July 8, 2014

FRENGLISH at Geneva Airport: We Are Actually Not Here

Frenglish is a word I use for English that is not Franglais (a crossover lingo).
It uses English but thinks in French, i.e uses French syntax, imagery, metaphors or cultural references.
A good example: a sign at Cointrin, Geneva Airport:

"We are actually not here"

We are submersed--my verb neologism, which means exactly what it sounds like-- in advertising. Immersed and submerged in, and subjugated by the world of ads. Seduction lurks at every turn.
Appeals to our esthetics, our self-love, our appetites, our fascination with technology we can possess, our craving for elegance, you name it.
And Geneva, that international crossroads of banking, commerce and language, serves up many delicious examples of Frenglish in advertising brochures and such.

OK. When you arrive at Geneva airport and are on your way to your gate on the electric ramp or on foot, inhaling  inside air and trying to avoid hooking bag wheels on something or someone and wondering whether your passport is in the usual pouch.....
AHHH.....
Indirect lighting, promises of cool luxury and the good life, biotechnology to improve your chances of survival or fabulous insurance and health coverage. Expensive glass posters paid for with fat budgets.
The clincher is the phrase that's tacked on. The jingle, the hook, the whatever-you-call-it.
I may be stepping on the toes of some PR pros, but c'mon guys, these are embarrassing:

Chopard -- big-time jewelry:  Life is a Smile
Give me a break. Many things can be many things, but life is not a smile. Or a grin or a leer or a frown or a smiley face. But you can't say La Vie Est Un Sourire. So this isn't even Frenglish.
Life is a beach, ok, I can live with that one -- a dash of wit, a play on words, a whiff of pleasure. Can't grin at Life is a Smile.

Bovet -- watches (with a dad and curly-haired kid):  Born from Love
 Right. Birth of a Watch, birth of a kid, legacy of a watch to kid born from love (love-child?). Anyway, who is born from love? Birth is generally from a female. The first Bovet watch was created in 1822. The original Mr. Bovet would be shocked, shocked! His watch a nature child?

Nespresso -- guess -- (with Clooney gazing demurely into an expresso cup):  Pure Pleasure is Inside.
Inside what?  His coffee cup? His stomach? His lap? Is this coy? Is Clooney about to make love to his coffee? I mean I love coffee and caffeine too, as it circulates through my system, my brain. Etc. Pure Pleasure Inside. Not even sexy, this.

Richard Mille -- more watches: A Racing Machine on the Wrist
Whaaaa? The wrist? Whose? Your wrist, my wrist. And hey, a racing machine sounds, like, heavy. Like who would you even want it on your wrist? Ever?
Even a total technophiliac wouldn't want to be saddled with heavy weight 'on the wrist' -- instant tendinitis. Ow.

Nissan - automobiles: Innovation that Excites
Oooh. This one, and the materials that went with it, won five marketing innovation rewards in 2012 for its Innovation That Excites - Altima Launch. And I'm sure it deserved the awards. But not for that phrase. Excites here is open-ended...you have to choose who will get excited or what part of you is supposed to get excited (imagination, body parts).  I think that was the intent. But the open-ended, vague idea it tries to get across, and the dubious grammar leaves me very unexcited. Get a life Nissan! I love my Nissan Micra, but get yourselves a better copywriter.
http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/releases/d3d07d6d-07af-4f95-b7be-191db2197ce1

And here's a cheesy poster from the Cointrin airport website.
Chahming!

http://www.gva.ch/en/desktopdefault.aspx

July 7, 2014

THE TELL-TALE SLICED-LEMON SCAR

Etched in the flesh of the upper arm or occasionally lower buttock of any baby boomer who travelled overseas is an indistinct circle, a flesh-colored permanent tatoo from the years when smallpox had not yet been eradicated.
The vaccination left a impressive pock scar one bore as a badge of honor:  I travel and I have been marked for travel.

The campaign led by the World Health Organization to eliminate smallpox was successful, thanks to intelligent planning and management, dogged persistence, and adequate funding.
1972 was the last year travellers were vaccinated, and 1990 the final year for the US military.

I thought I'd photograph a couple of my vaccination scars for the record and show them here.
But I looked in the mirror and surprise! The proud scars that had lasted over fifty years are now indistinguishable from marks and freckles and insect bites of various origins on on my upper arm.
I thought I was an anomaly.

