lost in translation

“The particular problem between French and English derives from the meager quantity of insults in French and the abundance of them in English,”

Take that at face value, eh.

Shout out to tywkiwdbi for the heads up on this, who shouted out Harper's for the original article.

Hennyway, translation in question stems from an exchange between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a French dude. When Sarkozy reached out to shake the man's hand, the man replied, “Casse-toi alors, pauvre con! ”

After some debate and a bunch of boring text about how that translates into English, "Fuck off (or get lost) asshole/dumbass" was kinda decided on.

What I found interesting was, as a typical American-centric asshole, the different subtleties of a phrase, sentence, word that go into translating from one language to another. Something as seemingly simple and black and white as "I crapped on your face" may mean something totally different across the globe. And in Japan, I'm sure it can have hundreds of varied sexualized meanings, and that comes mainly from my experiences streaming porn.

We've probably all taken foreign language classes and it seems we get caught up in learning the foreign equivalent of an exact word or sentiment. I know I have. Yeah, there's usually a direct equivalent for most nouns, and many verbs, but often times we fail to think about the context. A different language is essentially a diff'rent way of thinking.

Anyway, the hyperlinked articles above present those intricacies in an interesting way.

The takeaway here is that America didn't invent thinking, English, language, or communication, but I'm cool with giving us credit for inventing cats.

that's just the way it works out

That's just the way it works out?

What? Fuck that. Are you kidding me?

That's just the way it works out.

Think about what that means for a second.

Out for brunch yesterday, we had a free Groupon or LivingSocial or something. Basically the brunch and unlimited mimosas were both free; if you ordered a side of bacon or something, you paid for that.

Pretty simple, right? Everything was great, even the $3 side of bacon that we ordered. A couple mimosas each, a smoked trout omelet, and a beef hash dish thing, life is good.

Then came the bill.

We were both initially perplexed when the $3 side of bacon came to a total of $7.63. Upon further inspection, the total of what we ordered, including the six $7 mimosas was taxed. That's cool, whatevs. But here's the kicker.

That total came to $7.20. The extra $.43 came from taxing the $7.20 again.

No kidding, they taxed us twice!

But that's STILL not the kicker!

I asked the waitress about it, at Heckyeahwoman's prompting, not sure if it was just a mistake or what. I even prefaced my question with, "I hate to be a dick about forty three cents, but..."

Her response?

"Yeah, that's just the way it works out."

I got so pissed off that I reflexively scribbled a big fat zero on the gratuity portion while uttering probably a little too loudly, "fuck that". Seriously felt that anger literally boil up inside of me, like on the cusp of breaking out in a sweat. Imagine if I'd have been like nine mimosas (instead of three) into my day.

The forty three cents doesn't matter; I don't care about that. I hated the answer, and that's not even an answer. That's a blow off. That's an insult. That's a smarmy "you just got taxed twice and I don't think you're going to do anything about the pathetic reply I just gave you".