On Richard Griffiths, 1947-2013
Of course he's the fucking farmer.
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On Girl Good At Test
@Brooklyn Battery in a US context, think "yellow cab driver" not "African-American cab driver"
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On In California, the Winners Aren't Apologizing To God For Being Liberal
@Mari D the business in your example can sell the building for a zillion dollars; it'll be just fine. If it's an old lady having to sell the family home, that's a problem; if it's a business having to make business decisions, that's not a problem at all.
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On The Truth About Voting Machines: What's Real And What's A Nutty Election Fraud Conspiracy
@Daniel Burr Littlewood They're government contractors; of course they're corrupt right-wing organisations producing shoddy products. However, that doesn't mean the products are designed to create (or have the effect of creating) partisan biased results.
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On Super Sexy Women's Halloween Costumes
It'd be churlish and pedantic to point out that Northern Ireland doesn't have a western coast, but that absolutely isn't going to stop me.
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On A Takedown of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial
A Memorial To The Murdered Jews of Europe is actually better, as it establishes the Holocaust firmly in the tradition of the antisemitic murders that Europeans had committed in the name of nationalism and Christianity over the preceding millennium or so - rather than the "aberration under hypnotic influence of uniquely evil madman" that there's a natural tendency to chalk it down to.
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On Translation Difficult
Jeremy: be a love and learn to read before casting insane aspersions, eh? Yes, of course I know Mersault is a pied-noir, having, y'know, read the book in both English and French. I.e., he's a middle-class 1950s colonial. Hence, rendering him in English as a middle-class 1950s colonial makes sense. Rendering him in English as a contemporary American, or by not translating French terms, doesn't.
(and I'm not disputing the article's correctness over the French use of 'maman'; I'm disputing its correctness over the English use of 'mother').
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On Translation Difficult
While contemporary Americans might only use "mother" as a clinical descriptor, that isn't the case in 1950s middle-class colonial English - and Meursault is a middle-class 1950s colonial.
An English colonial chap in Meursault's position would have said "today Mother [did X]", and that would have been normal. So it's obviously still the right term to use, and trying to use terms like "mommy" or "mom" in a standard translation would be ridiculous and anachronistic.
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On Killer Cops And Newspaper Wars On The California Coast
@Ralph Haygood Everything Ralph said. Seeing that "was" was a distressing moment after reading an amazing piece...