Word: englishman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Monsignor Knox retired from Oxford to a Shropshire convent (as chaplain) in 1939 to do his translating. He says he did not ask himself "How shall I make this foreigner talk English?" but "What would an Englishman have said to express this?" Hence he searched less for the right word than for the right turn of phrase. Like all modern translations, Knox's substitutes pedestrian clarity for the poetic imagery and sweep of the older versions...
...blithely guessed it would take him three years, and when a friend pointed out that 40 French Academicians had labored 40 years to write a French dictionary, Johnson boomed: "Sir, forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." The Dictionary took nine years, and was such a success that the Government rewarded him with a pension of £300 a year...
Producer of the portfolios is 25-year-old Maurice Girodias, son of an Englishman who published advance-guard writers in between-wars Paris. Girodias got most of his paper from the black market, foiled German authorities by simply leaving town when his work appeared...
Such gullibility was traced farther back by John Morris in Traveler from Tokyo (Sheridan House; $2.75), Morris, an Englishman once attached to the Japanese Foreign Office as an adviser, wrote that Jap newspapers calmly assert that the airplane is a Japanese invention, that Jesus Christ was born in the north of Japan...
...Partisans could never figure out Major Randolph Churchill-his fits, bravado and geniality. They generally defined him as "the incredible Englishman." Randolph was constantly hunting up his batman. "Salmon! Where is Salmon? Salmon, I say, you must be with me!" Then he would praise Salmon in public, whereupon Salmon would draw himself up: "Sir, I don't like to be made fun of!" During the rest pauses, super-active Randolph would think up various picnic pleasures, such as constructing a nice bivouac when all we wanted was to be left alone and lie in the grass. He never fussed...