My grandmother on my father’s side was born in 1895 and lived most of her life close to the spot where the Golden Spike was driven on the transcontinental railroad. Her town was a true melting pot on account of the fact that it drew laborers from all over the world who worked on the Union Pacific Railroad and later in that company’s coal mines.
I was born there, and local people proudly claimed you could hear all the languages of the world spoken by native speakers just by walking around downtown and listening.
My father benefited from that linguistic diversity, and could curse in about a dozen languages. I can only curse in about eight, but I can still say “Drink your milk, boy,” in Greek and order coffee with cream and sugar in Sioux.
That doesn’t come in handy often, but being able to cuss in German, Spanish and Norwegian has its uses. I’m still proud of the fact that one time, the Finnish guy who ran a local lunch counter told my father I had “sisu.” It was years before I learned what that meant (you can look it up on Wikipedia), but if I had that word on a bumper sticker, I’d put it on my truck and display it happily.
There was also a disproportionately large population of Chinese in our town, whose families had first come to work on the railroad and stayed around afterwards. I don’t imagine the population of the town was over 10,000, but there were more than a half-dozen Chinese restaurants and nearly everybody ate in one of them from time to time.
Everybody except Grandma, who was the lifelong victim of a bad translation.
One time, she apparently heard one of the Chinese restaurateurs trying to translate the name of a dish into English, and the words hummingbird and butterfly figured into that translation somehow. Grandma, taking it literally, assumed the Chinese chefs were putting hummingbirds and butterflies in the food, so she refused to eat there, or at any of the other Chinese restaurants in town.
“I won’t eat bugs or little birds,” she always said by way of explanation, and she held to her belief even when we tried to explain those ingredients were probably not actually included in her pu-pu platter or sweet and sour chicken.
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure Grandma would have gotten a kick out of a story on CNN last week about the government in China, which is trying to make restaurant folk in that country change the names of some of their menu items so they’ll be more appealing to visitors who come to the Olympics.
Seems that if an American visitor went in and ordered kung-pao chicken, nobody would know what he or she was talking about. But if that visitor got a literal translation of the menu, they’d be very grossed out by some of the choices.
The name of one common Chinese menu dish, for example, translates into English as “husband and wife’s lung slice.” In reality, that dish is beef and ox tripe in chili sauce. That still sounds awful, but not quite as bad.
CNN reported that the Chinese government had also asked that the dish literally translated as “chicken without sexual life” be changed to steamed pullet, and that “bean curd made by a pockmarked woman” be changed to mapo tofu.
In total, the government would like to change the names of 2,000 common Chinese dishes to make them more palatable to foreign visitors. While that might take some of the fun out of things, it would certainly keep people who order a nice plate of “husband and wife’s lung slice” from fearing they’d be served an actual lung.
Unless Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, the people at Comcast who took away my History Channel, the people at Sears you can never get on the phone, or the knuckleheads who run the local blog called da Truth Squad show up at the Olympics, of course. If they show up, I hope a chef cooks them up a big, steaming plate of the real deal. • • • According to the results of a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll released recently, New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s approval ratings are in the cellar and dropping like zombies in George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.”
According to the results of the poll, our beleaguered governor’s approval rating is about 40 percent, with 41 percent disapproving and 19 percent too uninformed to go either way. Most of those people are Comcast executives, by the way. The rest are on the state payroll and not saying.
This is down from the 44 percent approval rating he enjoyed in April, and the 48 percent he tallied in January.
His numbers are expected to drop even further, once people realize how badly they’re gonna get hammered once the new state budget takes effect next month.
Oh, well, as big of a screwup as Corzine has turned out to be, at least he’s polling better than our president, George W. (Shrub) Bush. His current approval ratings are clocking in at a stellar 25 percent, with 71 percent disapproving and only 8 percent too ignorant to have an opinion. This, by comparison, is a precipitous drop from the approval rating of between 85 and 90 percent he tallied in the days right after 9/11.
If Corzine’s new press secretary, Sean Darcy, is looking for a way to put a positive spin on this dreary poll, I have a suggestion. He could make a bumper sticker that says: Jon S. Corzine – he’ll tax the fillings in your teeth, but at least he’s more popular than the president.
I’d put one of those on my car, right next to the “Sisu” sticker, wouldn’t you?
• • • Idon’t have all the details on this yet, but I heard from a couple of people recently who were complaining about the economic stimulus checks they’ve been expecting. For one reason or another, these people were among the last scheduled to receive a payment, and recently received a letter telling them that if their checks didn’t arrive within the next two weeks, it might be months before they arrived, or it might even be next April, when they could take the stimulus payment as some sort of tax break when they file on their 2007 income.
One of these people read me the letter and said they’ll fax me a copy soon. When I find out more, I’ll let you know. Until then, here’s a question for the IRS: What the heck is this malarkey?
I’m hoping someone from the service will call me with an explanation, but I’m not holding my breath.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].