."

The painter is happy...he paints countless landscapes.  

"This is the desert.  What can you paint here?"

"The colour."

"Blue for the sky, blue for the dunes, that's dull."

"I can use other colors too.  And I can swap the dunes' calm lines for something else."

"Why come here to reinvent everything? You could have done exactly the same in Russia."

"No. Not exactly."

"I prefer looking at nature than your daubs."

"Me too.  That's why I observe closely before I begin."

Asterix

Even better than Google

Avoid Mixing Homonyms in Expressions, and All About "Eggcorns"

Mixing homonyms is similar to the effect of "misheard lyrics" 

(also called Mondegreens) 

Eggcorns is a newer term 

described in this article  

meaning misheard words that still retain their original meaning  

(the word eggcorn is still recognizable as acorn, as long as it has a context)

Like:

 it's a doggy-dog world (instead of dog-eat-dog world)

I like "all-timers" instead of Alzheimers  

"Southern Peru gives us one of their best cymbals"
image from your mum, eating out in Peru.  

The translator has switched cymbals for symbols.
I might excuse the error since translating menus is no easy task, and this was overseas,
but I see examples like these
constantly
out there in the internet wilderness:

"the utensil serves a duel purpose"
(it should be dual, meaning 2 purposes)

 I need to tell you the backs story
(should be back story, as in background)

Our industries pray on
(prey on, as in bird of prey)

police found cashes of stolen items
(cache/caches meaning hidden in a secret place, from the French)

don't waist your time
should be: don't waste your time)
(This expression has 2.4 MILLION hits on Google.
See what I mean by internet wilderness?  really?  2.4 million?
Google is pretty smart and asks if I mean don't waste your time.

for all intensive purposes
(all intents and purposes) (that's an eggcorn)

these cookies are home maid
(home made)
Unless, of course, your employee prepared these cookies.

I saw this in an otherwise well-edited enjoyable book :
along with his cadre of confidents
(should be cadre of confidantes--people in whom he confides or trusts) from the French.

There is no excuse for this now that we have devices in our hands with processors more powerful than the ones that put man on the moon.

you need to click over to this article "Word Up" from the Washington Post at least to see the clever cartoon.

Examples of Anguished English

Reviewing the menu:

"I'd like the "banana in a blazes with ice cream" please.

No, wait,
make that a pancake with rum, in a blaze if you don't mind."

image: by your mum
an actual menu from a nice restaurant in Peru

Imagery from the Book "Cannery Row"

"Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row.  In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light...cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground"

"around them the evening crept in as delicately as music"

"little water snakes slipped down to the rocks and then gently entered the water and swam along through the pool, their heads held up like little periscopes and a tiny wake spreading behind them."

From Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
photo courtesy of John Wise

Mental Pyrotechnics

This is Boris Johnson whose wacky plans for fireworks on the Big Ben clock in London failed, leaving Brits confused New Years Eve 2013.


"Somewhere in a remote recess of his brain mental pyrotechnics were at play;
a sort of intellectual pin-wheel sprouted senseless ideas and suggestions of senseless ideas."
from The Chase of the Golden Plate by Jacques Futrelle (1906)

Tidbits from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

"I woke beside a creek in a bed of kudzu vines.  A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones. darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air."

"farmhouses with wide porches and tractor-tire swings suspended from ropes on nearby tree branches; windmills sprouted up beside them, their giant silver petals creaking a little when the breezes rose."

"There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed....
...........I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one."

"I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T.Ray.  He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse.  It seemed like this should tell God something."

"The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time out, the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."

"orange and pink swirls still hung in the sky from sunset"  image from southern living.com

"darkness had settled in and the fireflies sparkled around our shoulders"

"cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus"

"What happened when two people felt [pain] would it divide the hurt in two?  make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?"

