B. U. G. S.

I asked tenestre and Adelheim to go ahead and work out a translation of the Mantra where THEY are. Now that I have gotten over the shock of finding people who can go ahead and do that on their own, I am happy to see they are DOING it.

So Adelheim, being one of us, is checking out his Norwegian version of the Mantra tenestre worked out in Norwegian. He checked he Norwegian version out with tenestre in our comments. Which is exactly right.

So Ole Bob, being Ole Bob, just HAD to give him a hard time for it.

I said,

“Adelheim, just because I am from Pontiac, South Carolina, you foreigners think you got me FOOLED!”

“No way.”

“You and tenestre are talkin’ FRENCH at each each other, and I know when folks talk French, they’re sayin’ something DIRTY! ”

Comment by Bob

A decent human being would be deeply impressed by the fact that tesestre and Adleheim are proceding on their own. A decent human being would be deeply impressed that these two guys are working in a foreign language, English, and it never even occurs to them they would have problem with it.

They don’t.

So much for decent human beings. Let’s get back to me.

I not only expect them to handle English without a problem, I expect them to understand a Deep South sense of humor. They know I want them to keep this up.

What RELIEF from saying something and worrying the other person will reply, “So what you are saying is that my mother is ugly.” I COULD sit here and worry that Adelheim might read into this that I am objecting to his using Norwegian in my Blog, when I don’t know Norwegian.

I do not object. Quite the opposite. Unlike the neocons or William Buckley, we are not here to save the English language, we are here to save our RACE. If you need to write in Basque to do that here, I say, “Go Biscay!” If I didn’t assume tenetre and Adelheim knew that, I wouldn’t have made the joke.

One of the embarrassing moments in my embarrassment-filled life happened when I was working on a German brick plant in the 1950s. My boss did his correspondence routinely in German, English, French and Italian. I remember once when this German had to translate between French and English. To sum it up, dealing in foreign languages was not exactly Mount Everest to him.

If you are an American teenager in an all-German town, you become very, very American indeed. You get very touchy about people putting Americans down. So one day my asked a very innocent question that shamed me. He said,

“Robert, why is it so many American writers put untranslated French into their books? If their readers want to read French, why don’t they write the book in French?”

So I had to explain to him that the readers don’t actually READ French. If a William Buckley or some other pseudointellectual puts untranslated French into a book, it says, “You and I, unlike those peasants out there, took FRENCH at University.”

This makes the readers feel really high-toned, uptown, and all the rest. My boss looked a bit puzzled. I don’t think he actually BELIEVED a grownup could be that silly.

They are.

When I expect tenestre and Adelheim to understand my Southern rural sense of humor, I am complimenting them, but I am also bragging on ME. I don’t have to tell anybody I have been many places. My proud provincialism says, “If you can’t tell I’ve been around, so much the worse for YOU.”

I know several people who are experts on Classical languages. Most of them are from the Deep South and speak with what others call a “deep Southern accent.” But they can translate between different versions of Greek or Greek and Latin without hesitation. They don’t try to impress people with untraslated bits of Latin.

They can speak Greek and they can talk trash.

In short, like tenestre and Adelheim, “They got nuthin’ to prove.”

To me that is such a high level of sophistication it never even occurs to them use the word.

Much less PROVE it.