Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Thoughts from Galicia

Well, my daughter's doctor friend confirmed that the Accident & Emergency centres of the UK's NHS operate in exactly the same way as the Urxencias here in Galicia. Only it's worse. The NHS operates a telephone line which serves to send more folk to the A&E centres than would otherwise be the case. Hence yesterday's reports in the press that patients can wait in an ambulance for as long as 8 hours, thanks to a lack of beds/gurneys. Clearly, I got off lightly

Another abused gerund - El coaching. This appears to mean 'training' but it gets worse:- La persona que realiza el proceso de coaching recibe el nombre de coach (entrenador), mientras que la persona que lo recibe se denomina coachee.

Talking about funny words . . . The menu of the restaurant I dined at with friends tonight took a novel approach to the item Rape. This is normally given as 'Monkfish' in English. But not here, where it was translated as 'Toadfish'. This, it seems, is a Spanish alternative for Rape - Pez Sapo('Toadfish') - and it reflects, insisted the waitress, the ugliness of the fish. Spanish bluntness? Or poor marketing?

On the same menu there was an item called Cocochas de Merluza. Now, cocochas means 'cheeks' but it's not a word which would be known even to those with a reasonable command of Spanish. So it was a bit puzzling to see the English version given as 'Cocochas of Hake'.

But perhaps the best thing about this menu was the translation of the Spanish heading Revueltos. This is one of the rare examples where the Spanish is shorter than the English, for it means 'Scrambled Egg Dishes'. Admirably, perhaps, the menu kept it short and had it as just 'Scrambles'. Which is a word I think we should keep.

There was an article in today's Voz de Galicia on the number of Galician drivers who are on the verge of losing their licences because of the points they've lost after committing offences. It contained a useful list of said offences and the points lost in their respect. Interestingly, you can lose 3 points for using a mobile phone, having earphones in or using your satnav. I wonder if the last 2 are offences in other countries.

Der Spiegel reports that a combination of La Crisis and Brussels pressure have forced the Spanish to give up the hallowed tradition of the siesta, meaning the (crazy) split day. Allegedly, this has become 'a thing of the past' in the pursuit of increased consumer spending and, thus, higher profits and related tax revenue. Well, you could have fooled me. We still have 'the dead hour' (actually 2 or 3 hours) in Pontevedra. Maybe not in Madrid and Barcelona.

Finally . . . The critic A A Gill was clearly unimpressed with the performance of Al Pacino in his latest film, which is (not) about Phil Spector:- The writing started off tentatively, a bit too theatrical for the small screen, but then Pacino got hold of it and made it too ­theatrical for a theatre, too theatrical for a circus, too messianically over the big top for a biblical revival. He makes Brian Blessed look like Sooty. Al has ceased to be an actor in the sense that he exists in a given scenario with other actors and interacts. He has transcended into a monomaniac emoticon, with a character that is entirely self-generated from his memories and previous performances.

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