'in 'Eclectic Encyclopedia'' Archive
Esperanto’s fans hoping it becomes `lingvo internacia’
Thursday, June 10th, 2004
“Saluton!” The greeting rings throughout the Sulzer Regional Library auditorium in Ravenswood as members of the Esperanto Society of Chicago gather for their monthly meeting. They have come to study and celebrate the language of Esperanto, invented in the late 19th Century to be an international language.
The meeting is conducted almost entirely in Esperanto, but [...]
Our not-so-sound language a natural for spelling bees
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
Korean has a simple correspondence between spelling and sounds. English, with its many foreign influences and irregularities, does not.
“Spelling bees are largely an American phenomenon, something that is unique to the English language,” said Paige Kimble.
Once again without feeling: Athletic cliches a team effort
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
it’s the season of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and, as they inevitably say, you can throw the records out the window. And the mathematics. Over the next three weeks, in pregame pep talks and postgame press conferences, players and coaches will repeatedly make the math-defying pledge to give 110 percent and offer up boundless other basketball banalities.
“If anybody watches 10 seconds of sports on TV or reads anything between quotation marks in the paper, it’s almost all cliches,” says Steve Rushin, who writes the weekly “Air and Space” column for Sports Illustrated. “We all know those ready-made phrases so well you can almost predict them before they come out of someone’s mouth: `It was a team effort; we gave 110 percent.’”
In 2000, Rushin wrote a column composed entirely of cliches (deliberately, he hastens to note).
The Jesuit Scholar Who Translated ‘The Passion’
Thursday, March 4th, 2004
Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the
Christ” is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut
marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. …
“I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: ‘Hey, Padre, It’s Mel, I
got a job for you,’” Fulco said. “I said, `Mel who?’ We talked for
about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn’t pass it
up.”
In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict
Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to
translate it into Aramaic , Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated
the script back into English subtitles.
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