Friday 19 October 2012

Al Jenat supermarket due to open

So the mystery of the new supermarket from the earlier has become a lot clearer by the simple expedient of putting a sign up out the front. It's going to be called "Al Jenat" and due to the limitations of my education I'm entirely unable to tell you what that means and Google Translate wasn't much help either. If you do know what it means, and I note there are a few other food stores in the UK with the same name, then please do let me know.

Happily it's offering a 10% discount on opening so whatever it is they'll be selling will be temporarily cheaper, though how you'll be able to verify that I'm not quite sure as there won't be any point of reference. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth though so I'm looking forward to buying discounted stuff just because I can... It's be churlish not to eh?

Regressing slightly if you have any interest in failed translations then I can do little better than to point you in the direction of "English As She Is Spoke", a Portuguese to English phrasebook from 1883 which became an unintentional source of humour because, it's generally believed, the Portuguese author wasn't familiar with English so created the translations by using a Portuguese-French dictionary and then dragging them through a French-English dictionary. This has left us such lovely phrases as "Raining in jars" (raining buckets) and the phrase I used above about looking a gift horse in the mouth comes out as "A horse bared don't look him the tooth" but  Stephen Pile's "Book of Heroic Failures", which introduced me to this august tome, picks it's most evocative favourite as "To craunch a marmoset", which sits alongside such mysterious phrases as "To buy cat in pocket", "To make paps for the cats" and invites you to "Dress your hairs"!

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