Despite its rather little appearance on the
world map, Ireland seems to have a pretty intense history. In the face of the
fact that since Stone Age and throughout the history apparently everyone
reached out for Ireland and somehow conquered it and lost it and regained it again
and so on so forth, it is astounding how this little island kept alive its very
own culture. Something that I am especially interested in -concerning cultural items-
is mythology. Today I would like to introduce you to a little creature (or
shall I say being?), called the leprechaun. According to Irish mythology it is
a type of male faerie that is said to have inhabited the island of Ireland long
before the arrival of the Celts.
How does it look like?
First of all it is pretty small; dwarf-like
I would say. It wears a frock coat and a tri-cornered hat, sometimes depicted
with a shamrock. The lore of its real appearance differ however, in that some
say that he wears emerald green clothes whereas others claim they have seen him
in red clothes. The generally more accepted version is that of the emerald
green though. Besides, it is often associated with a crock (some sort of pot),
where it hides his gold. To humans it mostly appears as a little old man.
Where does it live?
It is alleged to live in so called ‘faerie
forts’ or ‘faerie rings’ which are sites of ancient earthworks. This counts
apparently for many mythological creatures of Ireland. Anyway, we can’t draw a
straight line here as well, sometimes they are said to dwell near springs and
green hills and some even believe they have seen one or the other in their
cellar. They are usually cobblers or shoemakers for profession, but they only
work for other faeries.
How does it behave?
The leprechaun is generally acknowledged as
being mischievous and ill-natured. Many
tales have him outwitting us humans with his cunning mind, by making use of our
greed for gold (his gold). This implies that they are not only capable of human
speech but also very well spoken indeed. What’s more, the leprechaun is very
tight-fisted indeed, although they shall be enormously rich with many of these
crocks of gold buried throughout Ireland.
Other tales evolve around a human finding a leprechaun’s
crock of gold (often said to be buried at the end of a rainbow), which may lead
him to offer three wishes in exchange for his treasure. His promises of gold always
prove misleading, though, as the Leprechaun always uses clever tricks in his
granting of wishes, often resulting in the embarrassment or injury of the one expecting
a splendid reward for the return.
The Leprechauns favorite pastimes are said
to be music, dancing, hunting wolves and drinking Irish whiskey. It is reported
that once a leprechaun begins dancing to a human's song, he can’t stop until
the song ceases. Thus it may occur that in their exhaustion they offer you
great wealth if you just stop the music. However, you should always have an eye
on that little creature especially when he made such a promise, because if you
capture him with your gaze he can’t escape but as soon as you turn your eyes
away from him he will vanish within a second.
In 1993 they made a horror comedy movie
about a Leprechaun called Leprechaun. In case you might want to see the film, I will
add the video of the trailer right here below.
I wish you further on great joy while learning Irish culture, but for now good bye and have a nice day!
While most people dream of lying under palms
on a sunny beach somewhere around or preferably below the equator, I was always
rather fascinated by the North. The breathtaking landscapes, the mysterious castles
and ruins, the picturesque little cities and the deep history always had a deep
impact on me. Especially Scandinavia with its overall ambience (I would call it
the northern spirit) has secured a place in my heart, to set limits to the term
North. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to travel to one of these
countries; nevertheless I have already set the vacancy dates of my part-time
job on the end of July and the beginning of August, which is actually the best
time to travel to Sweden (my favorite country not only of Scandinavia but
overall). Thus I hope that I will at last find any motivation to save money for
that trip, which will be pretty expensive for sure as Scandinavia in general
isn’t really the cheapest region in Europe.
However, I still have only two
weeks time to explore my beloved country which is no time at all if you take a
look at the many facets that one can discover. All in all I have to take into
account the time available and a certain budget together with the question if
anybody wants to come with me or should even come with me, though on the other
hand it would be really boring to stay two weeks in a foreign country without
any companions at all. After all I’m not some kind of lone wolf.
Well, now as
we have these factors included we can go on to the main point -> How?
What
should the journey be like?
Package holiday? No, certainly not.
A multi-city
tour? No that’s not quite my cup of tea either.
I want to see both, the South
with cities like Stockholm or Malmö but the savage North as well, with its
numerous pretty little lakes and forests. Honestly, Lapland (the region in
northern Sweden) should be part of every journey through Sweden, because you
haven’t seen Sweden if you haven’t been far up in the north where you sleep in
your tent between a bear and a moose (so to speak). Neither can you speak of
having discovered Sweden if you haven’t been at least in Stockholm, a
ravishingly beautiful city indeed. Did you know by the way that the city of Stockholm
is spread across a total amount of 14 islands, all of them connected with
bridges?
