火曜日と水曜日朝から出勤前に畑と買い物で忙しく、珍しくブログを二日も休んでしまいました。
さて、The Power of Noticing by Max H. Bazermanを読んでいます。
Bradstreet had an impressive resume: he attended Harvard College on an ROTC scholarship, rose to the rank of captain as a fighter pilot and air combat instructor over a five-year stint in the Marines, returned to Harvard and got an MBA, launched a career in business, and more broadly developed a reputation as an impressive businessperson, dedicated husband, and straight arrow.
最後に出てきた "straight arrow" とはどんな人物なのでしょうか？ 辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: An honest, morally upright person.: You can tell his character is gonna be a straight arrow when he refuses to let an unctuous lobbyist buy him breakfast.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: someone who is very honest and careful to behave in a socially acceptable way: Friends described Menendez as a straight arrow who rarely drank and was close to his family.
なるほど、真っすぐな人ですね。分かり易い。
The Power of Noticing by Max H. Bazermanを読んでいるとこんな文章に出会いました。
Most of us think we are better-than-average drivers, have smarter-than-average children, and choose stocks or investment funds that will outperform the market--even when there is clear evidence to the contrary. We discount facts that contradict the conclusions we want to reach, and we uncritically accept evidence that supports our positions. Unaware of our skewed information processing, we erroneously conclude that our judgements are free of bias. 確かに、私も色々なことを偏見と独断で決めていますね。
Reader's Digestの２月号あるいは３月号に出ていた記事です。
On the first day of her ski holiday, my colleague fell and broke her leg. As the doctor examined her, she moaned, "Why couldn't this have happened on my last day of skiing?"
The doctor looked up and said, "This is your last day of skiing."
Reader's Digest 5月号のWord Power三沢クイズはArtに関係する単語でいつもより比較的易しかったのですが、次の馴染みのある単語の元々の意味は知りませんでした。
graphic
A: life-like, vivid.
B: sculped of marble.
C: composed quickly and roughly
baroque
A: highly ornate.
B: plain in style.
C: traditional
正しい答えは： graphic： A 例文 The depiction of the embrace was a little too graphic for me. baroque； A 例文 Alex's baroque-inspired sketches were criticised for being too busy.
My five-year-old daughter came home from kindergarten very excited recently. "Mum, we got a 3-D printer at school!" she said.
"That's great," I replied.
"What are you guys going to print?"
She looked at me incredulously and said, "Three Ds."
Note: タイトル中の "kindy" はAustralian and New Zealand informal short for kindergarten （Collins Dictionary）
このところ小説を読むのが続いたのでMax H. Bazerman著のThe Power of Noticingを読んでみることにしました。早速覚えたい連語が出てきました。
A trader can either tell regulators about index fixing or request a fix in favor of her investiments. The conflict is evident and the choice deliberate. This view of conflict of interest as exclusively intentional leads to the view that moral suasion or sanctions can prevent the destructive effects of conflict of interest. However, extensive research demonstrates that our desires influence the way we interpret information, even when we are trying to be objective and impartial.
"moral suasion" が気になった連語です。辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Persuasion as opposed to force or compulsion.: We wait like small children to see if an aging Ayatollah will decide to evict us by force or moral suasion.
・Webster’s New World College Dictionary: persuasion now chiefly in moral suasion, the act of persuading by appealing to one's sense of morality
The outside of the building is non-descript by design. In an anonymous building, a man named Andre Simons sits at the head of the table. He is trim, compact and alert, with a scalp shaved to a high shine, arched eyebrows and preternaturally wide-open eyes. And he is the answer to the question of who is trying to stop the next shooting.
"preternaturally" を辞書で調べます。下記は "preternatural" での説明です。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Beyond what is normal or natural: autumn had arrived with preternatural speed
・Cambridge English Dictionary: more than is usual or natural: Anger gave me preternatural strength, and I managed to force the door open.
"preter" は余り見かけない接頭辞なのでどこかに説明がないかとさらに他の辞書を見るとありました。
・Vocabulary.com: Preternatural describes something that seems oddly abnormal and out of sync with everything else. If you hear a preternatural dog's barking, maybe it sounds like a police siren instead of a howl.
Note that preternatural contains the word natural. Preter comes from the Latin word praeter which means "beyond"; so something preternatural is beyond nature. It is less commonly used than unnatural or supernatural but means the same thing. If you lift a truck off the ground and hold it above your head, people will marvel at you and say you have preternatural strength.
"racket" はこれまでに二度（9/19/2013と3/18/2008）に取り上げていますが、Reader's Digest 5月号の記事に次のように出てきた "protection racket" の意味がピンと来ません。
SOCIAL MEDIA feels like a protection racket. Your reputation will be murdered unless you join in this thing that is, in significant part, about murdering reputations. Why would I want to feed that machine?
"protection racket" を辞書で確認します。
・Collins Dictionary: informal a criminal activity in which money gangsters extort money from victims in exchange for freedom from molestation ⇒ ran a major protection racket involving 100 pubs and bars Wikipediaにも "protection racket" の項目があり、次の説明がありました。
Protection rackets are often indistinguishable in practice from extortion rackets since, for the latter, there will be an implied threat that the racketeers themselves may attack the business if it fails to pay for their protection. In an extortion racket, the racketeers agree simply to not attack a business. In a protection racket the criminals agree to defend a business from any attack. Conversely, extortion racketeers will have to defend their clients if threatened by a rival gang to avoid the client transferring their allegiance.
Webで見つけたPlain English for Lawyers (by Richard C. Wydick)を読んでいると興味深い表現にであいました。
Elegant variation is practiced by writers whose English teachers told them not to use the same word twice in one sentence. The practice produces sentences like this:
The first case was settled for $2,000, and the second piece of litigation was disposed of out of court for $3,000, while the price of the amicable accord reached in the third suit was $5,000.
The readers are left to ponder the difference between a case, apiece of litigation, and a suit.
Do not be afraid to repeat a word if it is the right word and if repeating it will avoid confusion. If the repetition sounds clumsy, try a pronoun or recast the sentence:（以下省略）
英語では同じ言葉を繰り返し使うのは稚拙とか、好ましくないと聞いたことはあります。技術的なマニュアルを読むことが多かったし、今でもマニュアルやカタログを訳すことが多くあるので、技術書でも英語では同じ言葉を使わない傾向が書き手にもよりますがあります。技術書の場合は言葉は統一した方が良いのにと感じながら読むことがあります。同じことばを使わないようにするのが "elegant variation" と言うのですね。この表現が辞書にもあるか確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The stylistic fault of studiedly finding different ways to denote the same thing in a piece of writing, merely to avoid repetition.
・Wiktionary: a form of journalese characterized by the over use of synonyms for fear of repeating a word; best avoided by the use of pronouns or repetition: Tony Blair visited the town today. The Prime Minister saw the new theatre. The British leader left in the afternoon.
Wikipedia抜粋
Elegant variation is the unnecessary, and sometimes misleading, use of synonyms to denote a single thing, driven by an imbalance in compositional tone in which an attempt to maintain euphony by avoiding monotonous repetition degrades clarity and inadvertently introduces a different kind of tonal problem (such as unintended humor or attention-drawing eccentricity).
This morning my wife told my three-year-old daughter that owls are nocturnal. "That's right," my daughter responded. "Owls are not turtles."
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