Share Some Gris Tea With Me
June 22, 2008
When I first heard Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday sometime in 1991 (after moving to Dallas and being exposed to "alternative" for the first time), I was terribly confused about one of the last lines of the song: "share some gris tea with me". Of course, I originally thought it was "grease tea," which equally made no sense. When I learned to play the song on guitar, I found the lyrics and stood corrected. But not enlightened. Well, thank you French class! Now I know that gris means "grey" =).
Now to geek out: I was so excited last week when I discovered that "right", "droit", and "derecho/a" each have the same three meanings. Three languages, three different words, somehow carrying the same meaning? How strange is that?
- opposite of left
- strait / forward ("right in front of you", "right there," she said, intimating an invisible line between her finger and the object)
- legal entitlements
We read the first page of L'Étranger by Camus this week. It only took me an hour to write down the unknown vocabularly and translate it 90% correctly. At that rate, it would take me 4.5 weeks of "full time" (40 hours) reading to finish the original edition (182 pages). Well, that's not entirely true — after all, I was taking the time to write out good English, not just read the thing. So maybe half that. Only 90 hours for this little book.
And now for something completely different: I just watched my first episode of Battlestar Galactica. And no, not that one. I mean the original series, episode two. It was bad in so many ways, and yet I enjoyed it more than almost any show on the big four broadcast networks today (leaving out PBS =). NBC has aparently wisened up to the potential of their old creative content. And I only had to suffer maybe two minutes cumulative of Toyota Corolla ads for the 45 minute episode.