Our Pet Queen & Polish False Friends
Sep 15, 2022 8:16 pm
Hi,
The Queen died a few hours after I sent out my last newsletter. Sad news and certainly a seismic change for the UK.
Other than The Queue, the most fascinating consequence is how you realise nobody really remembers the Queen not being around. You have to talk to people in their 80s to hear any recollections of George VI and they're vague. The Queen is all we really know. The only monarch that had a longer reign was Louis XIV of France, who clocked in two more years for a total of 72.
I think once Charles' face is on all the money, that's when it might start feeling real for people.
Polish stuff
Last week I posted a thread on Twitter about Polish false friends. No, not Poles that mislead you and break your heart, but Polish words that look like familiar English words but are not what they seem.
Among the comments, somebody quite rightly pointed out that I had failed to include "no", one of the most well-known false friends in Polish. This felt ironic since it was the only false friend we wrote about in Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words. I guess my mind didn't include it since it had already been covered!
In case you're wondering after last week how my Twitter bio is doing, the A/B test has concluded my old bio has performed 10% better than my new one 😅
An amusing start, and I will be changing it again. Thanks to those of you who wrote to me with your suggestions, I will be using them for the next iteration! 🦉
Non-Polish stuff
I finally published a new blogpost on Procrastilearning.com. It's a bit different to the ironic meditation tips I posted last time. I hope you enjoy it. It's a true story about our dog Kika.
(Be aware that I've had problems recently with my SSL settings for both procrastilearning.com and translatingmarek.com and it may tell you the link is not secure. Hopefully they'll be working normally by the time you read this 🤞)
You'll notice that for the main image, I've used a weird illustration of a sad dog. The image was actually generated by the AI platform Midjourney. If you've not heard, there is now a swathe of these image generators. Craiyon is another and probably the quickest to start using if you want to have a go.
Just put in any sort of description and the AI gizmos will get to whirring and churn out a selection of images based on what you wrote. It's pretty bloody amazing to be honest. For this new article, I used the term "an angry Yorkshire terrier begs for food"
I also used Midjourney to make a new image for the meditation tips article using the term "meditation gone wrong, head on fire":
I think I'll just use AI-generated images every time. I had a concept about making crappy looking Photoshop chops, but I find it a bit time-consuming since my skills are rudimentary.
For example, I recently made the chop below of my son making an unexpected appearance on the cover of the 1992 Beastie Boys album Check Your Head. It took me 10-15 minutes which is ridiculous compared to the creation of those AI images - they took me more like 5 each.
Book recommendation of the week
The book is a pro-monarchy argument that is irritating for both monarchists and republicans alike. Essentially, Higgs argues that the British monarchy are like our pets, born into a gilded cage to entertain the rest of us and to give us a sense that the country is being personified as somebody reliable.
It's quite brilliant and well worth your time.
Here are three passages that caught my attention and go together nicely:
"Modern people still continued to personify their country, even though rationally it made little sense, because that is just how their brains worked. You can see this in the Russian talk of the Motherland or the German talk of the Fatherland. Making the President of the United States the personification of America was problematic, because at any one time about half of the country hates the president’s guts. If you loved America but really hated Bush and/or Obama, then you did not want to conflate the two. This failure of the American head of state to successfully symbolize the nation may explain the importance of the flag in the American imagination."
"Once the irrational nature of the head of state is understood, we find that the practical but fundamentally shambolic nature of our neurological wiring offers an explanation for the failure of the Australian people to ditch the British Queen in the 1999 referendum. The offered alternative, that of a government-selected president serving five-year terms, appealed to rationality rather than magical thinking. But because the position of head of state does not exist for rational reasons, applying logic to the problem of filling it is to miss the point entirely."
"The personification of a nation is supposed to capture the character of that country, and preferably promote the greatest and most noble aspects of that character, so the idea that this will be best achieved with a politician or an ex-politician is not widely held in the general population. Very few countries wish to promote themselves as smug, power-hungry and one hidden-camera away from a major fraud investigation. Appointing a politician to the position of head of state is like a range of upmarket consumer goods using a turd for a logo."
That's all for this week. Look after yourselves.
Adam
Adam Zulawski
TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff
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