I should start this article by apologizing for the technical terms in the title.

Now in my final semester as an undergraduate student, I made the dubious decision to take a class that meets twice a week at 8am for two hours. For linguistics, however, I was willing to sacrifice two of my mornings (I know, I know, in the real world most people have to get up for their jobs before I usually get up for class). I was perhaps unduly excited when I realized I could use what I’d been learning and apply it to this particular story about gallivanting in foreign lands. For those unfamiliar with linguistics, phonology refers to the sounds used to compose words and semantics is essentially the meaning of words and how we understand one another when we communicate.

I should probably apologize again for providing an impromptu lesson – but I like to think other people are just as passionate about languages as I am, so I’ll leave off saying sorry.

Although there’s only one language besides English in which I feel perfectly comfortable conversing (French), I have had the occasion to study Mandarin Chinese for a number of years, and have also tried my hand at Arabic and Spanish. Because I am most familiar with French, the majority of the following examples will come from that language, but perhaps someday I’ll have the capability to write a follow-up article focusing more on Mandarin and Arabic!

Without further ado, my top five entertaining incidents of language mishaps:

5) Seal Eyes: On my first day of high school in France, a guy named Gael took me to a bar after class to help me improve my French vocabulary and pronunciation. The first words he taught me? Swear words. Universally acknowledged as the most important thing to teach any foreigner, I was happy to spend an hour memorizing all the gros mots (the translation literally means ‘large words’). The thing is, swearing in French never felt as satisfying as the English words I’d been so petrified of in my youth. Dirty though their meaning might be, French swear words still seem ineffective or silly. But fear not, learners of French as a second language! You will soon discover the joys of words that sound bad, but only to an English speaker. In this case phoque yeux – literally seal eyes, though it’s not very grammatically correct to put them together like that. We’ll focus on the pronunciation though. Despite it’s odd spelling, phoque sounds just like “f***.” And yeux, while it’s more of a “yuh” sound, could be mispronounced as “you.” Yay French!

4) Anatomy 101: I was in the library with friends, ostensibly studying but actually being taught new French words, a favorite pastime. One friend decided to check how well I knew the parts of the body, moving from the words for different fingers to obscure bones and finally, to an ambiguous region somewhere between her chest and her under arm. “Les aisselles,” she told me. Like so many language learners, I feigned understanding though I was only half sure she was teaching me slang for breast, possibly the equivalent of “boob.” Later I learned aisselle actually means armpit. Good thing I never used that one in public!

3) With Tomatoes: During my time in Morocco my friends and I were regularly harassed by men on the street, who would employ any number of colorful phrases to compliment us. With this particular incident we were not offered a compliment, but a bizarre response when we declined to buy the man’s wares. When asked if you’d like to buy something from a street vendor, the polite response is La, shoukran – no, thank you. Apparently we struck a nerve with this man, because instead of moving on to some other target or silently grumbling, he yelled, “Eat your shoukran with tomatoes!” To this day I am not sure what to make of his statement. If anyone is intimately familiar with Moroccan Arabic, maybe you could clarify why he felt the need to include tomatoes in his obviously angry reply.

2) Dumplings: Although its grammar is relatively straightforward – no verb tenses, no need to make agreement between subject and verb – Mandarin Chinese is complex because of the tones required for its pronunciation. There are four tones in Chinese, which is very difficult to explain without providing sounds, but for the sake of this story let’s just accept that there are four ways to say every word, and this drastically changes the meaning of the word. One of the stories I’ve frequently heard about a non-native speaker of Chinese making a gaffe is the story of the dumplings. The word for dumplings is “shui jiao,” both words pronounced using the third tone. This is very similar to the word for sleep – “shui jiao” pronounced using the fourth tone for both words. To a speaker of Chinese, the difference is enormous. To someone accustomed to English, not so much. Which is why this person found himself getting yelled at after trying to order a plate of dumplings and accidentally asking for the dumpling-maker to sleep with him.