Stockholm by day ...
Anyway, I’m beating around the bush right now. I won’t present you a
guided tour though, as I don’t know one that completely satisfies my urge to
inhale the Swedish spirit myself, right now. I will give you three tips, however,
that, in my opinion could be helpful for travelling to Sweden.
Step 1: Get yourself an old VW bus,
preferably in Yellow! (Why? Because it’s my favorite color, that’s why!) But honestly
now, a country like Sweden shall be explored neither by train nor by a coach but
only with a car (hiking by foot would be acceptable too but I think it gets a
little bit inconvenient after the first half of the country). I am not talking
about a three day trip to Stockholm but about a travel through the whole
country, from the southern shores up to the northern lights (my dream!). First
of all, you are completely free and not bound to any travel group etc. You can
go where YOU want and when YOU want it, not your tourist guide. Besides, a VW
bus has a huge trunk where you can possibly sleep and cook in if it rains too
heavy to put up your dents.
... and by night.
One note I do have yet: In northern Sweden
you can camp wherever you want (if not on private property) and swim in every
lake because that’s property of everyone according to the government –
wonderful, isn’t it? (unlike Austria
where you have to pay a fee if you want to dip your toe in any goddamn puddle).
Step 2: Be prepared to drain your bank account
drastically. Sweden really is an expensive country compared to others in Europe,
especially concerning the groceries. A beer normally costs something around €8
as I’ve heard, first and foremost in the cities it get’s expensive.
Let me start here with a definition of the
Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (my favorite dictionary by the way): In
linguistics, the register of a piece of speech or writing is its level
and style of language, which is usually appropriate to the situation or
circumstances in which it is used [p. 1309].
Language, as we all know, has always a
purpose -> Communication and the conveying of a message, whereupon the
limits of the term message in this case are widely spread. Now, let’s take a
look at these two sentences:
1. Good evening,
Sir, unfortunately I have solely dissatisfactory tidings for you this evening. I
fear I have to apprise you of the imprisonment of your business associate,
Mister Perkins. Ostensibly he is indicted for participation at illegal
narcotics trade.
2. Yo dude,
what’s up?!! Hey have ya already heard, ye old fella that Perkins guy or
whatever got busted for dealing with drugs, geez, bad news, bad news pal, ain’t
they.
Apparently these two sentences are intended
to pass on the same message; nevertheless these are two completely different
leagues of language. Which one would you say to the Queen and which one would
you tell one of your close friends?! This is the matter that register deals
with. The above stated examples are, as you might have guessed already,
extremely opposed, although neither of them is completely artificial and
somehow excluded from the English language, in that no one would use this
vocabulary.
What do we,
however, associate with the first sentence? In my mind, pictures of a butler or a servant
appear, speaking to a lord or a lady of the British upper class, after they
arrived at their noble residence in an English shire. Sounds like a stereotype
(noble sounding English is somehow always associated with British upper class
English) but actually that is exactly how I think about it.
While reading
the second sentence a completely different circumstance comes into my mind. I
imagine a park or an urban settlement of block houses in which environment two
teenagers or young people meet on the street and greet themselves before having
a little chat about this and that.
The important thing here is that neither of
these sentences is wrong in any respect. The second might not sound ‘English’
to the majority of you but it is indeed. It is youth language, some sort of
dialect which is spoken between young people up to the age of 20 (from that age
on the usage of this language sounds more and more ridiculous and if you should
use it in our forties you automatically are perceived as in the middle of your
midlife crisis). Somehow all of us use a certain dialect at least I cannot
figure out that there is actually anyone who talks all day and night long in
the highest of high registers even under familiar circumstances, and that’s the
point: under familiar circumstances!
The average guy will immediately change his
style of language and therefore ascend into a higher register if he leaves his
familiar environment and gets in touch with different circumstances and
situations e.g. during a stay at his parents-in-law, at his work place
(especially if there’s customer contact), at an encounter with the police or
any other person with civil servant status and with a person of a higher ‘status’
or let’s say of a higher class (an aristocrat for example), while these
examples are ordered in a scale from 1 (higher register than average but still
low in comparison) to 10 (highest available register), according to my opinion
of course. Right below is an example of a very very high register - of course, overall it's the Queen herself.
Now, after a little introduction to the
term and scope of register per se, there is still the question why students of
the English language got their little problems with register or rather adapting
the concept of register in their active usage of language especially when
facing it for the first time as something you have to learn and know to use.
