wshaffer

Was just in a meeting where someone used the phrase "robbing Peter to pay Paul", and then immediately amended that to "borrowing from Ganesh to pay Shiva." Which, as far as I can tell, doesn't seem to be an expression in general use. Did make me wonder if there are any common idioms for this concept that aren't based in a Christian context.

So, a twitter conversation today about weird similes in love songs made me think about my favorite weird simile in a love song, from the Song of Solomon. I know it best translated as:

Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.

However, a google search turned up this page of various translations of the verse. It's remarkable how a difference of a word or two can completely change the tenor of the line. Some favorites:

New International Version:

You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, majestic as troops with banners.

I don't particularly care for "darling", and "troops" just makes me think of Pentagon press briefings. However, "majestic" might be closer to the intended effect than "terrible".

New Living Translation:

You are beautiful, my darling, like the lovely city of Tirzah. Yes, as beautiful as Jerusalem, as majestic as an army with billowing banners.

This is the "Y'all totally don't know what Tirzah is, do you?" translation. Feels wordy to me.

GOD'S WORD Translation:

You are beautiful, my true love, like Tirzah, lovely like Jerusalem, awe-inspiring like those great cities.

Where my army with banners at? This is the "Forget Tirzah, you're not entirely sure what Jerusalem is," translation.

Bible in Basic English:

You are beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, as fair as Jerusalem; you are to be feared like an army with flags.

Bzzzt! Thank you for playing, but no!

There are a lot of valiant attempts on that page, but I don't think any of them really improves on the King James version. What do you think? Anyone want to make a case for "you are to be feared like an army with flags"?

Probably as a result of the Stephen Pinker book I'm reading, it occurred to me in the middle of a meeting yesterday that certain aspects of trademark law are fighting a battle with the way human minds conceive of language.*

In this meeting, we kept running up against what I think of as the Xerox(TM) problem. You know how Xerox doesn't want you to say things like, "I xeroxed the report"? Because if Xerox becomes a generic, they lose their trademark, and verbs, I suppose, are sort of inherently generic, being more abstract entities than nouns. So technical writers for Xerox probably end up saying things like "photocopied with a Xerox(TM) copier" rather than "xeroxed".

I've got a really cool trademarked feature that I write about, and I always have to use constructions like "photocopied with a Xerox copier". Such constructions are clunky. They automatically build an extra prepositional phrase into your sentence, which makes things really tricky if you have additional modifiers you need to include. (Imagine things like "the pages photocopied with a Xerox copier that belong to Mike...") The truth of the matter is: there's no one in the world who has more interest in protecting our trademarked noun than we do, and yet, in all unofficial written and spoken communication, in anything that doesn't go in front of a customer, we turn that noun into a verb, because it's just more effective communication.

It's a marvel to me that any verbable noun stays trademarked for any length of time at all.

* This is probably far from the only instance in which intellectual property law conflicts with fundamental aspects of human nature, but that's a whole 'nother post.