1) Rain, Rain, Go Away: There’s nothing quite so much fun as learning and using the idioms of a different language. In France I was always excited to put such phrases to use, but this occasionally led to ridicule when I misused the phrase. In French, to comment on how hard it is raining, one can say il pleut comme une vache qui pisse – it’s raining like a peeing cow. We have cats and dogs, they have peeing bovines. I actually think the French version makes more literal sense. Anyways, I proudly paraded out the phrase one day during a torrential downpour, only to realize as my friends erupted into laughter, that I’d forgotten a key word and instead said il pisse comme une vache – it’s peeing like a cow. Yes, I know, it doesn’t even make sense.

The moral of the story when it comes to language errors is that, though they make you feel like a dunce (especially if you’re caught by a very young child, who then questions your intelligence), each mistake brings you closer to the people who hear it, and reminds you to not take yourself too seriously. Instead of wincing at the differences between your poor pronunciation and their perfect speech, take heart in the fact that you can still share a laugh over something as basic as a cow peeing.

Chinese Bathroom Sign

From Ms. Magazine: Black Herstory: Black Women in the White House

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/02/20/black-herstory-black-women-in-the-white-house/

Ribbon courtesy of www.fem2pt0.com

There’s a new law proposed in my dear old home state of New Hampshire that has me rather riled up. This is saying something, especially given that I’ve been distracted by the Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen drama. In essence, two of the state’s more conservative legislators are trying to amend New Hampshire’s domestic violence law to state that police may not make an arrest on a domestic violence call unless they have witnessed the crime(s) in action. It’s an entirely stupid proposal, one that seems to have no merit unless its writers are hoping to get away with such crimes themselves, but it’s worth discussing here because intimate partner violence- domestic violence, battering, whatever you wish to call it- is a global problem with implications for all of us.

While many complain that intimate partner violence is treated differently than other forms of violence, it’s very important to make one thing clear: intimate partner assaults are not the same as stranger assaults. In a physical assault from a stranger, there’s rarely much history to explain the situation. We often think about such assaults as being preceded by drinking, disagreements, or other crimes such as robberies. The history of the people involved- or, really, lack thereof- means that future safety concerns are generally minimal. There might be some criminal charges, and in extreme cases a restraining order, but otherwise things go on. When the assault is perpetrated by one intimate partner against another, however, it’s almost always the latest in a series of controlling and abusive tactics that that person has used to gain power and control over their loved one. In most abusive relationships, the physical violence is preceded by verbal abuse, threats, isolation of the victim, and other tactics that have contributed to the buildup towards a physical assault.

Context is key because, for many victims, police involvement can make a relationship more dangerous. What may have been an offhand threat to kill may turn into a serious plan as the abuser stews in jail after the arrest is made. The safety of the victim(s) has to be paramount, and for that very reason many states have reconsidered their mandatory arrest policies (where at least one party has to be arrested on a domestic violence police call).

This reconsideration, however, is not New Hampshire’s proposed law. Rather than leaving the decision to arrest up to the responding officers, who we hope are well-trained in assessing the situations they encounter, the law would remove the power to arrest altogether. After several years’ experience as a victim advocate in multiple states and countries, I can tell you that holding abusers accountable is hard enough without preventing the police from doing their job of arresting dangerous individuals. Taking this discretion and authority away from the police does nothing to help the victims of abusive partners. In fact, it gives the abusers more power in the relationship (“What’re you gonna do, call the cops? They can’t do anything. Just try.”). The insidious message that this sends, even to those who aren’t in abusive relationships, is that victimization in certain contexts is okay.

As the article I linked rightly points out, domestic violence laws in New Hampshire- and around the world really- have changed a lot for the better in the last half-century. Intimate partner violence has, for a very long time, been perceived as a private problem. In America, the phrase has long been that “you don’t wash your dirty laundry in public” and community members have been encouraged to turn a blind eye to the abusive and violent relationships that exist all around them. Only in the last few decades have we finally begun to recognize that violence of this variety will not stop when we tacitly permit it to continue.

