''Como identificar se o YOU significa VOCÊ ou VOCÊS''

Na língua falada eles lançam mão de certos artifícios para que quem ouve saiba se eles estão falando “você” ou “vocês”. Mesmo em texto escritos – quando informais – eles usam estes artifícios. Observe o exemplo abaixo:

- What are you guys doing?

Veja que no exemplo acima a palavra “you” está acompanhada de “guys” [pronúncia-se /gáis/]. Neste caso, o “guys” não deve ser traduzido por “caras” [acredite: muita gente costuma traduzir]. Esta palavrinha está ali, junto de “you”, apenas para indicar que a pergunta está sendo feita a duas ou mais pessoas e não apenas a uma. Ou seja, a interpretação deve ser a seguinte:

- O que vocês estão fazendo?

Com isto descobrimos que em inglês eles não usam apenas o “you” para fazer referência a “vocês”. Aprendemos também que o “you” sozinho deve ser entendido como “você”. Veja,

- What are you doing? = O que você está fazendo?
- What are you guys doing? = O que vocês estão fazendo?

Além do “you guys”, eles também costumam dizer “you all” – geralmente dito apenas “y’all” – ou ainda “you folks”. Quando são apenas duas pessoas, eles também dizem “you two” – parecido com nosso “vocês dois”.

''SCENES FROM PALESTINIAN LIFE''

Gideon Lichfield reports on his travels among the Palestinians, this time to the village of Bil'in, which was celebrating a court victory obliging Israel to re-route the security barrier and restore access to nearby farmland ...

A colleague and I visited Bil’in, a Palestinian village that has become famous for its weekly protests against the anti-terror fence/separation barrier/apartheid wall. (NB: when I learn Javascript, I’ll add a “delete as appropriate” feature so you can read the version of this piece that corresponds to your politics.) The villagers were celebrating an Israeli High Court decision to reroute the barrier, restoring to the village about half the farmland that the existing route cuts off.

By the time we arrived the festivities had ended so the village could gear up for a wedding celebration, and handfuls of foreign sympathisers were loitering around trying to hitch rides back home. We drove out to the site of the protests next to the fence itself, where the ground is littered with the packaging from tear gas grenades.

As we stood taking pictures we heard a gunshot, and a minute later another. A group of boys in the distance had evidently strayed too near to another part of the fence, and the soldiers on the other side were firing warning shots and gunning the engine of their jeep. We decided not to make them any more jumpy by hanging around too close to the fence ourselves, and started driving back.

On the way I stopped the car to take a leak in an olive grove. From there I could hear the boys and the soldiers cursing each other in a fluid mix of Hebrew and Arabic. We walked closer, and it became clear that this was part of an established and mutually enjoyed tradition:

Boy: Fuck your sister!
Soldier: Your sister is a whore!
Boy: Your mother and your sister are whores!
Soldiers: [uproarious laughter]
Boy, mockingly: Where is Sharon? Sharon is dead!!
Soldier: [more laughter] You’re not a man!........

Não perca esta oportunidade!!!

''ALAN BENNETT GIVES US A NEW QUEEN SHE'S LIKE THE OLD ONE, BUT SHE READS A LOT''

Alan Bennett’s new book about Queen Elizabeth, "The Uncommon Reader" is published in America on September 18th, a fortnight after its appearance in Britain. Jasper Rees, in Intelligent Life magazine, declares himself amused ...

“The Uncommon Reader” posits a scenario ripe with comedy: that, as she enters her ninth decade, the Queen discovers the joys of reading. It is a tale of the unexpected. The joke, of course, is that the Queen’s taste for sedentary pleasures is widely believed to be confined to doing jigsaws and watching the racing. She is famously, for example, no fan of Shakespeare.

A reader on the throne is as implausible in its way as the plot of Sue Townsend’s 1992 novel, “The Queen and I”. Townsend, the creator of Adrian Mole, had huge fun transplanting the royal family, dethroned after the republicans take Downing Street, to a Midlands sink estate. Here they survive on welfare, without servants or other comforts. Although she does at one point shed a lone tear of despair as she stirs Baxter’s game soup at the hob, naturally the Queen faces the trials of working-class life with a resourcefulness which lends credence to the popular idea that she really could cut it in the real world. Unheated houses certainly wouldn’t trouble a woman rumoured to throw open the windows of Balmoral whatever the weather. The novel also became a popular play.

