Word: anglo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Admittedly, this division between seeing meat on one's plate and recognizing the animal it comes from has long been a part of Anglo-Saxon culture, a part that one pitiful little endpaper like this could hardly hope to explode. Consider the fact that the meats in the English language have different names from the animals they come from (pig, pork; deer, venison; cow, beef) because the Norman rulers in England were the ones who got to enjoy meat while the poor peasants could only herd the animals, or at best raise them for dairy products. But that doesn...
...read Beowulf," Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen's core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread--if not actually read--what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking...
...squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines...
...preface, Heaney acknowledges the irony of a Celtic poet's attempting to revivify an Anglo-Saxon poem. When younger, he notes, "I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands." But this notion faded the deeper he got into his translation. Digging, delving into the loam of language, has been a central metaphor throughout his poetic career. (His most recent selection is titled Opened Ground.) What Heaney has brought to the surface with his Beowulf is an old and newly burnished treasure...
...called the name of Lisa Marie Presley's fiance, John Oszajca, "unpronounceable" [PEOPLE, Feb. 14]. But if 40 million people can pronounce the name Oszajca correctly, why can't you? Please don't let your Anglo-Saxon bias impair your ability to pronounce Slavic names, especially Polish ones. Not being able to pronounce a name correctly denigrates and debases not only its bearer but also the country of its origin. Ethnocentricity isn't funny in our rapidly shrinking global village. We all need to make the effort to pronounce names correctly and not make fun of them. Because, frankly...