The problem is that, even without legal setbacks like this one, we continue to believe that intimate relationships confer ownership of one party by the other and thus the abuse is okay. For a lot of people, this specifically refers to the legal status of cis women as their husbands’ property; I can assure you, however, that possessive and controlling behaviours are not bound by simple sexism and can (and do) occur in all different types of relationships. Many state coalitions against domestic violence have revised their mission statements and lobbied their governments to reflect the fact that intimate partner violence occurs in same-sex relationships, relationships involving trans and genderqueer folk, and can include male victims of female offenders. Some human beings, for whatever reason, have a propensity to enjoy being in charge of each other and are willing to take this to an extreme in a variety of ways- sex and gender aside. What we see in intimate relationships is reflected, albeit in a distorted fashion, in other forms of power-based interaction. Think of human trafficking, for instance, or the way global trade choices often leave entire countries without access to basic necessities. Intimate partner violence is a very specific form of power-based personal violence, to be sure, but it’s symptomatic of the way humans are taught- in all societies- to assign value and worth to each other. For me, the proposed law in New Hampshire is an outrage but unsurprising in this global climate.

Where does that leave us as Go Girls? Laws like this one are proposed- and sometimes passed- around the world on a regular basis, and their effect isn’t simply to restrict the humanity of the victims of domestic violence. Global awareness of intimate partner violence has usually been through the lens of sexism, but I would suggest we add other lenses as well. Racism, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, and other forms of categorizing and judging people all play vital roles in the way we react to- or sometimes permit- the diminishment of a given portion of our populations. Our awareness and response to these systems of oppression (including our complicity in them) is the first and best step we can take in ensuring that thought patterns like the ones that led to the New Hampshire proposal cease to exist.

This article also appears on Not Another Wave.

Consult the self-improvement powers that be, and you’re likely to hear one of two things:

1)   Embrace the present

2)   Envision the future

What you won’t hear, what is to be avoided at ALL COSTS is living in the past. Don’t let past heartbreaks, failures or disappointments keep you from tapping into your radiant core and maximizing your full potential.

(And this, my friends, might be why my life coach fired me.)

You’ve read the advice, the tips and the tricks, but sometimes just hearing about other long-distance relationships (LDRs) can take weight off of yours. Today get to know my brother Peter, a high school senior, and his partner Iris, who joined us on Facebook chat from college. They have been together for 7.5 months and in a LDR for 5.

How far apart are you and Iris when you are in a LDR?

P: Half an hour by car.

How often do you see each other in person?

P: Usually once every two weeks, sometimes longer. I convince a family member to drive me up. Also on her breaks.

You don’t have your driver’s license?

P: Nope. That’s what she wants for her birthday.

How did you meet?

P: At church, I guess. On a trip to North Carolina was the first time I actually talked to her, because we were in the same work group. We were in North Carolina to rebuild homes and play with children in a rural town. It makes our relationship sound very exotic. We actually got to know each other on a church trip in Scotland, which sounds very romantic.

What attracted you to each other?

P: Originally it was just because she was someone I vaguely knew in my work group. She’s silly. And she’s gorgeous, and she’s nerdy. She’s very smart.

I: Other than you were a nice guy? You were in the Friend Zone back then, man. You were weird in a nice way, and funny and smart and what-have-you. Basically, you were friend material.

In your LDR, how often do you communicate and what is your usual method?

P: Usually daily and usually Facebook chat because it’s easiest.

What is your preferred method of communication?

P: I like Skype because you can see them. It’s nice after not seeing them for a week to have their face appear on your computer screen.

I: Skype, providing it’s working. And if it isn’t, then the phone. I get to hear you and see you on Skype. It’s the closest I can get to actually having you here.

What other ways do you communicate?

P: I like the telephone because you can hear tone. You can actually understand how they’re feeling. Facebook, letters. I’m gonna send one tomorrow.

That’s an old-fashioned way of communicating. What made you decide to start?

P: It’s more personal. It’s kind of the same as Facebook: you’re seeing words, but they’re handwritten, and someone took the time to write them out.

How do you feel when you send or receive a letter?

P: When I know she’s sent one, I get excited and check the mail right when I get home. And when I send one there’s anticipation of her reaction, because she always seems excited to get one.

I: Warm and fuzzy. Receiving a letter in the mail is awesome to begin with, but it’s doubly great when it’s from you. There’s something particularly personal and touching about a letter.

