Alien Profanity

I've been watching Farscape again and I love the way they handle profanity.

If you haven't seen it they have a neat little mcguffin to handle the fact that all the alien species speak different languages but understand each other with perfect clarity. All the characters are infected with "translator microbes" that enable them to understand any language spoken to them. They are also quite consistent with it in that uninfected characters can't understand each other.

As for us, well we understand everyone except for when the plot works better if we don't understand.

Simple.

The interesting thing is that swearwords are NEVER translated so we hear a constant stream of "dren", "boll-yotz", "farbot", "fekkik", "hazmot", "tralk" and "frel".*

The only other things that don't translate tend to be units of measurement. Obviously they can't include the swearwords or they would never get on air but the context makes the meanings of the substitutions clear.

Moral little beasties those translator microbes.

(*in English, that's shit, bullshit, crazy, ass, bitch, whore and f**k)

A River of Stones: Interlopers

30 June


half of these houses are
as I remember them
from my childhood,
fifty years shabbier and
fifty years greyer
but unchanged in their essence

but half of them are interlopers
absent in my memory

Getting Closer

Well they aren't great offers but they are offers. People finally seem to want to buy my house and that's the only piece of the puzzle that's been missing. It seems that I've taken another step towards reaching China. Now that I have offers, I have a sense of things moving again.

I heard something this morning that initially sounded plausible but the more it niggled away at me the more I decided that the speaker was just another I-think-I-know-better-than-you (but I'm wrong) pundit.

It was another of those TV discussion shows that only people (like me) who are either currently unemployed or actually mentally ill (you can make your own mind up about me) would ever watch. This particular show as they run into the advertising breaks always asks the audience a multiple choice question. This multiple choice question was along the lines of (and I'm making up the specifics, though not the intent)

How many people think the current exam system is a failure?

a) 25%

b) 37%

c) 63%

The host, when the show resumed, made a comment to the effect that he understood the difference between a number and percentage and the people who wrote the question clearly didn't. But I think he's wrong. Yes, it's true, a question beginning "how many" normally requires a numerical answer and a percentag answer normally requires a "how much" question. Normally, but not always.

Grammatically it's a well formed question but would anyone, anyone at all, expect an answer along the lines of 23,617,321?

Of course not. It would be utterly ridiculous.

On the other hand the alternate formulation of the question would be either,

"How much of the population thinks," or

"What percentage of the population thinks"

both of which sound rather more clunky and inarticulate than the actual question.

So, the question is, can a "how many" question be answered with a percentage and I think that, though it may depend on the question it certainly can be.

So, all that remains to ask is how many of my fellow (slightly more informed) language pundits agree with me.