ultra gaelic

Since I can’t get enough of the Economist’s brilliant Christmas issue, let me share two more articles with you:

• “The others” – on being foreign, living abroad by choice, living in exile, and self-deception
• “A Ponzi scheme that works” –all the reasons why the Economist loves America in one article … in case you needed reminding

Oh, I wrote to the editor about the confusion over types of verb aspect and actually got a response. Turns out I interpreted what “it” referred to in one sentence differently from what the author intended, so I retract my complaint.

I’m way behind on work and a conference proposal (though procrastinating on it), so it’s going to take me longer to write about Morocco. In the meantime, I’ll include beautiful photos of the desert like this one:

(That’s not me on the sand dune. It’s one of our Berber cameleers.)

I managed to sort through my Morocco photos, but I need some more time to write narrative. I’m also waiting for my traveling companions to post photos they took so I can supplement my meager collection of 82 photos (not all of which will be described in the narrative, rest assured).

In the meantime, here’s a shot of me on a camel:

I’ve recently come across a few articles dealing with the ways Americans and Britons use language that have solidified some things I’ve been thinking about:

• “My American Friends” from the New York Times Sunday Book Review is spot on and even touches on that which distinguishes Americans (and often Canadians) from most Europeans: namely, chattiness with strangers in social and customer service situations. That and clothing that’s not black.
• “Hi there” from the Economist a history of the loss of formality in contemporary language and argues that this decreases our ability to express intimacy. Lots of food for thought here. Especially interesting to read the claim that Britons are more informal than Americans in their use of languageuse of first names was a British innovation, not an American one as I assumed. I have to say that while they cite as an example Gordon Brown referring to Obama as “Barack”, I think this can be entirely blamed on George W. Bush’s habit of referring to foreign leaders by their first name. He made it look normal for eight years, so why would Brown act otherwise? I also have to say that I had never realized that use of “sir” to address a stranger was an Americanism. I used to think contemporary Russian was deficient in not having a word for addressing a stranger (compared with French or American English), but now I see that Britons also suffer from this!

While I’m sharing articles, here’s another from the Economist: a fun, short introduction to linguistics (a faster read than the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which belongs on every coffee table). The Economist confuses different types of verb aspect (perfective/imperfective versus progressive/nonprogressive), but I’ll forgive them.

My coworkers—and, it seemed, most of Dublin—disappeared as Christmas approached, so I found the bus ride to the airport on Christmas Eve, and the airport itself, to be incredibly quiet. I had some extra time, so I checked out the bookstore, where all the top sellers were about the financial crisis in Ireland—how bankers and politicians conspired to rip off the little man.
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I’m back from holiday in London and Morocco. Had a great time; blog posts to come. Despite taking the day off work to recover (laundry, shopping, emails, etc.), I didn’t find time to sort through my photos today.

In the meantime, though, I’ll see if I can generate some conversation here by sharing some “before and after” photos of my beard. Beard, you say? Well, I couldn’t shave in the desert, so once we got to Marrakech, I looked like this:

I trimmed it a bit, ending up like this (taken this morning, back in Dublin):

I was tempted to keep the beard, but I decided that trimming it was going to turn out to be a lot of work. So I’m back to normal:

I know beards are trendy these days in the US (but not at all in Morocco!), and I’m always a bit contrarian about trends. Is it time for me to give in to the facial hair phenomenon?