What do you do to stay involved in each other’s lives?

P: Talk daily. Send little Facebook messages to each other when we get home from school or wake up. Tell each other about our day.

I: Communicating in some way, shape, or form at least once a day. I feel rather distressed if I don’t hear from you for a while.

Are there certain topics you always cover?

P: I send her a message in the morning when I wake up, and I always have my plan for the day. I ask her what her plan for the day is.

How do you resolve arguments when/if you have them?

P: I don’t think we have had any. We have nothing to argue about. We’re both happy.

How long do you expect to be in a LDR?

P: Until she’s done college this semester. Then it’s a close-distance relationship because she’s home for the summer. And then it gets farther away, because I’m leaving for college.

I: I may have started mapping out a train and bus route to your college.

What do you like about being in a LDR?

P: It makes seeing each other a lot more fun. It’s like pent up energy from when you were apart all gets focused to that time. I might be apart later in life from someone, and it’s good to know that you can handle it.

I: The only plus that I can think of is that we’re forced to give each other space. No clinginess.

What don’t you like?

P: Separation. It’d be nice to see her whenever I wanted. I’m not worried about her doing anything; I trust her. The only problem is the separation.

I: Sometimes I feel a bit like we’re growing apart, which is why I’m really happy that this semester will be more flexible in terms of visits.

What would you change about your LDR?

P: I guess Skyping more often. It’s nice to see her, even though I’m not there.

I: I wish it weren’t such a hassle to see each other because we see each other rather infrequently considering how close we are.

What advice would you give to a couple just beginning a LDR?

P: If you want it to work, you can make it work. Send letters because it’s always nice to find something in the mail from the person you’re missing. Talk about the little things in your day, because even though you think they don’t care, they might be interested in what you had for breakfast. I always ask Iris what she had for dinner because she has the fourth best dining hall in the country. Tonight it was taco bar; it was the fourth best taco bar she’d ever had.

I: Sometimes it’ll be rough or frustrating because you don’t get to see someone you care about for extended periods of time, but sticking it out is worth it, especially for someone like you, Peter.

Thank you to Peter and Iris! And look forward to more interviews in the future!

Every now and then I find a place that leaves me never wanting to leave. Okay, a lot of places in the world have that effect. But not many of them are in the UK. And on my new quest to explore my own country, this place has served me well: the Scottish countryside and Inverlochy Castle.

After arriving at Edinburgh, you can be transferred, by helicopter no less, to the Castle. I took the road…but here’s to dreaming (come on lottery…). Sat at the foot of the mighty Ben Nevis Mountain, Inverlochy Castle sits in the most tranquil of locations with rolling green hills, emerald lochs and stretches of pristine farmland. Matching its surroundings are the castle interiors: stark contrasts of colours, rich fabrics, and elaborate period pieces that easily make you feel like you’re on the set of Pride & Prejudice.

Each of the castle’s 17 bedrooms are unique, and individually decorated with gorgeous bathrooms and stunning views to match. The Castle was built in 1863 by the first Lord Abinger and, until 1969, it had remained a private residence. It has had a string of important guests stay within its walls, including her Majesty Queen Victoria who spent a week at the Castle sketching and painting the grounds and famously writing in her diary that she ‘never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot’. I couldn’t agree more, Vicky.

The great thing about this place is that you can make your stay as relaxing or active as you want. Lounge in the sitting room and catch up with some reading, jump into the resident Rolls Royce (at your beck and call, naturally) to explore nearby towns or take to the countryside. Clay pigeon shooting, anyone? Or maybe it’s a canter on the Castle’s horses you’d like. In the summer, you can battle the rivers nearby with some whitewater rafting. The temperatures were a little arctic when I visited so I hope you won’t blame me for skipping this one… Ben Nevis is the tallest mountain in the UK, and while I didn’t brave the climb, a lot of visitors do and I am seriously thinking about returning to give it a go.

As I have a Scottish background, I love Scottish food, but it has its limitations. So I was pretty pleased to see the Michelin starred menu had ventured further afield than how many different ways to cook a haggis. Not that I don’t love haggis…promise.

