QUOTES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Before flying back to SF, my daughter Laura Lynn left behind, for me to read, a book by Susan Cain, Bitter Sweet , about the power (?) of sorrow, longing, and how to cope. You may know by now how adverse I am to self-help books. However, I did peruse this one and looked it over. In the Prelude Cain says that Sarajevo is the city of Love. Sarajevo the city of Love? Then after finding 55 pages of Notes and 9 pages of Acknowledgments where she mentions and thanks everybody and his mother, an orgy of thanks and recognition, I came to the gist of this post of mine. After mentioning Gonzo, a.k.a. Ken, Ms. Cain writes in Spanish: "juntos somos mas". Aside from being a truism -together we are always more than singly- she manages to make one mistake out of three words, or 33 %. This sentence in Spanish comes from somewhere and must be a quotation. Quotations add much to our writing and if in foreign languages, they add glamour and exoticism and also, of course, scholarship. However, w...