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Re: Word Games
From: Brooke Clarke
Date: 2005 Feb 16, 09:52 -0800
From: Brooke Clarke
Date: 2005 Feb 16, 09:52 -0800
Hi:
At one point in my career I worked for an east Indian. Although he had a thick accent his English was very good. In business meetings he would use word games by telling the truth is such a way that people would "assume" that he used the wrong word. He would use a word that sounded like another word but had the opposite meaning.
Later when they would complain he could honestly say "I told you so".
This is also the guy who would take the visiting inspectors out for dinner and drink them under the table to give us more time to get ready for the next day.
Have Fun,
Brooke Clarke, N6GCE
Frank Reed wrote:
At one point in my career I worked for an east Indian. Although he had a thick accent his English was very good. In business meetings he would use word games by telling the truth is such a way that people would "assume" that he used the wrong word. He would use a word that sounded like another word but had the opposite meaning.
Later when they would complain he could honestly say "I told you so".
This is also the guy who would take the visiting inspectors out for dinner and drink them under the table to give us more time to get ready for the next day.
Have Fun,
Brooke Clarke, N6GCE
-- w/Java http://www.PRC68.com w/o Java http://www.pacificsites.com/~brooke/PRC68COM.shtml http://www.precisionclock.com
Frank Reed wrote:
Dave, you wrote:"Years later, I was watching an education channel program where the guest brought up this very same speech and quote of Krushchev. He said the problem was that the translater translated literally what was just a colloquialism (sp?) of the Russion language."And years later, Khrushchev commented on the misunderstanding and explained that what he meant was that capitalism will be over-thrown and "your own working class who will bury you" (and 'we will present at your funeral' is the sense of the expression he used). But ya know, Khrushchev was quite comfortable with saber-rattling. Any of thousands of people in the Soviet government could have explained that the premier did not mean what his words were translated to mean. This was a simple matter. But Khrushchev's foreign policy indulged in bluff and bluster on a daily basis and a little mistranslation didn't necessarily hurt... :-)(sorry, off-topic)