The dining room itself is pretty amazing, furnished by visiting Royal families. Just the way I like my dining rooms. Then it’s to the drawing room with a glass of whisky. If you like whisky. I don’t, so it was red wine for me. Sorry. I guess the Scottish genes didn’t come through as strongly as they should have.

Back home in England in what feels like another life entirely now, I used to be a bit of a fitness junkie, quickly becoming obsessed with ‘Spinning’ classes when they were first introduced and berating myself if I didn’t squeeze in at least three sessions at the gym each week. Here in this traditional Moroccan village that I now call home, however, my exercise options are somewhat limited, and after a fitness DVD cruelly inflicted Tendonitis upon me, I resigned myself to taking our dog, Douglas, for some monstrously long walks in an effort to stave off the flab that threatens to consume me. There is a gym here actually, but it’s only open to male members of the village population, and even if it weren’t, it’s bad enough being the centre of attention when wearing my normal clothes, let alone having all eyes on me when I’m rather bulgingly clad in lycra!

When we first arrived here and adopted ourselves a flea-ridden, tick-infested, mongrel puppy, I started taking her for several walks at various times of the day. But I found that unless I walked a good distance away from the village, I simply drew far too much unwanted attention to myself. At one point I can honestly say that I felt like The Pied Piper of Hamelin but instead of playing a pipe, I had a puppy on a lead and instead of rats, I had a throng of little boys trailing behind me. The children were friendly for the most part, but they often had with them little puppies or dogs of their own that they had found and were playing with, and I didn’t want my freshly vaccinated hound getting into a fight with one of them and being infected with goodness knows what. Not only that but the boys would constantly pester me for money or sweets, neither of which I ever carried with me, and the language barrier made it quite tricky for me to rid myself of them. If it wasn’t young boys continuously asking me for cash or confectionary, then it was older ones asking me for my telephone number or email address. It was fast getting to the point where I dreaded taking her out for a walk and so I decided that I would get up earlier in the mornings and take Douglas out while the local children and the Prince Charmings were still tucked up in bed. I have to say that my plan worked, and each morning, give or take the odd person on a donkey or bent over double in a field, I barely see a soul and I am free to walk unpestered. My dog can run free to chase ground squirrels and sniff at the huge piles of rubbish that people dump all over the place.

I don’t know if it is because Douglas began her life in the wild and is used to scavenging for food, but she is instantly drawn to the stinking heaps of rubbish and rotting animal carcasses that my delicate English nostrils are subjected to on our daily outings, and many times I’ve had to forcibly drag her away from a donkey’s rotting hindquarters that she is chewing at with stomach-churning gusto. I’ve been told that the local people are continuing to live as they did when the village was home to merely a fraction of the people it is home to today, and the older generation in particular still dispose of their rubbish by dumping it in the countryside, despite the fact that there are regular, and free, rubbish collections. Decades ago this would not have caused too many problems. Nowadays however, the village is brimming with residents and as tourism increases in the region, there is growing pressure from the younger generation to find more environmental ways of disposing of rubbish.

Many Moroccan households, (at least here in the village), leave the remnants of their meals outside their front doors, for passing hungry animals to partake of. Every day I see turmeric stained bones and hunks of stale bread piled up in this manner, and as commendable as this is, it goes hand in hand with encouraging wild and potentially dangerous animals to your very front door, namely cats, rats and dogs.

Muslims are forbidden from keeping dogs as pets. They may be kept as guard dogs to protect properties or herds of sheep and goats, but they are not permitted to enter inside the home as it would then be rendered unclean and impure. In knowing this, you would think that inviting them to dine at your door would be one of the last things they would want to do, particularly when many of the houses are home to countless small children, each of whom would undoubtedly meet an untimely demise should they happen to be savaged by a rabid dog, or cat for that matter, carrier of the dreaded disease as they are too.

