Bons faits!
Getting it right in your own language is hard enough, particularly if writing isn’t your profession.
Straying into other languages has its own, sometimes unusual, drawbacks.
In a previous life, long before ELCS.ch first saw the light of day in 2010, I used to do “Things”. Most of them totally legal.
The thread running through these Things was that they were what the French might call “insolite”. So, quirky.
Some publicity was (sometimes, for the legal Things at least) required. And as there was no money around, posters and flyers were run up on a completely inadequate laptop running a clunky editing program and with the help of a very understanding local printer.
I once put up dozens of posters in local shops and bars to advertise a forthcoming Thing. Only to find that the poster, in French, contained a spelling mistake.* And then had to go around those dozens of local shops and bars and correct each poster by hand, by sticking a (this time) carefully crafted correction over the offending word.
Getting it right in your own language is hard enough, particularly if writing isn’t your profession.
Straying into other languages, meanwhile, has its own drawbacks.
Sometimes these lurking pitfalls are mundane, like my inadvertent spelling mistake.
Sometimes though, they’re… special.
Not a million miles away from the ELCS.ch offices is a company that specializes in the care of horses.**
It’s been around for many years now. So it was a long time ago that its founders sat around the kitchen table brainstorming an appropriate name for their new venture, and came up with “Horse Motions”.
A great idea. So, “emotions” > “Horse Motions”. A job well done.
I always smile when I pass by, because among the many definitions of “motion” in English we find:
“an evacuation of the bowels” […] the matter evacuated”
And so, “Horse Motions” means “Horseshit”.
And with that, ELCS.ch wishes you Ein frohes Natale et une bonne anno nuovo.
* In an inexplicable lapse in my devotion to Reliable Sources, I’d searched the internet for the French word I was looking to use (yes, I know), and merrily copied others’ mistakes.
** In fact, horses isn’t the company’s specialism; I’ve changed the species “to protect the innocent”.
[Illustration: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder - Levels adjusted from File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, originally from Google Art Project., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22179117, with thanks to Wikimedia.]
