*
I’ve decided to look up ‘Tum Ho’. I should have done it before nailing it above the entrance to my blog - it could mean anything: “Taxes can’t be lowered and the government needs to grow” or “Dualism sucks!” (oh dear! – a cold shiver has just gone down my spine...) or "Stupid Blog - Avoid."
Really, I shoud have known better. I can recall a quite recent situation, which should have made me doubly aware of potential lexical dangers. I was taking part in a sing&dance session during which, as a warm-up, our instructor wanted us to sing a simple and quite melodic African folk song. The words were easy to learn, which we did, and we were just about to start, when I had a brain wave. “Hang on. What are the lyrics about?” I demanded. “I don’t know”, the man admitted. I could see a potential problem: “What if the song goes: ‘Down with the white man!’?" The instructor didn’t know what to say, but assured me that he’d seen a translation at some point and it was all nice and innocent PC stuff. I didn’t believe him, but because we were on the safe outskirts of Europe, a good few decades after the African branch of the British Empire was taken down and because there was only one black person in our group, I joined in with the rest.
PS I know that ‘Tum Ho’ makes a short and innocent first impression, but it’s so easy to be misled. In some European languages we have some pretty tricky cases, too. There is a word, e.g., that means: “depressing, suicidal, biased in favour of nothingness and meaninglessness”, but all you hear is a neat “materialist” or its synonym, equally nasty in implicatios, but even more confusing “naturalist”.
The moral is that one always, always should look things up. Preferably in this blog.
*not that Celts have anything to do with any of the examples (apart from being, linguistically, Indo-European as I have a hunch 'Tum Ho' will turn out to be too); which is not to say that they don't have their share of nasty, subtle buggers - I bet that the local 'naturalist' in doing its subvertive job somewhere in the valleys of Glamorgan.
The moral is that one always, always should look things up. Preferably in this blog.
*not that Celts have anything to do with any of the examples (apart from being, linguistically, Indo-European as I have a hunch 'Tum Ho' will turn out to be too); which is not to say that they don't have their share of nasty, subtle buggers - I bet that the local 'naturalist' in doing its subvertive job somewhere in the valleys of Glamorgan.