So I checked my husband's arm that had long born its lemon-slice over years of marriage and lo! his scar had also gone the way of all flesh!

So the request is out:

"Seeking genuine smallpox scar to record as photo-relic on blog"

But wait, there's always Google.

I search "smallpox vaccination scars photos" I find Flickr answers the appeal.
Yes, there is indeed at least one site that has over a thousand photos of people displaying, voluntarily or nay, their shots.

A fine example of two scars on one arm:


It is worth a visit to this website to see everything from demure maidens smiling shyly at the camera to vamps-with-scars (check out the thighs).
(The photos are protected, they cannot be displayed here).

Perhaps they were used to show just how sexy it was to get vaccinated, or perhaps it was a forerunner of today's rage to tattoo....

https://www.flickr.com/photos/49602798@N04/11499125306/in/pool-677958@N25/

Not to put a damper on the matter, it appears that quite recently some old vials of smallpox virus were found refrigerated somewhere on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in  Bethesda, Maryland. The battle against smallpox may be over, but perhaps not the war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/smallpox-vials-found-in-storage-room-of-nih-campus-in-bethesda/2014/07/08/bfdc284a-06d2-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html?hpid=z1

July 1, 2014

FAMILY AND HISTORY


There but for the sweep of history......am I, born in Paris of second generation immigrant parents, just after the end of World War II. Well perhaps not.
My grandmother and grandfather made the difficult journey over land from Russia to France in the early twentieth century, looking for a better life. Despite rudimentary living conditions and tough piece-work sewing fur pelts together into coats, my fourteen year-old grandmother apparently adored the French capital. She learned to prepare French dishes, sew beautifully, enjoy the beauty of an incredible city and live the life Parisian, wheeling her baby girl, my aunt, through the Jardins de Luxembourg, singing her French lullabies at night. 

At the urging of relatives, the young family decided to join them in the US until the war was over. In 1915 they were certain it would be over within a year and they could return to Paris. My grandfather, having already been forced to serve for years in the Czar's army was not about to join another one.


If it hadn't been for the Great War, I might have been born French.

But then with deportations in World War II my mother might not have survived and I'd never have been born.

If Archduke Franz Ferdinand's coach hadn't (unpredictably) gone down the street where Gavrilo Princip was lurking, the murders might not have taken place, and no Great War. 

'Ifs' are debatable, but the terrible events of the Great War are not.
And the rest is history? Well not exactly.

"Despite his message of goodwill, Komsic presides over only a part of an ethnically divided city. Nineteen years after the war ended, Bosnia operates as two "entities", the predominantly Muslim and Croat Federation, and the overwhelmingly Serb-dominated Serb Republic (RS). The highly autonomous RS was recognised by the peace settlement. Many Muslims regard it as the product of ethnic cleansing, while for Serbs its existence is a guarantor of peace.
Swaths of the capital lie in the RS, where the administration of Istocno (east) Sarajevo operates separately, the two not even joined by public transport. In emergency cases, citizens of Istocno Sarajevo cannot be treated in the city centre's general hospital, Komsic notes, instead having to be taken 120 miles to Banja Luka, the capital of the RS."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/gavrilo-princip-sarajevo-divided-archduke-franz-ferdinand-assassination

The above article describes the great divisions within contemporary Sarajevo and the country as a whole. Princip as a revered and actively commemorated hero / Princip as a wild criminal who unleashed hell on the world.
Divided passions survive intact into the twenty-first century, fester and divide communities, cities, countries. Sarajevo is scarred, Bosnia is divided.

I never met my grandmother. She died young in Philadelphia in 1934. 

My mother, her second daughter, left America for Europe in 1945, and worked with the Red Cross in Greece, then in Geneva.
My mother died peacefully six years ago to the day at the age of 90 only three miles from the French border. 
You could say she was fortunate. She was born in the US at the end of the Great War. She did not suffer during the Second World War. She lived in Europe in a time of relative peace. The Europe her own mother had loved. The gorgeous flowers and bushes she cultivated in her country garden and her love of birds were intense expressions of beauty.

But she carried within her the collective memory of pogroms, the deaths from typhus, the struggle of immigration and poverty and the death of a young mother. 
She talked about this only occasionally, but her emotional struggle was patent.
My mother bore this history within her her whole life.