It wasn’t quite as popular as “The Queen”, the movie. Released a year ago, the film met with extraordinary success at the Oscars and the box office. Yes, Peter Morgan’s chronicle of the week leading up to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a made-up riff on the known course of events. But it answered a public yearning, which reached insurrectionary levels after Diana’s death, for a show of monarchical emotion. Unusually for a genre in which history is prey to the vagaries of speculation, there was notably little quibbling with the film’s deeper veracity. This was because Helen Mirren, created a Dame by Her Majesty not too long before she took on the role of impersonating her, carted home every award going for a performance which enraptured audiences into forgetting that they were watching just that. People saw the Queen briefly blubbing alone in a Scottish wilderness, and they fervently willed it to be true. In the literal sense, the film was make-believe.

The eponymous head of state seems to have found little to quarrel with in her portrayal, because Mirren and her director Stephen Frears were subsequently invited to lunch with their subject at Buckingham Palace. Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter. “And how did you research one’s character?”

This must be the first time the Queen has met one of her impersonators. These days you can’t move for actresses who’ve played Queen Elizabeth I, including Mirren, but a residual deference to the owner of the face on the coins and the stamps has kept portrayals of QEII to a respectful trickle. The actress Jeannette Charles has made an honest buck out of a passing resemblance, most recently in the film “Austin Powers: Goldmember”. The Queen cuts a more approachable figure in Roald Dahl’s story for children, “The BFG”, than the grisly old ladies found in the rest of his work. Even the pitiless lampoonists of “Spitting Image” always struggled to lay a glove on her.

One of the first writers to intuit that there is absolutely no future in rubbishing the Queen was Bennett. In “A Question of Attribution”, his 1988 play about the former Soviet spy and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt, she makes a cameo appearance as a tartly knowing commentator on fakery and illusion. Prunella Scales, the dragon of “Fawlty Towers”, played her both on stage, at the National, and then on television. Now, nearly 20 years on, Bennett is having a second go at Her Majesty in “The Uncommon Reader”. She still comes up smelling of roses.

Her interest in literature is pricked by accident when, out of a customary sense of duty, she finds herself idly borrowing a book from Kensington and Chelsea’s mobile library parked up in one of the Palace’s courtyards. She is soon racing through classics ancient and modern with the avidity of a convert--or, to use a word she learns from her researches, an opsimath: one who learns only late in life.

She may learn late, but she also learns fast. To the dismay of politicians and flunkies, literature instils in the Queen such dangerous concepts as egalitarianism, empathy and, horror of horrors, humanity. “I think I may be turning into a human being,” she notes after an early tussle with Henry James, “I am not sure this is an altogether welcome development.” Quite the contrary. Dame Helen has the awards to prove that a glimpse behind the mask is extremely welcome. Even if it’s pure fiction.

''Mais gíria de inglês com The Big Bang Theory''

Hi, everybody! What’s up?
Are you ready? Let’s get started!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BeiJYeRTgM&feature=player_embedded

English version:

Patrick: Dude, that chick is checking you out! Go get her!

Jeff: Nah, I’ll just stay here in my little corner. Besides, I don’t like bottle blondes.

Patrick: What’s wrong with you? You’re turning into such a lame-o.

Jeff: Hey, that was totally uncalled for, man. Ok, I’ll go get her!… But if I can’t pull it off,it’s on you.

Portuguese version:

Patrick: Mano, aquela mina está olhando pra você! Vai lá pegar ela!

Jeff: Não, eu quero ficar aqui no meu cantinho. Além disso, eu não gosto de loira oxigenada.

Patrick: Qual é o teu problema? Você está virando um enrolão de primeira.

Jeff: Não precisava dessa, cara. Ok, eu vou lá pegar ela!… Mas se eu não conseguir, a culpa vai ser sua.

Obs.: lame-o (“lei-mou”) não quer sempre dizer “enrolão”, mas é uma gíria super informal que amigos usam entre si quando um deles está desanimado, não quer sair, ou não quer falar com uma garota, etc (pode ser usada para alguém que não faz parte do grupo também, é claro).

Key words│Expressions:

• Uncalled for ─ Quando se diz algo que é desnecessário no sentido de “Não precisava dizer/fazer isso; foi um pouco demais”, inapropriado, sem necessidade.

Segue mais um exemplo: He thinks the criticism from FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke was totally uncalled for. (Ele acha que as críticas do secretário geral da FIFA foram totalmente desnecessárias.)

