Don't worry, it'll all make sense in the end. Or as much sense as you are liable to find in BOOJUM!
Posting late tonight as traffic was a conspiracy to delay Conrad, then I threw together some dough to make breadsticks, which are even now in the oven. And I do mean "threw together", it will be amusing and entertaining to see what emerges from Gas Mark 6 at twenty minutes.
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| These! Bread batons. You could club a person with these. |
Nyemetski
Which the Russian for "German", translating as "The dumb ones". Not that our Teutonic cousins are especially shy, voiceless or quiet - witness "Das Neibelung" and in fact anything by Wagner - but when our Slavic brethren encountered German-speaking Germans it came as a bit of a shock. The Slavic languages are mutually intelligible, so a Pole or a Czech or a Serb or a Bulgarian could make themselves understood to a Russian. But not a German. Hence Nyemetski.
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| Richard Wagner. Inspiring Prince since 1860 |
So, I hear you asking, where does this lead to Sparta?
Barbarians At The Gates
The Greeks dubbed non-Greeks "barbarians", because they didn't speak Greek, and Conrad recalls reading that barbarians were so dubbed because their speech sounded like "bar-bar-bar" to the refined and intellectual Greek ear.
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| Greek rear. Close enough. |
Sparta - you've heard of the city-state, right? - was tellingly described as a "dull, cruel city" because it's motivation was WARFARE. None of that pansying about with art or culture, with Sparta it was MY TANK IS FIGHT* except with swords and spears instead of tanks. It was the chief city of the region of Laconia. Still with me? Good. Now, the Spartans were not known for being big on rhetoric, in the sense of formal speaking - after all, why talk to someone when you can MY TANK IS FIGHT them instead? When a Spartan diplomatic mission went to request food aid from another polity, they simply brought along an empty sack, dangled it in front of the other city's dignitaries and said "needs grain". They were, of course, roundly condemned by their fellow Spartans for being wildly loquacious** since all they needed to have done was dangle the sack and say "Empty".
Thus, "Laconic" - that is, to be brief and to the point. Imagine The Man With No Name in the Dollar westerns; like him.
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| He sounds Spartan - his name has "KIL" in it. |
Classical Greek for "Come and take". This was the response of Leonidas to the demands of the Persian heralds at Thermopylae, who told the Greeks to give up their weapons. As you may recall, things did not end well for the Spartans, but in the process of being completely wiped out they did give the Persian host quite a hot time of it. Allegedly Leonidas's words to his men at breakfast were "Dine well, lads, for tonight we sup in Hell", although Conrad wonders who heard this and lived to tell the tale. As a pre-battle motivational speech it is pretty wordy for a Spartan, as compared to MY TANK IS FIGHT, but is a laconic model if you compare it to Henry V in Shakespeare, banging on about death and breaches***.
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| "Come and take - if you think you're hard enough" |
Coca-Cola Life - Mileage In This Product Yet!
Conrad doubts the mighty multinational is reeling yet at the variegated vindictive venom put out by BOOJUM!, yet hopes remain high.
"Lower Calorie" declared the bus poster that wafted past Conrad this morning, extolling the virtues of the liquid in question. My mind, trained in the art of forensic rhetoric by rigourous study of the Greek classics, immediately swung into action.
"Lower - as compared to what!" came the instant mental rejoinder. After all, there is no other metric given to base this comparison on. Lower calorie than a mound of sugar as big as a bus? Lower calorie than the sugar intake of the entire UK? Lower calorie than -<Mister Hand intervenes to hurry things on before midnight>
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| "Granite! Less fattening than lava!" |
The Great British Bake Off
Tricky bready stuff tonight, folks. The quarter-finals, with only 5 contestants left of the original 13. First challenge - freeform sweet bread, no tins or pans allowed. Richard did well with a Swedish couronne^. Then came the technical, with a horribly difficult Croatian bread-cake that had a walnut, cocoa and butter filling, that only Chetna did well with - because her Signature bake had been a variant of this. The name sounded like "Povitza" which obviously - obviously! - any Slav listener would immediately recognise.
Lastly came the showstopper, 18 each of two different kinds of doughnut. Not just proving, then, but the temperature and duration of the frying had to be just right.
Now, I shan't put who got sent home here, but it is below in the asterisked remarks^^.
| "MY TANK IS FIGHT! Also, any Povitza going?" |
* A bad translation of a Russian phrase
** Chatty
*** Not to be confused with "breeches", as although breeches can have breaches, breaches can't have breeches.
^ I say it was a couronne. So it is.
^^ Martha :(
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