Welcome to my Wordland (October 4, 2007)

The survey my wonderful friend Tina has just posted gives me the possibility to talk about me and words, words and I...as you know, I teach languages and I work with words at all times...words are my daily bread and I am fully aware of how much power they can be endowed with...I remember having taken a PH-certified test about what is my best skill...and well...it tuned out to be linguistic...what a surprise!

They say I started to talk properly before I even walked and it seems like I only had only one twist of letters which I corrected quickly and which was pretty unusual...of course, we're talking about Romanian here so it will be a little harder to explain...I used to invert the "F" with an "S", rather unusual since these are two wholy different sounds...So instead of saying "cafea" (=coffee) I used to say "casea" and instead of saying "Ce faci?" (=how are you?) I was saying "Ce saci?"...Anyway, it seems that soon I loved to talk all of the time, I was unstoppable, but it seems like I only used to say words the meaning of which I already knew or it was deducible...

Then it seemed to me that foreign languages weren't that foreign and I chose to study those cause it was not a great effort at all...Then I started writing things, for myself, but never using meaningless words, just trying to respect them at all times...No form without meaning for me, it's too easy the other way around...

Anyway, I'd like to write more but before I'll get to bore you good people to death I'll just take this survey...my answers won't be that spectacular...first because I'll have to adapt them for English...and second, because there are so many words spinning around in my head all the time...sometimes mixing the languages...which is so funny and which is why my friends say that I'm like a TV aerial antenna reproducing foreign channels...

Oh, I watched a documentary once and they were saying that for each language that a person learns a new centre for speaking is developed by the brain and they proved it while operating on a lady's brain...and she was awake so they won't damage some important centres...That lady could speak English and Spanish and the moment they touched her speaking centre for Spanish and asked her a question in Spanish she answered in English that she couldn't understand that language...wow!

I also talk very fast but I keep that under surveillance (which is an effort) and some people might say that sometimes I talk very slow! It's just when I happen to be an interpreter...with the headphones on...you really have to be fast!

OK, my survey answers:

1. What word (or expression) do you use far too frequently?
In English it would be "just"...since I often tell people what I was "just" doing or...to soften things a bit I use expressions like...I "just" want to know..., I was "just" wondering, that's all...etc...etc...etc...Of course, being a word that I use too often, I hate it.

In Italian I use too often "allora" and my friend Sonja knows what I'm talking about here...People just (!!!!) use it all the time when they start saying something, anything...ot when they just (again!) want to inquire about everything and nothing..."Allora?"...

In Romanian...is just... "Ce faci?" (see translation above)

2. What word do you use not frequently enough?
Ah, that's an easy one...I don't use frequently enough the expression... "Sorry, can't help you" and sometimes I wished I would have.

3. What word do you use when swearing is not appropriate?
When swearing is not appropriate I don't swear...I rarely do and most often...when I drive.

4. What's the most recent new word you learned?
I'm not really aware of what exact word I've recently learnt...

5. What's a word you've invented? (alternate question: What needs a word but doesn't have one?)
In Romanian when it's a hailstorm and there are all those little ice pieces around...we don't have a word for it...we say "It's raining with hailstones"...and because in Italian one can say it with one word ("Grandina") I say "grindineste" in Romanian and people always laugh at that.

6. List five favorite words!:
In English I love all those adverbials ending in a "-ly"....really really truthfully loving them, the sound of them...then...I like the word "marvel"/"marvelous", then..."Supercalifragilisticespialidocious"...I totally adore this one...then..."espresso" pronounced by the English speakers....well...I like all words, really...