Rosalita the Riveter

from Time Life Pictures Getty images as posted in NY Times May 21, 2006

They were welcome during WWII ..cast as heroic braceros..but in the 1950s Mexicans were rebranded as dangerous, welfare-seeking wetacks"

They Treat Us So Bad

Once, when visiting Teotihuacan near Mexico City, my friend and I stopped to chat with a vendor.  My Anglo friend told me (in English, and in front of the vendor) that I shouldn't buy because it was probably a fake.  I had no answer when the vendor responded "they treat us so bad, even in our own country."

"nearly every immigrant group has been caught at that crossroads for a time, wanted for work but unwelcome as citizens...but Mexicans have been summoned and sent back in cycles for 4 generations"

Picking cotton in Texas in 1919, image from New York Times

image from latimes.com


"They say that 'free trade' is supposed to help us.
We get manufacturing jobs like my son-in-law's at the General Motors plant in Silao.
That's fine with the American companies.
It's expensive for them to pay car workers in the States.

But when it comes to agriculture, this free trade is killing us...
the Americans refused to stop selling their cheap corn in Mexico...
more and more people will try to cross the border now,
to find work.
This, while the Americans are trying harder than ever to turn us back.

From Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs

Tidbits from "Orphan Train"

"the nubby white bedspread like braille under my fingers"

"You are as handy as a pocket in a shirt!"


about Lutheranism:
"I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best
and we should all just be kind to each other."

"...their wails penetrate my skin like tiny needles..."

"Dandelions dance like sparklers in the grass."

"he had yet to eat a chili that was too hot for him.
His taste buds were as anesthetized as an
Indian bureaucrat's conscience"

"He looked frail,
the bags under his eyes sagging
like deflated balloons hanging from a light fitting the morning after a party"

I Can't Tell What You're Thinking

"I have a very limited intelligence--
I only understand what people TELL me.
from The Duchess of Duke Street


......................................

depression is a symptom exhibited by

smart people thinking about their complicated lives

...

the result of a life examined.

Sometimes I make the mistake of

comparing myself to people who have things:

cars, houses...

but 

I have invested all my time and energy

in people,

and learning,

and experiences with my family.

And then I remember that those other people

have lives that consist

ONLY

of what I do not have

An Authentic and Honest Mother's Day Poem

Words of Complimentation

I was gonna write a poem,
but then I realized I can't write poems.
I bought this card from the store,
and forgot to send it.
I got hungry
so I ate the chocolates.

I got too lazy to water your flowers
Do you like them wilted?
I forgot your special day
and I partied at my friend's house instead.

Don't worry,
I'll send you a present in 2 weeks,
and then it will be mixed-up with someone else's mail.

But my heart's love will always connect
and that is 1,000,000 times more valuable
than chocolates.
Right?

p.s.  Can I borrow $20?

A Mother's Duty

"You must never be deflected by unpleasantness."
...........

"Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will be as clear to you as if it was a white line painted down the middle of the road."

from The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag. by Alan Bradley

An Air Force Officer with Integrity

"He rolled along with every inexplicable order from his superiors,
every foolish act of his inferiors,
and every abrasive personality that the military could throw at an officer."

from Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

What's it's Like to Raise a Family in Two Paragraphs

"Those were the salad days...the sleepless nights, the wailing babies, the days the interior of the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, the times I had 5 kids...and a wife in bed with fever.  Even when the fourth glass of milk got spilled in a single night, or the shrill screeching threatened to split my skull, or when I was bailing out some son or other...they were good years, grand years...One minute Marlena and I were up to our eyeballs and next thing the kids were borrowing the car and fleeing the coop for college."

from Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

"So many battles fought, and for what?  Most of these battles weren't even for The Good Fight; they weren't part of the war against Satan.  The battles for which Nurse Verna girded herself in armor--both physical and spiritual--were battles that Nurse Verna fought in order to control the people, environment and events happening around her.  They were Verna's personal battles, not God's battles."

