I saw this cartoon in Reader's Digest a couple of months ago.
I have recreated this cartoon with Microsoft Paint.
Reader's Digest ６月号の定番コラム All in a Day's Workの記事からです。
I was at the customer-service desk, returning a pair of jeans that were too tight.
"Was anything wrong with them?" the shop assistant asked.
"Yes," I said. "They hurt my feelings."
Reader's Digest ６月号の定番コラム All in a Day's Work中の一つの記事タイトルに使われていた単語が気になりました。
Classic Complisult
It's amazing how a person can compliment and insult you at the same time. Recently, when I greeted a colleague, she said, "You look so gorgeous. I didn't recognise you."
"complisult" の意味が "compliment and insult you at the same time" の意味であることは記事を読めばわかりますが、辞書にこの単語が出ているでしょうか？
普通の辞書にはありませんでしたが、次の俗語辞典には掲載されていました。
・Urban Dictionary: A backhanded compliment.: "That's such a nice dress. It does wonders for your figure.": This person has just delievered a complisult.
"complisult" を普通の表現では "backhanded compliment" と言う様で、こちらは普通の辞書にも掲載されています。
・American Heritage Dictionary: Having derogatory or insulting implications: "Everyone...said how wonderful, how glamorous she looked, but even that was a sort of backhanded compliment, with the unspoken addendum, for your age"
・Vocabulary.com: roundabout or ambiguous: “attacks from that source amounted to a backhanded compliment to his integrity”: “a backhanded and dishonest way of reaching his goal”
Reader's Digest ６月号の記事 Psychoanalysing Dictatorsの中のNikita Khrushchevについての記述の一部を引用します。
"Capable of extraordinary frankness, and in his own eyes no doubt unusually honest, Khrushchev can also be expert in calculated bluffing. It is often hard to distinguish when he is voicing real conviction and when he is dissembling."
最後に出てきた単語 "dissembling" を原形の "dissemble" で調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Conceal one’s true motives, feelings, or beliefs: an honest, sincere person with no need to dissemble
・Vocabulary.com: To dissemble is to hide under a false appearance, to deceive. "When confronted about their human rights record, the Chinese government typically dissembles."
Dissemble is a little more complicated than a straight lie or denial. When you dissemble, you disguise your true intentions or feelings behind a false appearance. To dissemble is to pretend that you don't know something, to pretend that you think one way when you act another way. "My boyfriend was dissembling the whole time. He was a married father of two."
July 10のThe Japan Times Online記事 "Japan’s discriminatory koseki registry system looks ever more outdated" に気になる単語が出てきました。
The koseki made every Japanese family an open book -- quite literally. Until access restrictions were introduced in 1976, anyone could pay the statutory fee and peruse another person’s koseki. Not only that, but in the past, far more information was recorded in the registry. Unusual deaths and different categories of children born out of wedlock were logged, and until 1963 criminal convictions were also recorded, staining the entire family. (Now criminal records are maintained in a separate registry.) The koseki was thus part of a panopticon-like system in which everyone would feel that they were being monitored but could also participate in the monitoring process.
"panopticon" は監視されている気がするシステム？ 早速辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.: The panopticon, an 18 th-century prison design dominated by a central viewing tower, called for an elimination of privacy and constant surveillance of prisoners.
・Vocabulary.com: If your school is designed as a panopticon, it means that if you stand in the middle of the building, you can see every single classroom.
Use the noun panopticon to talk about a circular building ? especially a prison with cells distributed around a central surveillance station. Eighteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up the idea and was kind enough to bequeath us the word as well, from the Greek pan, or "all," and optikon, "of or for sight."
戸籍制度が "panopticon-like system" と感じたことはありませんが、新しく導入されたマイナンバー制度は "panopticon-like system" と言えるかも知れません。
またしても日本人が海外でテロの被害者になりました。July 2, 2016付けのThe Japan Times Onlineの記事冒頭を引用します。
All the seven Japanese citizens who were previously unaccounted for after a 12-hour hostage crisis in Dhaka were found and pronounced dead at a local hospital, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a news conference in Tokyo late Saturday night.
