[lace-chat] Re: travels by air and US customs
Moving from lace. On Apr 29, 2005, at 13:44, Janice Blair wrote: I thought of Tamara when she was off to see her son as it was around the time they banned carry-on of lighters. Could see her gasping for a fag at the end of that journey if she had to wait to buy some matches. :-) Thankfully, the NYTimes mentioned it ahead of time. DH spoted the notice and passed it on, so I was well-prepared :) 5 boxes were permitted as carry-on, and 5 boxes I took having beefed them up first - each box had a box and a half in it. American matches are very stingy on the phosphorus; they're as likely to go out the moment you strike them, as last long enough to light up a cig, so need a lot of them. Especially when your layover is in Chicago, also known as "Windy City" San Francisco and the Bay Area are almost as bad, but buying a (cheap, disposable) lighter was a priority once I landed; we got one on the way to my son's (and I left it with him, against the next visit) BTW, they have to be cardboard matches that you are allowed to carry on. That's as maybe, but the notice in the paper didn't say so, so that's not what I took with me; I hate the flimsy paper thingies. And I went through 4 security checks with them (in order to smoke, you have to leave the secure area. You have to leave the airport altogether), and not an objection to be heard :) Also, nobody objected to the whacking long (and medium-sharp) pin on my lace brooch. I figured it would be banned if I put it in my jewelry box (carry-on luggage) but decided to risk wearing it (you are, usually, offered the option of mailing the "terrrorising tools" to yourself, if discovered). And it didn't alert the scanner at all - at none of the 4 beeping arches... -- Tamara P Duvallhttp://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Re: French (pardon mine)
On Apr 29, 2005, at 19:42, Weronika Patena wrote (in response to Joy
Beeson):
English got its habit of French interjections from a little event in
1066 -- but where did Polish pick it up?
Several centuries later... Around baroque, I think, maybe? My
history is
pretty bad, but I remember French was very fashionable for a while.
French was the language of the Polish court and diplomacy in general
since about 1500. It replaced (Medieval) Latin as "ligua franca", with
Latin being kept, to an extent, for scholarly purposes. Later on,
French remained the foreign language of choice of the Polish educated
classes, in all 3 Partition areas (in two of which the official
language was German, in one Russian). So it's no wonder that Polish
became peppered with phrases of French origin. That changed after WWII,
and now everyone learns English :)
Do you also have latin stock phrases? (e.g.: etc., i.e., q.v.,
Q.E.D., gustabis non disputandem est, habeus corpus, quid pro quo,
carpe diem, . . . )
Yes, we do, although not as many as in English.
That just proves how many changes happened in the 35 years that divide
me and Weronika :) When I was her age, anyone with highschool education
- whether they took Latin or not (I didn't) - was expected at least to
understand a whole lot of Latin phrases and most of us used them, too,
in everyday speech though, usually, in an abbreviated format.
A student called tot he blackboard to "recite" the lesson was as likely
as not to say, bravely "Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant"... Every math
theorem had to be ended with "q.e.d." and you had to know what it
meant. So, in discussion, to demolish our opponent, we'd say: "quod
erat, d" ("d" standing both for the original "demonstrandum" and for
the Polish "dupa" - arse)... We used "de gustibus" (without the "non
est disputandum") and a shrug, when sneering at someone else's bad
taste... "Quid pro quo" was so common, it became "kwi pro kwo" and, for
a while, was even a name of a night club/comedy program. We didn't say
"carpe diem"; we said "idziem na karpia" (we're going to have some
carp"), because everyone was supposed to know what the phrase was a
take-off of... When I took a U-prep course (total waste of time, BTW
), we mocked our teacher by saying "sine kwa-kwa" (the sound we
believe a duck makes). Not because we didn't understand it, but because
he used the proper "sine qua non" far too often, and we thought him
pretentious... I don't think there was anyone among my acquaintance who
didn't understand the partially Polish, partially Latin: "cum bibo
piwo, stat mihi kolano krzywo" (when I drink beer, my knee is
crooked)... Etc, etc.
Habeas corpus? No, not in a communist system :)
--
Tamara P Duvallhttp://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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Re: [lace-chat] Re: [lace] RSS Feeds?
On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:44:32 EDT, you wrote: >What's RSS Feeds? The ultra-short explanation is that an RSS feed is a way of grabbing headlines from web sites, with links to the full stories, to keep track of changing content. There's a decent summary here: http://www.whatisrss.com/ To use RSS you need some RSS software. Some browsers, e.g. Opera, Firefox, include RSS, others e.g. Internet Explorer, don't. There are also separate RSS programs. Then you find a web site that offers an RSS feed which you want to keep an eye on - for instance the BBC news site, or I use it to keep an eye on computer related news at http://www.theregister.co.uk. Look for the letters RSS often orange coloured. -- Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down, byte, byte, byte! Steph Peters, Manchester, England [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scanned by WinProxy http://www.Ositis.com/ To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
