Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Ponters Pensées: 24.7.16

The Horrendous Santiago Rail crash: Three years on, no one except the driver has been prosecuted, no one has resigned, very few of the victims or relatives have received any of the payments due to them, and the government has said it can't possibly re-do an official investigation that Brussels rejected as 'inadequate'. Spanish justice? Oh, and the proper safety system has yet to be installed on the relevant, dangerous stretch of track.

Kamikaze Drivers: In Spain, these are people who drive the wrong way down the autopistas. We have quite a few of them in Galicia, the most famous being the chap in a wheelchair heading for a brothel. But a surprising entrant in this class of negligent driver this week was a young (North) American guy(un yanqui) who rode his motorbike some way down the AP9 that I mentioned yesterday. Without a helmet.

France: So the vast delays in Dover caused by the French putting only one man and his dog on border patrol has everything to do with the horror of Nice and nothing to do with Paris reacting to the Brexit development. Yes, of course. Why didn't I think of that?

The Internet in Galicia: Pontevedra is reported to be the place in the region with the best service. You can imagine how this statement was received by those of us who had to wait almost 16 years for Telefónica to give us more than half a mega of download speed.

Spanish: The Brexit has been called a spanner in the works of the world economy. This was translated in the media here as un palo en la rueda. Or a stick in the wheel. I always thought the Spanish for spanner was llave inglesa. Which would have made the comment rather pertinent/ironic. But perhaps a llave inglesa is only a monkey wrench. Maria?

Finally . . . Language: The thought occurred to me yesterday that it must have been extraordinarily difficult for the first humans who created language to talk to each other. Imagine, for example, how long it must have taken for the world's very first pedant to get this point across:-
I rather think you should have been using the subjunctive tense there.
And then how even more difficult it must have been for the world's second pedant to reply:-
And I think you'll find the subjunctive is a mood, not a tense.


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