Saturday, March 19, 2011

I'm the alien.

There was an experiment that our teacher in Swedish used once, he told us to explain ordinary things around us without using the terms for them or the standard words that described them.

"Picture that you are talking to an alien," he told us, "and have to describe it. You can't call a rainbow a rainbow because the alien don't know what a rainbow is."

In a way that's how I write in English, I don't know the correct term and I end up writing many "explaining" words instead. The latest example I've found is, "the fields had not been tended to for years". I put the Swedish term into Google Translate and suddenly I had one word that would explain it all, "fallow". It's not over there of course, now I have to figure out how to use the word correctly. Do the fields "fallow", had they "fallowed" or did they "lie in fallow".

I feel an headache coming on...

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