From The Girl Who Married an Eagle by Tamar Myers

The Pershing Chinese, a short overview

In the US, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbade absolutely any Chinese immigration for 10 years for both skilled and unskilled labour, and put new restrictions for Chinese citizens already in the country.

After the Exclusion Act expired in 1892, it was extended another 10 years under the Geary Act. In 1902, it was made permanent and continued to regulate immigration until the 1920s when the US Congress repealed all the exclusion acts but left a system of limits and quotas on Chinese immigrants.

Chinese immigrants who ran small businesses were often resented for their success both in the US and in Mexico. Because so few Chinese women immigrated to the Americas, some Chinese men married Mexican women, adding to the already explosive combination of discrimination and racism in both countries.  Chinese Texans (vulnerable to deportation, and barred from becoming US citizens) were frequently targets of persecution by politicians and businessmen who blamed them for poverty and corruption.

In Mexico, some Chinese had supported President Carranza against Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa, and were targets of retaliation by Villa's forces with reportedly whole families killed including Mexican wives.

On 19 March, 1916, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico and the US responded with The Mexican Punitive Expedition.  The US Army was not able at that date to provide logistics for such an expedition so they advertised for labourers in a New Mexico newspaper.  Hundreds of Chinese immigrants responded and quickly cleared brush and set up a military camp

Chinese labourers also provided logistical support supplying hot food, laundry service, soap, towels and other supplies for 10,000 to 12,000 US troops, with 6,675 of these troops moving about 400 miles into remote areas in Mexico.  Also significant was the Chinese practice of boiling water to use in drinks, rather than using untreated water from local water sources.  This likely protected US troops from all manner of waterborne illnesses.

During the campaign, hundreds of Chinese living in Mexico also joined the expedition and supplied additional logistics support.  About 524 (numbers vary in different accounts) Mexican Chinese requested permission to return to the US with Pershing's Army in Feb 1917, fearing reprisal for having supporting Pershing's forces.

In 1919, Pershing, who now had the highest rank ever given to any member of the US armed forces, remembered his Chinese supporters and began a campaign to allow the "Pershing Chinese" to become US legal permanent residents as long as they worked for the US Army, thus helping establish legal precedents for immigrants seeking political asylum.


Sources
Chinese Exlusion Document
Who Were the Pershing Chinese
this Albuquerque Journal article
wikipedia

borne vs bourne vs born

BORNE is the correct spelling meaning "to carry"
as in
food-borne illness
or 
the empress was carried in a litter borne by 4 servants"

image from wikipedia

BOURNE is a last name, as in "The Bourne Identity"
or company names like "Waterbourne Real Estate"

It is not a British spelling vs US spelling,
but Google is so smart it will pull up both words in your search

BORN is how people arrive on the earth

Like Hitler's Germany, the current Russians are practicing a little bit of geo-political jujitsu.

"The US has something called the Monroe Doctrine, which says we're not going to allow any foreign activity anywhere in The Americas, and that doesn't just mean North America, that means South America too, that's ... a massive zone of control."  .........we've taken over places to defend American minorities before"

We understand the idea of  "sphere of influence."
"Buffer states" and "zones of control" are not a thing of the past.
We don't think they are old-fashioned ideas when it comes to our sphere of influence.

"When Adolph Hitler and the Germans (before the Second World War broke out) were trying to state that there were territories outside of Germany that should be handed to Germany;  the excuse that they used was that there were Germans in these areas...and they were being persecuted by their neighbours" (that was the problem with taking pieces of Imperial Germany and making them into new countries after WW1)

"So when we propose NATO Membership for  Ukraine, the Russians just have to sit back and take that?"

From Common Sense with Dan Carlin  podcast  22 March 2014 (at the 5-12 minute mark)

[my note: Also, think about the 1916 Mexican Punitive Expedition led by General Pershing into Texas  to protect US citizens living in Texas, which at the time belonged to Mexico]