• Pull something off ─  “pull something off” é um phrasal verb que quer dizer ter sucesso em fazer algo, conseguir uma proeza ou uma espécie de façanha. É muito comum ouvir em seriados um personagem dizer ao outro “You can’t pull that off”, ou “Você não consegue (fazer isso)”. Veja um exemplo de uso neste episódio de Friends: a cena começa mais ou menos em 4:50.

Segue mais um exemplo: I’m learning a new maneuver and I think I can pull it off at the skateboarding championship.  (Estou aprendendo uma nova manobra e acho que eu consigo fazer no campeonato de skate.)

• It’s on you ─ A culpa é sua ou a culpa vai ser sua. Essa expressão é geralmente usada quando alguém pede para você fazer algo que não está afim. Quando você decide fazer, meio a contragosto, você diz “A culpa é sua ou a culpa vai ser sua (se não der certo)”.

Segue mais um exemplo: Basically, if anything goes wrong, it’s on you. (Basicamente, se alguma coisa der errado, a culpa é sua.)

É isso aí pessoal, por hoje é só!

Take care guys, all the best!

''Falsos cognatos: exquisite e fabric''

Sabemos que os falsos cognatos são os amigos-da-onça, aquelas palavras que são parecidas ou até mesmo iguais ao português, porém trazem significados diferentes.
O primeiro falso cognato é a palavra exquisite, que inicialmente lembra esquisito, estranho mas tem um significado bem oposto.
Exquiste é algo refinado, precioso, fino, delicioso e até mesmo educado. Em espanhol se dizesquisito e em francês exquis porqu vêm do particípio passado do verbo ex-quaerere (escolher cuidadosamente), em latim.
I love the exquisite Asian cuisine. (Adoro a refinada cozinha oriental.)
She has an exquisite taste in clothes. (Ela tem um gosto refinado para roupas.)
Para dizermos que algo é esquisito ou estranho usamos as palavras weird ou strange.
He’s such a weird guy. (Ele é um cara muito estranho.)
A palavra fabric também não significa fábrica, indústria, que traduzimos por factory ou plant.Fabric vem do latim fabrica, que era uma oficina onde trabalhava o faber (artesão) e por causa do progresso industrial veio a significar tecido (material manufaturado).
I don’t like this fabric. It’s very itchy. (Não gosto deste tecido. Me dá muita coceira.)
That dress is made of a very fine fabric. (Aquele vestido é feito de um tecido muito fino.)
Temos também a expressão social fabric, que significa tecido (ou tessitura) social, estrutura, organização.
Wars have affected the very fabric of our society. (As guerras afetaram a organização da nossa sociedade.)
See you next time!

''INTRODUCING THE INTELLIGENT LIFE PLAYLIST''

Tim de Lisle, deputy editor of Intelligent Life magazine and rock critic of the Mail on Sunday, introduces a mix of this year's best songs, for downloading--and one golden oldie in memory of Marc Bolan, who died 30 years ago this month ...

As we relaunch Intelligent Life as a quarterly magazine instead of an annual, we're adding several new features, including a playlist. I’m the magazine’s deputy editor, and I moonlight as a rock critic for the Mail on Sunday (or is the other way round?), so the task of choosing a dozen songs fell to me.

The thinking behind the playlist is this. We suspect most of our readers have iPods, and nearly all of them have long since loaded up their old favourites, but perhaps not so many know where to go to find good new music. In Britain, where we are based, there is a shortage of intelligent, grown-up radio stations. And although there’s an infinite supply of new music out here on the web, it can be hard to know where to begin.

So here's my opening offer: I've chosen 11 songs from this year, plus one golden oldie. The singers range from chart-toppers to relative unknowns. The one firm rule was that the songs had to be good--tuneful, soulful and thoughtful, the kind of songs that become part of the fabric of your life. Of course that’s in the ear of the beholder, but music isn’t a private language and usually if one person likes something, a few others will too.

Plenty of music magazines now come with a free CD, but the price you pay is that the songs you get are the ones the record companies (as well as the magazine) want you to get. This selection is completely independent. I drew up the list, wrote the blurbs, and then handed it to a helpful man at Apple UK, who put it up as an iMix on the British version of iTunes, so readers in Britain can buy the whole lot at one fell swoop. If you’re not in Britain, you can always listen to the 30-second free sample, or go to the singers’myspace pages. Let us know what you think.

