Alasdair Wilkins on Science Fiction’s Greatest Legal Minds – Revealed!

Judiciary Pag, Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed, might technically be more of a judge than a lawyer, but I’ll still include him for a couple of reasons. One, he probably started out as a lawyer, and two, he’s easily my favorite minor character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy saga. Judiciary Pag was most famous for sentencing the people of Krikkit some ten billion years ago to imprisonment in a Slo-Time seal after they tried to kill everybody in the entire universe (which, he points out, he feels like doing the same thing some mornings).

He was hated by pretty much all of his colleagues for his unprofessional manner and supremely laid-back approach to the law. (For instance, he marked what he rightly recognized as the most important moment in legal history by sticking some gum under his chair.) He got away with all this because he was, in fact, the greatest legal mind the cosmos would ever know. Pag or, as he preferred to be known for reasons that made sense only to him, Zipo Bibrok 5 × 108, handed down his ruling on the Krikit matter to great acclaim and thunderous, which he would have been around to receive if he hadn’t already slipped away with one of the more attractive members of the jury to whom he had slipped a note about a half hour beforehand.

And several more.

(Via The Seamless Web)

The winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee was stromuhr.

Anamika Veeramani of North Royalton won by spelling the word “stromuhr” correctly after the last of the other nine finalists had tripped up, Scripps Howard News Service reported. For those unfamiliar with the word, it is of German origin and means an instrument for the measurement of viscous substances.

I hope they pronounced it correctly.

Online spelling bee tutoring programme.

Spelling bee protesters (scroll down for photos of placards, e.g. ‘Enuf is enuf’, ‘All you need is luv’ and so on.

(Thanks to Karen)

BBC News reports that Amanda Galsworthy, who was the interpreter for three successive French presidents, has been talking at the Hay Festival.

President Mitterand once had Galsworthy say to Margaret Thatcher, ‘This interpreter was one of yours, but now she’s one of hours’. Allegedly Mrs. Thatcher was offended and some years later took her revenge on the interpreter:

“Years later after a lunch she called me over and said ‘I have some advice to ask of you’,” Mrs Galsworthy told the audience.

“Then, in her very loudest voice, so that everyone could hear she said ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, a great friend of mine has a son who has failed all of his exams’.

“‘I suggested that he become an interpreter. What do you think?”‘

She added: “It was horrific because she was still prime minister so I could not say what I really felt.”

Of course, Mrs. Thatcher only nearly failed her university exams.

Mind you, I didn’t realize Margaret Thatcher had a quiet voice.

Margaret Thatcher doing the dead parrot sketch (via Boing Boing)

(Thanks to Ekkehard)

There are far too many legal translation topics available at the moment, but here is a break. Picture from Wikipedia (but not Wikimedia Commons):

Munch was surely expressing anxiety, but the colour of the sky was correct at the time, after the eruption of Krakatoa. From the Independent:

With its dramatic red sky, Edvard Munch’s The Scream is renowned as a depiction of despair. Less well known is the fact that the Norwegian artist was merely recreating what he saw in Oslo in 1883. Professor Olson’s team found that the eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia led to a series of sunsets in Norway which made the sky seem ablaze.

The Economist has an (anonymous) article on loanwords in German and the fury they arouse. It’s quite well informed, and reminds me of studying the history of the German language at university.

Germans have been resisting foreign words ever since they began writing, says Falco Pfalzgraf of the University of London. German is “watered-down and oversalted” with foreign words, said the founders of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (“fruit-bearing society”) in 1617. Such groups taught Germans to prefer Abstand to the French Distanz and Augenblick to Moment.

It mentions Lena Meyer-Landrut (it appeared on May 27) and Walter Krämer of the Verein Deutsche Sprache, who I referred to at the end of my last entry.

A Neue Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft was founded in 2007. Mr Krämer’s Verein, with 31,000 members, publishes an index of 7,200 anglicisms, four-fifths of which, it claims, crowd out good German words. A pet hate is “blockbuster”, originally a 1942 coinage for city-destroying bombs. Mr Krämer, who lost six relatives to Allied bombing, prefers Kassenschlager (“box-office hit”).

Needless to say, the comments go mad. Criticism or comment on English or German is like a red rag to some bulls. (This reminds me of Christian Säfken’s entry on the ECHR Gäfgen decision, Das Schöne am Recht: alle sabbeln mit). GlobalHelen from Canada denies the Economist’s right to an opinion:

When Brits travel to Italy or Spain, they usually do not speak one word of the foreign language and stick in their British bars together with their fellow countrymen. As far as I know, this is very unique in most European countries. Italians, the French, the Spanish, Germans, they have a different attitude, their TV and radio is full of international and multicultural programs. The majority of these people learns and speaks at least one foreign language to some extent, something you can definitely not say about the British population.

So what exactly was it that makes the British believe they are able or entitled to write – let alone make a judgment – on foreign cultures trying to save their cultural heritage in times of globalization, increasing loss of identity and alienation?

I can’t agree with everything GlobalHelen says – for isntance, I am still looking for international and multicultural programmes on German TV (all foreign films are dubbed, and even in Britain I saw Wallender in Swedish with English subtitles this May), and even cable TV has hardly anything except CNN and BBC World News, OK some French and Turkish, but Italian is an extra subscription. But I think she may be right: we Brits shouldn’t express an opinion about anything, least of all language.

Speaking for myself, I see Walter Krämer trying to defend a language against a natural process. But then I’m not a linguistics expert.