@RegDwigнt A Very Important and Recurrent Problem with things people say is that they think an utterance has a very clear and distinct meaning while in fact it rare does.
@tchrist So I was right. An object has a colour, but it needs someone to determine what that colour is. And different people may come up with different colours.
The perceived colour changes. It still has colour. The perceived colour depends on what light it's reflecting as well as what is receiving the reflected light.
mmmm. in Romanian for a genitive clause with an adjective, sometimes the adjective becomes genitive form and not the noun.
so, I'm wondering (in terms of English) what makes this adjective special
in this particular case, if I were to say something belonging to "an other building" "other" would become genitive. but if I said to "a red building" then "building" would be genitive and red normal.
it may seem a lot like he's generalizing too much… but oddly enough, I see it as completely appropriate. because it's just such a large amount of Romanians that fit what he's saying
and when it comes to misogyny, it's not even a generalization. I think misogyny may even be Romanian on some deeper level.
my parents get ripped apart by Romanians in the way JS describes how 'westerners' do, and even before they emigrated, for intellectual Romanians it's difficult to blend in in the first place. since such a small amount go to higher education (by their extremely merit based system) they get alienated.
I was trying to explain to someone why I think higher of myself because I'm reading [so and so book] and he's reading a Dan Brown book and couldn't do it. I just didn't know what to say.
But I've no idea what's popular in France or Belgium or the NL. And as far as Germany is concerned, they read a lot of really good stuff there. Interspersed with really horrible stuff like Dan Brown. In sum: I can't tell.
@GeorgePompidou sadly no, because I've never read a Dan Brown book myself. But that would be my advice to you: go read one. Then you could easily argue your point.
So I just began reading the very first page of A Game Of Thrones, Book One. The first ten lines already have three names dropped. What is this, some crazy Solzhenitsyn shit? Who's supposed to keep up?
have you ever been to a water park or on a roller coaster? or done drugs? or anything that is fun but not at all constructive, productive, artistic, athletic, or "human" in any way?
I can't find the quote where I explained my beef with A Game of Thrones to Cerberus.
So I might as well just paraphrase. Basically the structure of every sentence is exactly the same. You don't notice it immediately, but once you do, you can't unsee it. And it becomes immensely boring to read.
Now, the thing is that of course you don't need to be a good writer to be a great writer. Dostoyevski couldn't write his way out of a wet paperbag. He was abysmal. He was shit. But he happened to be a great psychologist, or at least an excellent observer. So it is immensely interesting what he writes, even though it's physically painful how he writes it.
But Dan Brown has neither. Neither form nor content.
Every five pages I have to learn eight new characters, and by the time I think I got them more or less sorted, half of them are killed off. And from all I hear, the other half will be killed off at a later point.
The most interesting thing about Romania I have heard so far, and in a documentary I saw on Romanian television no less, was just how much everyone was into fortune-telling and other superstitious stuff. Like the most successful and rich people are fortune tellers. They live in villas the size of a LEGO factory, and eat caviar three times a day, all from money they get from piss-poor people for telling them their future.
my biggest problem going to Romania: they finally installed air conditioning on some of the more expensive trains, so I was very excited. I started requesting specifically to go on those new air conditioning trains, because I hate heat and stagnant air. every single one I went on had the air conditioning disabled, because of too many complaints about the draft.
they say mă trage which is an expression specifically meaning I am bothered by the draft
they have a literal expression for that.
JSB should have included that in his article. I think it shows just how ingrained in everyone it is.