''THE CAR IN FRONT MAY SOON BE A HONDA''

oyota seized a decisive lead in green motoring a decade ago with its Prius hybrid. Now Honda is chasing the post-petrol market by offering not only hydrogen-powered cars, but home power-stations to go with them. By Nick Valery ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007

IN ITS BID TO wrestle away Toyota's halo, Honda is testing a flashy family saloon code-named FCX--the third in a series of hydrogen-powered electric cars Honda has been quietly developing since 1989. The FCX is not the first electric vehicle to hit the road with a hydrogen fuel-cell under the hood: in a recent test on public roads General Motors showed that its Chevrolet Sequel could travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen.

But compared to the FCX, the rest are experimental mules. Honda proposes a roomy family saloon with all creature comforts that breezes along with a hum, accelerates briskly to 100mph, rounds bends with barely a hint of roll, and goes 270 miles on each tank of fuel. As far as everyday motoring is concerned, no compromises have been made to accommodate the vehicle's radical innards.

The FCX gets the equivalent of 75 mpg--three times the 24 mpg achieved in the city by the relatively frugal Honda Accord. In performance terms, the two cars are pretty much the same, except that the FCX's greater low-end torque makes it a lot quicker off the mark.

The FCX is also vastly cleaner. Because a fuel cell works like a car battery in reverse--combining hydrogen from the tank with oxygen from the air to produce electricity--there is no combustion processes and therefore no greenhouse gases from the car itself. The only waste coming out of the FCX's tailpipe is water vapour.

Carmakers everywhere see the fuel cell as the ultimate replacement for the internal combustion engine. But they've been idling along on the assumption that the changeover won't happen until 2020 at the earliest--after a decade spent building the infrastructure for making hydrogen widely available to the public. Right now there are only 60 or so hydrogen stations in the whole of America (50 of those in California) compared with 160,000 petrol stations.

Why has Honda turned up the heat? For one simple reason: it is not waiting for the hydrogen infrastructure to get built, but intends developing a network of refueling stations of its own instead. And it plans to put them, not on petrol station forecourts, but in motorists' own homes.

Honda's plan for marketing the FCX presumes that motorists will buy or lease the home-brew equipment to make their own hydrogen from natural gas. The Home Energy Station uses the natural gas supply to produce hot water and heat for the home as well as hydrogen for the fuel-cell car. If the domestic power supply goes on the blink, a built-in inverter can take juice from the car's fuel cell to produce alternating current for running the home.

California's authorities love the idea. They want to see clean co-generation in the home and energy efficient cars on the road; and they hope FCX owners will be tempted to leave their fuel-cell vehicles running in the garage rather than taking them for a spin. By selling their surplus electricity back to the grid, FCX owners could help local utilities meet their peak demands and avoid California's dreaded summer brownouts.

''Calvin''

''MANHATTAN MEMES ON CAMERA''

This Season: Cintra Wilson applauds a new documentary about a fashion photographer with an incorruptible eye... 

One of Manhattan’s most distinctive landmarks is not a building, but a white-haired octogenarian in a bright blue smock, perched on a three-speed bike on an uptown corner, taking photographs of the sidewalk fashion parade. For more than half a century, the photographer-writer Bill Cunningham (above) has been documenting the evolution of style across the spectrum of society, whether it’s diamond-heavy Fifth Avenue matrons or art-school Aphrodites rising from the subway. His New York Times columns, “On the Street” and “Evening Hours”, are considered the gold standard of fashion journalism.

“We all get dressed for Bill,” declares Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, in “Bill Cunningham New York”, a documentary that has been collecting international accolades. La Wintour barely exaggerates: Cunningham’s incorruptible eye has long been the de facto conscience of the fashion world. His camera disdains boring, derivative fashions—regardless of which celebrity might be wearing them— in favour of capturing viral fashion memes during the brief, mysterious lifespans in which they articulate some new flash of exuberance in the sartorial spirit.

Richard Press’s documentary shines a light into both Cunningham’s monkish existence and his singular artistic mind. “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do,” he says, with a rebellious grin. His journalism supports an apparently frugal lifestyle, and he turns down any gig or gift that might smack of payola—he won’t even eat or drink at the events he covers. His extravagances, he says, are editorial freedom and objectivity.

Cunningham’s lifelong obsession with seeking beauty is inspiring: he finds it every day, on sidewalks and catwalks. “Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life,” he says. “You can’t do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilisation.” This unpretentious, clear-eyed film captures an artist of humility dissolving seamlessly into his subject—a moth, in love, becoming fire.

''Crumb''

''Peanuts''

''Quadrinhos!!!''