Verbification

Yes, Moe just used trompe l'oeil as a verb.

US Customs Language FAIL

When I was returning from the US yesterday, I had to pass through customs and fill out a form. Question 15 threw me for a loop, however:

"15. Residents -- the total value of all goods, including commercial merchandise I/we have purchased or acquired abroad, (including gifts for someone else, but not items mailed to the U.S.) and am/are bringing to the U.S. is:"

and then a blank for the monetary value.

The obvious intended meaning is for you to give the monetary value of all goods being brought back that have not been subject to US taxes. As written, the wording on the actual form is, at best, ambiguous. The problematic portion is "including commercial merchandise", which SHOULD be a parenthetical statement. However, some IDIOT dropped a comma, such that the parenthetical statement is now "including commercial merchandise I/we have purchased or acquired abroad", which now renders 15. as "the total value of all goods", instead of "the total value of all goods I/we have purchased or acquired abroad"

The instructions on the US Customs webpage says this more clearly, perhaps because whoever was writing it knows HOW TO USE PUNCTUATION: "15. If you are a U.S. resident, print the total value of all goods (including commercial merchandise) you or any family members traveling with you have purchased or acquired abroad (including gifts for someone else, but not items mailed to the United States) and are bringing into the United States." The instructions on back of the actual form are much less detailed and are essentially useless.

When I asked the guy at Customs about it, he admitted it was confusing, but said it made sense after more readings. I did not want to press the issue at the time, cuz they can confiscate your laptop without due process. I think it's pretty clear that I was doing an accurate job of interpreting the syntax AS WRITTEN when I asked if I had to report the value of all the objects I brought with me to Finland as well.

powerpoint parsing fail

Yesterday, I was puzzled by this curious bullet-point at our weekly ecology seminar:
- recruitment unlikely due to Allee effects

Because I was parsing "unlikely" as an adverb modifying the verb "due" - of course, this didn't make any sense because Allee effects are not typically mentioned except as a mechanism to inhibit recruitment. Even more confusing was the previous sentence that no significant recruitment had been observed since the 1960s - so in some ways the statement that there *was* recruitment could have been new evidence to overturn earlier findings.

Eventually, I figured out that the intended parsing was for "unlikely" to be an adjective modifying the noun "recruitment" - recruitment is unlikely to occur because of low population densities (Allee effects).

Which begs the question of using complete sentences vs. phrases in powerpoint bullets: in this case, I think a complete sentence would have been fairly unambiguous, and would only have needed to be a bit longer - but in other cases, a complete sentence would take up a lot more space and be confusing as a block of text for the audience to read.

Loanwords in Japanese

Recently, I was eating in Sakura the other day and noticed something interesting on the specials menu, 黒豚ソーセジポトフ (kurobuta sausage potofu). Turning the menu over for the English side, all I found was the added word, soup, in parenthesis, which led me to believe that potofu was, indeed, derived from the French pot-au-feu. With that, I went ahead and ordered it, since the first and only time I had pot-au-feu, it was a delicious duck broth with seared foie gras and truffle oil. (thank you, Captain Jack!) Well, this one was not nearly so good - a rather bland vegetable mix with some decent sausage that tasted a bit more like hot dog than kurobuta, although in retrospect, I think that may be due to the rather unusual sweetness in kurobuta.

EDIT: This post wouldn't be complete without pointing you towards the wiki page on loanwords in Japanese, Gairaigo and the hilarious non-example "left-over", which refers to a "hit that goes over the left-fielder's head" in baseball rather than, well, leftovers. :)