Carcasses and rubbish aside though, despite the surrounding landscape being for the most part impenetrably rocky and barren, there is a rugged beauty to be found in it, particularly when the morning sun begins to pierce the already cobalt blue sky, highlighting the distant mountains and making me feel like singing simply because not a soul would hear me. My mum often says that she would love to see my dog frolicking in a green meadow or splashing around in a stream, but this dry and dusty land is all Douglas has ever known, and I imagine that depositing her in the English countryside would only cause bewilderment and doubtless disappointment, as she fruitlessly foraged for even the merest sniff of litter!

Shop to Stop Slavery: Fair Trade Valentine’s Day: Chocolate and Wine http://www.shoptostopslavery.com/fair-trade-valentines-day-chocolate-and-wine-3381.html

From the Frisky: All-Female Team Builds Barracks in Record Time

http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-01-25/all-female-team-builds-barracks-in-record-time/

Since five minutes after Marvin proposed, people have been asking me wedding details.

I remember calling one of my friends with the ring freshly placed on my finger.

“Congratulations!!!” she exclaimed. “So, where are you going to have it?”

I hadn’t even had a chance to sit down yet, and I was already being asked what my plans were. Though the stigma is that many women have been planning their weddings since age 5 and had already worked out the details far before they even met Mr. Right (in fact, I have even heard of people even going so far as to reserve the reception venue due to a long waiting list), the more I am involved in my own wedding planning, the more I see that these are merely the outliers.

After all, it takes two to get married.

"Modern Brides": It's a good start, but we're still not there yet. Photo courtesy of http://thealisters.typepad.com/

Involving Marvin in wedding planning has been wholly necessary, and, to be honest, much more difficult than I expected. Shows like TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress” and “Four Weddings“, and websites like The Knot and Wedding Wire bombard us with arguments that the wedding is all about the bride, and the groom merely “shows up”. Left and right, a bride’s days are filled with people giving her their opinions (from both sides of the family), advertising campaigns with images focused on happy brides embraced by their blurred-out grooms (see this, this and this, oh, and even this if you don’t know what I mean), and, if it couldn’t get any worse, the lack of a single groom planning his wedding on the many wedding-related message boards.

If that doesn’t drive you nuts, I don’t know what does.

Throughout my life, I always knew that my husband-to-be would be as much of a part of my wedding planning as I would. But when we got engaged, it seemed the world tried to take us on a different path. Even Marvin said to me that he wanted me to have the wedding of my dreams (what he didn’t mention until later was that he thought every woman already had her dream figured out, so he didn’t want to “ruin” it for me). I pushed him for his opinion, but he refused to give it. And since he didn’t seem to care anyway, I left it to my own devices.

I quickly learned that, despite what the shows tell you, it takes two to plan a wedding. Though Marvin wouldn’t give me his advice directly, I could read him like a book. I would announce that our wedding ceremony would be outside in a park and he would sigh and say, “Whatever you want. This wedding is for you.”

If there’s one way to get me angry, it’s to say I can do “whatever I want” or that it’s “my wedding”. And finally, after days of hearing Marvin quietly condone my ideas, I had just about had enough.

“Tell me what you want!” I demanded. And, finally, when I had all but beaten it out of him, the comments flowed freely. I’d nearly wished I hadn’t asked. It turns out, this guy really did have an opinion. And a lot of it was completely opposite my own.

The point is not that we had come at odds with each other. Despite a few days of conflicting interest, we were finally able to agree on some things, and divide and conquer the rest. I would take care of anything that was “creative”, from centerpieces to favors, and he would take care of the “logistics”, like transportation, working with the DJ and what the groomsmen wore. Every couple works this out differently, but I think the worst thing you can do is get caught up in the celebration and forget the marriage. In one of my former articles, Baking Your Cake (And Eating it, Too), I mentioned that couples should pay for at least a portion of their weddings, as it’s a good lesson in financial responsibility for later down the line. I also think that couples should plan a wedding together for the same reasons. If you can’t make a one-day event work to represent both you and your spouse-to-be evenly, how can you possibly make a 20, 50, or 70-year marriage work? It’s how you work together, how you synergize, that makes all the difference in the world.

Now, when anyone asks me about my wedding details, I gladly tell them my plans. But nothing comes to Marvin as a surprise, because we’re in this together. For better or for worse, if you will.