The cork from a bottle of Masi.

Tags: language

From a can of Stockmeyer's lentil soup. Good soup, mind.

Tags: language

In French, there are two different words for pride. 'Fierté' is pride as a positive quality, mommy's pride and joy, I'm proud of my country. 'Orgueuil' is pride as a fault, he was brought down by pride, he's too proud to admit he's wrong. Pride in English is not so confusing for us, we figure out which you mean from context. Imagine a foreign language where the word for both 'strong' and 'brutal' is 'kliptok'. "Your son will recover, he's a kliptok young man." "There was a kliptok murder last night."

But in Spanish, they have only one word for both sorts of pride, and it's 'orgullo', clearly the same root as our negative pride. But they use it for the positive pride too. Note that I say 'positive pride' and 'negative pride' as a really clumsy and incorrect attempt to convey that these two thing, because of my language, are not the same thing to my mind. So when the subject of pride comes up in Spanish, to me it's like the word for both 'strong' and 'brutal' is 'brutal'. "Your son will recover, he's a brutal young man."

Tags: language