(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

It hath now been hours and I'm still trying to figure out how an intelligent, well-educated francophone employee of a major federal government ministry could have thought that the standard English word for "les gens" was "the gigolo."

I can only assume it's the result of a prank by a malicious English-speaker. I'm not really allowed to point out people's mistakes during these placement tests, so I couldn't actually ask her.

I also wonder how many times she's written "gigolo" in place of "people" on government documents. If you get any government documents with the word "gigolo" in it where the word "people" should be, you know I've spoken to that woman.

So, yeah -- it was an interesting day giving English-as-a-second-language placement tests.

Another breakthrough in my editing has put me about one-fifth of the way through my major edit.

Comments

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

They put Ludwig to music? ;) It would be appropriate considering his passion for music I suppose. Hmmm that makes me wonder if there's a drama CD. I just finished downloading the Antique BAkery drama CDs from the forum I linked in my journal. Now I have to check if tey have Ludwig II...

And that story is both hilarious and sad. I'd believe it was a prank but it seems to me the sort of thing you figure out kind of fast. Like how the first French rougemacabre's husband taught her was "Je suis ton esclave". ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It still displays on your computer as "Current Music"? I changed it to "Current Read" ages ago, and that's how it displays on my end :/

I'm somehow reminded of the story of the guy who got a kanji tatoo without knowing what it meant. It apparently expressed the tatoo artist's low opinion of the tatooee :)

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

hmmm, not when I'm directly on your LJ apparently. On my friends' page it does still say music though.

Haha, there was a bitter Japanese tatoo artist who got fined for something like that a while back. He was sick of white people tatooing kanji they didn't understand on themselves so he didn't exactly comply with their requests. He's make "slight" modifications, like tatooing prostitute instead of princess and so on. ^_^ That's one permanent prank though.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That's very funny ^_^

Are the kanji for "princess" and "prostitute" very similar...?

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

Not really (prostitute is actually two characters, sell and spring if I remember correctly...), but if you don't know better you can't tell the difference. They both look pretty.

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Same here, by the way- it says current music on my friends list, I was wondering about the Ludwig music too =P
Does say current read on your journal directly though... are you using S1 or S2 style system?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

S2. Though I'm *fairly* comfortable now with HTML and CSS (at least so long as I have my reference book handy, which I just packed up for the move).

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Ahh okay that's it then. I suppose everyone who uses S1 won't see it on their friends page; I remember there is the same problem with the 'current location' thing.