Count Smorltalk asks the question: is this the end of the road? When I was little, nobody had had the genius idea of adding wheels to suitcases. I reckon that the late dawning realisation that you could add wheels to bags is a prime example of linguistic determinism: we called it luggage because we lugged it. End of. I was lucky to...
Count Smorltalk does voiceover Many moons ago I wrote about heteronyms. You know, those awkward words spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts. If you only have a second to think about it, how do you know it is second and not second? How did you know it was “How to perfect perfect speech” in the title? Context, as always...
Count Smorltalk cogitates on the machinery of translation Je pense, donc je suis. These famous words, penned by Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode, are a cornerstone of Western philosophy: the fact of thought means that the thinker is real. Later, the words Je pense, donc je suis were translated into...
Count Smorltalk speculates on WER “Well there you are, four candles!’ “No, fork ‘andles! ‘Andles for forks!” If you haven’t ever seen the Two Ronnies sketch The Hardware Shop, do it now: It immortalises the kind of chaos that ensues when one human says one thing and another human hears something else. Genius.Of course, we interpreters listen...
Count Smorltalk fails the Turing test On some dark days in the depths of the Covid lockdown if you had asked my friends whether text messages emanating from my account were generated by human or by computer, they would have answered that the thing the other end was definitely not human. Sadly, at some points during these bleak times I would have...
Count Smorltalk takes a look at the 2nd Edition of Gillies’ seminal work I was contemplating sending these notes into Mme Blog as proof that I had read the book I was asked to review. And I thought I might leave it at that. But I had a niggling feeling I’d get sent away with a flea in my ear and told to do the review properly, so I have...
Count Smorltalk combats an invasive alien species You know what, for a man of few words, I don’t half talk a lot. It’s an occupational hazard for interpreters, talking a lot. Conversely, our punters do an awful lot of listening. Day in and day out they listen to us. On and on and on. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that an essential component of...
The Gospel according to Smorltalk If you, like me, are afflicted by old fogeyism, you may also be a martyr to general grumpiness syndrome. It comes with age and is rarely more acute than at Christmas, when peace on earth and good will to men are the order of the day. “Bah! Humbug!” I say as I stomp around with the hangdog demeanour of a man...
Count Smorltalk raids the minibar – again! British waistlines are testament to the fact that we are a nation of foodies. If any further proof were required of quite how food obsessed we have become, the runaway success of the BBC television show The Great British Bake Off, now in its sixth series and emulated around the world, speaks volumes...
Count Smorltalk on another sticky wicket Just the other day on the radio they were talking about cricket, which, as you will know if you have ever lived in England, constitutes a very high proportion of total broadcast output of the BBC and is deemed a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to discuss at very considerable length on the radio. But...