Every so often you’ll see an article that declares that word x in language y is untranslatable into language z — this last almost always being English. The truth of it is that most of these statements are simply wrong and often show themselves to be wrong as they proceed to tell you what word x means in English. It is the case, of course, that we don’t always have a single word in English that serves the same function as the single word in the exotic language, so sometimes it takes us a few words to express pretty much . . . [more]

“The family of Harper has long been settled in Sussex Drive.”

Parliament, it would appear, is demiprorogued, which might seem as impossible as being just a little bit pregnant. Yet the will-he, won’t-he, has-he, hasn’t-he uncertainty persists so long as the definitive decision is . . . well, prorogued. What is certain, though, is that the House is not in session, which gives us a little time to prepare for what we might say when we again rise up on our hind legs and give voice to our thoughts. And for what we may not say even though we may . . . [more]

It helps to have a set of “just so” stories, in order that we can find, grasp and share data somewhat more easily. The Roman alphabet is one such “story,” for example. Almost everyone can recite it, so we can hunt through an alphabetized list of words quite swiftly. And I guess in a way our numbers are another handy “accepted structure” for managing information in the world, so accepted in fact that they seem to be a part of the world rather than a construct. These and other like inventions can be compared to maps, which, after all, are . . . [more]

As people who work in law we’re used to squeezing every last drop of significance from a fact or a word, framing it this way or that way so that a particular facet glints. Even the presence, absence or location of a single comma can be a matter of moment (though the significance of the curls in “comma cases” is exaggerated by the disingenuously wondering press). So we know the importance of the small in ways that others might find hard to appreciate.

For example, in these times of political disaffection (are there ever other times?) you’ll hear people say . . . [more]

Canadians have invented a lot of high-profile things — the Canadarm, the method for extracting insulin, IMAX projection — but what catches my attention are the small things that disappear into everyday life as though they’d always been there. These Canadian inventions are rarely sung (well, if something can be “unsung,” surely it might also be “sung”).

First among these is the humble egg carton. Yes, a Canadian invented the thing in which you buy and, likely, store your eggs. Joseph L. Coyle from  Smithers, B.C., a newspaperman of all things, came up with a working prototype in . . . [more]

You get a three-fer this holiday weekend, a trio of nifty things that came into my ken this past week.

The Tune

Thanks to a blurb in the Globe and Mail, I was introduced to Moby, the musician who walks among us as Richard Melville Hall and who specializes in electronica, ambient music, downtempo, and the like (if that last can make any sense). Take a listen to his collaboration with Cold Specks, a Canadian singer living in London whose haunting alto is spot on for the song, A Case for Shame:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/98822483″ params=”” width=” 100%” . . . [more]

Those of us who write for and read Slaw spend a lot of our time deriving meaning from books or other documents, not an easy task some of the time, particularly when the tomes are old and the language archaic. Imagine, then, how frustrating it must be for scholars when they come up against a text that utterly defies comprehension. Such is the Voynich Manuscript.

Created around 1420, likely in northern Italy, the 200 vellum pages are beautifully inscribed with line after line of what would appear to be text written in characters that are unique to the book. It . . . [more]

I like reading in bed. In fact it’s got to the point where I must read before falling asleep, even if it’s only a line or two. It probably all started with being read to as a child, a bedtime ritual both pleasurable and soporific, and a fitting introit to the land of dreams. At some point that ritual became self-administered, though the stories were rather more exciting as I recall — exciting enough that I, like so many of you, read on under the covers with a flashlight after the official “lights out.”

In bed at the end of . . . [more]

I’m not an online game player — computer games are one of those things that I know I should like, and maybe even would like, because of their high degree of sophistication and the amount of creative energy that gets invested in them, but that I just never got into. (Opera is another of such wrongly-neglected-by-me things.) But I must say I’m tickled and intrigued by an online teaser for an upcoming game from Ubisoft, not so much because of what the game might be but rather because of the ingenuity of the teaser itself.

The game is Watch Dogs . . . [more]

English comedy has made a good name for itself this side of the Atlantic. But good as the shows we get here are, there are comedy acts as good that never really make it out of Britain, in part because of the BBC’s decision to restrict much of their programming to the island whose inhabitants pay the fees and taxes that support the broadcaster. This goes part way to explaining how I had never heard of Mitchell and Webb, a comedy duo who have a couple of popular BBC TV shows to their credit (and who, incidentally, began their . . . [more]

People now say comprised of instead of the “proper” composed of (comprising needing no prepositional help to gather things together). Meld is nearly universal now for “merge” or “join firmly,” despite the fact that it started life not too long ago as a term from canasta describing a declared set of cards (melden v. German: to announce). Language changes. I resist, being a conservative in this matter. Eppur si muove.

But not everything in languages changes at the same pace. Or, to put it another way, some words are more resistant to change than others; we hang . . . [more]

Today’s the summer solstice. So what do you do when the sun just won’t quit shining? You go outside, of course. And what do you find outside in the summer? Bugs, that’s what, mini-critters that creep, crawl, buzz, bite, flit and fly. Now, few of us have the . . . wisdom? . . . to appreciate these minuscule machines in the flesh; but cartoon a hopper or a spinner, and we like them just fine.

Sometimes more than just fine. A French company, Futurikon, has for some time now been making charming stop-motion, short, animated films under the . . . [more]