Considering my general dislike for anything that has to do with sports, it was surprising even to me to count and come up with 14 years of bona-fide membership in a sports club. This was, of course, years ago. I took a liking to squash because it provided a good workout in a short time and was played indoors. To prepare myself, I took lessons from the former Japanese women’s squash champion at Do Sports Plaza in Shinjuku. When we moved to Ota-ku, we joined the small but prestigious Isetan Sports Club (伊勢丹スポーツクラブ) where we were members for the aforementioned 14 years.

The sports club was on Meguro-dori next to the lesser known branch of 紀ノ国屋インターナショナルスーパーマーケット, an easy drive from our home. For years, I would play squash two to three times a week and use their bath and sauna facilities almost every evening. It was a great place to get to know people. I met Willi Thaler there, the Thyssen man in Tokyo; Kohana-san, who owned a bar in Jiyugaoka; Suzuki-shacho, who had a typesetting company with branches in Hawaii and Australia, but we never got any business off the ground; and the very quiet Fuji-san, who brings me to the title of this entry.

Tatsuya Fuji’s claim to fame was the male title role in the 1976 Nagisa Oshima movie Ai no corrida (English title: In the Realm of the Senses), which has the dubious distinction that it was not shown in uncensored form in Japan, its country of origin, until 2001.

Freda Freiberg reminisces in an article in Senses of Cinema:

In the mid ’70s, when this film was produced, it created a storm of controversy … Now, 25 years later, its re-release in the original uncut version has passed almost unnoticed … The public’s lack of interest serves to remind us of all those clichés about yesterday’s sensation and the ephemerality of fame. Saddest of all is the evident lack of interest in challenging cinema, cinema that challenges the viewer aesthetically, politically, emotionally and intellectually. Oshima at his prime was one of the few filmmakers in the history of cinema to produce such cinema.

At the end of the property-price driven “bubble” economy in Tokyo, Isetan Sports Club had to close its doors. I am glad I had a chance to be part of it for such a long time.

When M. was stuck for hours at Toronto airport the other day because of bad weather in Chicago, she bought Lynne Truss’ bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation to help her pass the time. I learnt about English punctuation from Gordon Vero Carey’s 1958 book Mind the stop: A brief guide to punctuation with a note on proof-correction, which wasn’t nearly as funny and that’s probably why I didn’t learn all that much. Carey, by the way, also wrote American into English: A handbook for translators.

But back to Lynne Truss. Here, in case you haven’t heard it yet, the story behind the title: A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. “Why?” groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. “Panda,” ran the entry for his assailant. “Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

The book is full of interesting examples where punctuation or the lack thereof makes a difference to the meaning. The writing style is breezy and funny. But the book is also oddly unsatisfactory. Where I hoped for an explanation I found just another example. There is not much depth to it, and, by the way, I was aware of Aldus Manutius and his accomplishments. As a user of PageMaker from its first incarnation on, when the program was still published by the Seattle company Aldus Software, I couldn’t help but read of Aldus Manutius over and over in their corporate literature.

Come to think of it, Lynne Truss’ complaints about the misuse of the apostrophe sounded very much like the ones in the Zwiebelfisch column of Der Spiegel – or the other way around.

BlogRolling is back up again — in a fashion. It still shows Unicode turned ANSI for “Link Goodies” and “Recently Updated,” and any changes I am trying to make do not stick. Please excuse the seemingly random characters …

[May 15: It seems to be working again.]

It wasn’t a mob of emus or a gaggle of geese making a racket around my house this morning, it was a __________ of turkeys.

(A) band — (B) flock — (C) gang — (D) herd — (E) raft

The right answer(s) can be found at Melissa Kaplan’s Beastly Garden of Wordy Delights.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla.

Es ist schon lange her, aber ich meiner Jugend machte ich den Fehler, Englisch als zusätzliche moderne Fremdsprache zu wählen, obwohl ich ein humanistisches Gymnasium besuchte und mit Französisch mein Soll schon erfüllt hatte. Ich mache die Beatles dafür verantwortlich.

Meine Expedition ins Reich der englischen Sprache verlief wenig erfolgreich. Unser Lehrer, Herr Kammer, konnte irgendwie nicht begreifen, daß das Erlernen einer Sprache etwas mit Kommunikation zu tun haben könnte. Der langen Rede kurzer Sinn: Am Ende der Untertertia war der Moment für eine Ehrenrunde gekommen, u. a. wegen einer Fünf in Englisch.

Ich wählte Englisch in der Oberstufe ab und machte mit Latein weiter, obwohl dies zum „übergroßen Latinum“ führte. Ich wollte auf keinen Fall das Englisch-Debakel wiederholen.

Als ich 1971 zum ersten Mal Fuß auf amerikanischen Boden setzte, wurde mir schnell klar, daß Herr Kammer uns wenig von dem vermittelt hatte, was zum Überleben in einer englischsprachigen Umgebung nötig war. Also machte ich mich an die Arbeit, selbst das nachzuholen, was er versäumt hatte.

Vor kurzem stieß ich auf auf das obenstehende „Grammatik-Quiz“, und da mußte ich an meine Noten in Herrn Kammers Klasse denken. Ich füllte das Quiz aus, obwohl es sich eigentlich nicht um strikte Grammatikfragen handelte. Das Ergebnis gefiel mir wesentlich besser als meine Fünf im Abschlußzeugnis der Untertertia.

Открываем дачный сезон! Essential Russian phrases.

I just received this letter from none other than … well, actually, it was sent by his wife Renee who was in charge of the prom dinner for my daughter’s senior class. The man has been a fellow parent for years and the school got a baseball field and a softball field out of it — and perhaps even more, who knows.

Since nobody knows that this letter wasn’t sent by him personally, perhaps I should frame it and hang it on the wall?

Just read in Transblawg about a new edition of the Collins German Dictionary – and it brought back memories of my time in Glasgow.

Peter Terrell hired me in the early 70s right out of university for my first (and first overseas) job as a compiler on a bilingual English-German dictionary project for Collins Publishers – most likely the first incarnation of the dictionary mentioned by Margaret Marks. I worked in the derelict building of Collins in Glasgow’s Cathedral Street, the only one that was left standing on the north side of the street. This was before computers, and our small crew worked with paper and pencil on the German entries for the dictionary.

I was the new kid in the office, and Roland Breitsprecher, later of Duden-Oxford Bildwörterbuch, and Veronika Schnorr (today Büro für Lexikographie in Stuttgart), helped me to make sense of my job.

I will always be grateful to Peter for giving me the chance to start in the language business. I had no idea of the direction I wanted to take and he was extraordinarily patient with me. Even when I left Collins (much sooner than I had planned) for the United States, exchanging electrical bar heaters and hot water heaters with time switches for central heating and perpetual hot water, he was generous enough to allow me to contribute on a freelance basis for some time.

The last time I saw Roland was 1978 in Mannheim. Veronika came to visit us in Tokyo one time in the early 80s and another time she kindly offered her office in Stuttgart so that I could interview prospective translators. With Peter I still have occasional contact: I visited him in Glasgow one year, and I did some translation work for his company Lexus Translations. The old Collins building in Cathedral Street is no more, I am told.