News You Can Bruise for 2007 February 27

Sumana and I are going to India soon so I'm trying to learn Kannada. I've never been very good at learning languages. Sumana tried to comfort me by saying that I'll know enough to impress people and then they'll switch to English. Except that's not why I'm trying to learn Kannada. Me: "I'm not afraid I'll be stranded in a foreign land with no way to impress people." Sumana: "Huh, I guess I kind of am."

We watched some Hanna-Barbera-esque cartoons narrated in Kannada, with Sumana translating. Sumana gets better at understanding a Kannada sentence the closer it comes to a complaint. She knows "very angry" and "become angry" and "this little whippersnapper's stopping me from doing something in my own house", but we had to look up "love". Oh, she also knows "bath" (snana).

The Ruby Cookbook has been translated into French. Rather than an idiomatic title they chose Ruby par l'exemple, which I'm actually glad of: I think the pedagogic power of the Cookbook has been undermarketed. Plus, it was translated by Eric Jacoboni, who did some review for the original Cookbook.

Speaking of idiomatic translations, the French translation for O'Reilly's "In A Nutshell" is "en concentré."

Sumana should enjoy this fake infomercial.

I've noticed crutches I use in my long-form nonfiction writing; for instance, in the Ruby Cookbook I relied very heavily on the semicolon, for no good reason. The "See Also" sections at the ends of recipes are full of semicolons when I should have just used periods. I actually got rid of those semicolons, but many of my edits were lost by the incompetent post office.

In the REST book my crutch is the phrase "for instance". For instance this, for instance that. Again it can usually just be cut. I think I got most of them.