Word: dialects
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most mainstream readers. Subduing those question marks required captivating, original fiction. That challenge, which the novel met so spectacularly, is analogous to the one the new film of the same name faces. “The Kite Runner” is a subtitled film in a language (Dari, the dialect of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan) foreign to most moviegoers; its cast list is populated by no-name actors. Fortunately, the movie largely lives up to the expectations that readers of Hosseini’s book will have. The selling point of the movie is the plot, which chronicles the life...
...still angry at my friend for bashing my dignified Texan twang, but I duly understood that I was getting a taste of my own medicine. Ever since I came to Harvard I’ve cringed each time I’ve heard that local New England dialect. How anybody could walk through Boston Common and still think it’s us Texans who sound dumb was beyond...
...being a bit more precise: the Italian word in question is vaffanculo. Unlike the Italian high court, though, we will not deconstruct the exact significance of what is affectionately abbreviated as "vaffa" when the irritation is a bit less extreme. It is an expression that has survived in one dialect form or another down generations of Italy's millions of emigrants around the world (it is known by its Sicilian variant in the U.S. va fangul, popularized on the hit HBO series The Sopranos), alongside more wholesome words and concepts like prosciutto, mamma and amore...
...outpost of terrorist activity. Residents of the quiet street, cut into a wooded hillside in the upper-middle class suburb, can count the Scottish city's rich professional football players among their neighbors. Curving in on itself, the crescent's name speaks to its snug insulation: In the local dialect, "neuk" means "nook...
...Some say this is the "real" Taiwan, and, indeed, a trip down from the capital requires cultural reorientation. Taxi drivers and shopkeepers speak the Taiwanese dialect instead of Mandarin, and politics here are decidedly "green"-the color of President Chen and his independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party. Japanese tourists regularly visit, looking for scattered vestiges of their country's 50-year rule on the island, but Westerners have only trickled in, deterred by the four-hour-plus train ride or stop-and-start bus trip down Taiwan's congested west coast. That is expected to change now that the high...