"unaccounted for" は知っている "account for" の反対/否定する意味とは異なる様です。辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Not included in (an account or calculation) through being lost or disregarded: a substantial amount of money is unaccounted for
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: used to say that what happened to someone or something is not known: Many people were unaccounted for after the disaster.: A great deal of money remains unaccounted for.
こんな意味で使われるのですね。
The Japan Times Online June 22の記事 "Reflecting on a potential cure for warming" からの抜粋です。
We need to turn down the heat -- and fast. To this end, albedo modification -- a kind of geoengineering intended to cool the planet by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere -- holds tremendous promise.
Injecting synthetic aerosols that reflect sunlight into the stratosphere, for example, could help counter the warming caused by greenhouse gases. The mechanism is similar to wearing a white shirt in the summer: white reflects sunlight and cools what is underneath, whereas darker colors absorb sunlight and heat.
"albedo modification" の意味は説明があるので分かりますが、"albedo" と言う言葉は初めて知りました。一応辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The proportion of the incident light or radiation that is reflected by a surface, typically that of a planet or moon.: Taking characteristic values for the average albedo (the fraction of sunlight reflected), size limits could be calculated.
・Vocabulary.com: Albedo refers to how reflective and bright something is. Snow has a high albedo, which is why skiers wear sunglasses and sunscreen.
Technically speaking, the albedo of an object is a ratio. It compares the amount of light hitting the surface of the object to the amount of light that gets reflected back. The more light reflected, the higher the albedo. Scientists often use this word in reference to the surfaces of planets and other reflective objects in the night sky. Albedo comes from a Latin word for “white.”
"albedo" で "albino" を連想したのですが、やはり白と関係があったのですね。すると "album" も白と関係するのではと思い、 "album" の語源も調べると：
・Oxford English Dictionary: Early 17th century: from Latin, neuter of albus 'white' used as a noun meaning 'a blank tablet'. Taken into English from the German use of the Latin phrase album amicorum 'album of friends', it was originally used consciously as a Latin word with Latin inflections.
"albedo" から脱線しましたが、"albxx" は白と関係すると予想するのは当たっているようです。
Reader's Digest 3月号のMarch All in a Day's Workに出ていたそそっかしい人の話
A Twitter exchange between an angry customer and an apologetic staffer at a pizza takeaway:
Customer Yoooo: I ordered a pizza and it came with no topping on it or anything. It's just bread.
Pizza takeaway: We're sorry to hear about this!
...[minute later]
Customer: Never mind. I opened the pizza upside down.
Reader's Digest ６月号の定番コラム Life's Like That にあった記事からです。
I went to a colleague's wedding recently. When it came to the part of the service where the couple had both said, "I do," they handed their mobile phones to each other to update their Facebook relationship status. That was a first for me!
世の中の変化に段々とついていけなくなってきた様です。これから又結婚することは考えられないので Wedding 3.0に対応できなくても問題ありませんが、Windows 10に変わり、Internet Explorerに代わりMicrosoft Edgeが出しゃばってくるのに閉口しています。
The Power of Noticing by Max H. Bazermanは小説と違い余り難しい単語や慣用句はほとんで出てきません。この本から取り上げる最後の表現です。
Between 1999 and Madoff's arrest, Markopolos approached the SEC five times. His 2005 book identifies a large number of red flags, and an appendix reproduces a thirty-five-page document that he provided to the SEC. His book also makes it clear that, by 2005, he thought it was far more likely that Madoff had constructed a Ponzi scheme than that he was front-running. So why didn't the Securities and Exchange Commision pay attention to Markopolos?
以前（3/4/2008）に取り上げた "Ponzi scheme" と同様にここの " front-running" は何か悪いことに違いありません。辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Stock Market The practice by market makers of dealing on advance information provided by their brokers and investment analysts, before their clients have been given the information.: Such dicey practices as insider trading and front-running have long been rampant in Moscow's bourses.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the usually illegal act of a dealer buying shares in a company after they have had an order from a customer to buy a large number of the same shares, which is likely to have the result that the shares will go up in price. The dealer can then make a profit by selling the shares that they have bought: Front-running is when a broker places trades for his own account before fulfilling orders previously submitted by his customer.
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