Well, to start with, I’m pretty sure that
you have realized that I didn’t form the first (highly formal) sentence off the
top of my head, as it sounds completely artificial and made up. And that’s
exactly what I did. I thought about the message I wanted to convey (someone
telling another one that an acquaintance was arrested for dealing drugs) and
searched purposely for extreme synonyms, by going to http://www.thesaurus.com (a very useful
site indeed), typing in the word that I knew as being of a neutral register and
finally increasing the scale called ‘complexity’ to the highest point, that’s
it. Thus I get phrases of both the very low and the very high register. Like:
I made this on my own on Word but unfortunately Blogger doesn't accept these SmartArt's!!!
As you see the verbs of a higher register are
usually longer and consist of only one part (unlike phrasal verbs for example
which count mostly as informal) and somehow they even sound more formal, don’t
they? You could better imagine a judge saying detain instead of rounding so. up
am I right?
Anyway, let’s finally put our attention
towards the problems that students have with adapting register. For that we have
to go back into high school. I remember my teacher handing out sheets with a variety
of random linking words, without making any mention of register at all. They
wanted you to use them as often and as good as possible. The more moreover’s
and furthermore’s and on top of that’s occurred, the better the grade and the
better the feeling of getting one step closer to the ‘real English’. Our
English teachers (at least in my school) simply didn’t bother teaching us
register at all, maybe because they really didn’t have the time to do so as nowadays
they have to stick to a very tight curriculum or whatever. Fact is, as you come
to university and suddenly have to cope with something like register in
addition to several other items of the English language you feel like being
thrown in at the deep end. All at once, the grade of your text isn’t scaled at
the variety and flamboyant usage of all the linking words, you’ve learned by
heart so bravely at school. That’s problem number one – you are being told that
something that obviously worked at school doesn’t work anymore at university.
Another example that I can remember just
too good would be how you write your texts. At some point you have to or want
to look up new vocabulary inevitably. Let us now look through the eyes of an average
(or maybe not so average) student. In his opinion he doesn’t want to use the
word ‘forbid’ twice (that’s so poor), so he looks up some synonyms. There is ‘to
disallow’ but, well, no better not, sounds too A1-English-like, hmm, but hey,
there is ‘to impede’ and ‘to embargo’ or even better ‘to preclude’, that’s it, very long and sounds greatly
complex, better use that so that my teacher thinks I have a great style. Now he
simply adds the word ‘to preclude’ in his homework, without thinking about
looking it up and checking if it has really the same meaning, because why, it’s
listed as a synonym to forbid thus it has to mean exactly the same as ‘to forbid
‘of course (it doesn’t by the way). The homework, however, was to write a
letter to a close friend and so the verb ‘to preclude’ stands in the middle of
the letter, decorated by many surrounding ‘it’s’ and ‘ain’t’s’ and ‘ya’s’ and ‘gonna’s’
and so forth. In other words we combine words (both familiar and unfamiliar) of
any register. It must be horrible for an
English teacher to read through this.
Click on it to enlarge it!
It gets even worse if some words are in a
completely different register than you expect them because you have used them
all the time without thinking about this problem. The word ‘therefore’ for
example is one of the traps that I always get caught in because I have adapted
this word long ago in my active vocabulary and I use it for ‘deshalb’ in every
single context under any circumstances. I know that there are other expressions
like ‘that is why’ or ‘thus’ or just ‘so’ but I have never really thought about
using them because I got really familiar with ‘therefore’. Now I know that it
is of a very high register and can’t always be used.
Unfortunately I haven’t found a dictionary
or a website that deals solely or especially with the register of words, something
where you can put in the word and it tells you of which register it is. That’s
a problem in my opinion, as I don’t know of which register new words and
especially phrases and conjunctions are when I find or look them up in a
dictionary. There are however some helpful keys to somehow deduce the register.
In a dictionary,
if you see the abbreviations coll. (colloquial), sl. (slang) or vulg. (vulgar)
next to a word, than it’s definitely of a low(er) register.
If a word
is very long and sounds complex (like ostensibly) or French (like resemble)
than it’s mostly of a high(er) register
Phrasal
verbs like ‘get trough’ (pass) or ‘to get across’ (communicate) are mostly
considered as of a lower register.
Well,
guys I think I should end here, nevertheless I want to give you a link to a useful page concerning ‘How to use register properly’. I hope you liked
this (rather not that) ‘short’ introduction and hopefully some day we will
laugh about our current issues with that damn register!
Good
evening ladies and gentlemen! Our today’s topic is travelling, a very
interesting topic indeed, for some more than for others but all in all something
very special. Journeys are a beautiful thing aren’t they? A throughout enriching
and engraving activity it is, and the most adventurous and exciting ones are
written down in a book and stay accessible forever. Even more fascinating,
however, is the telling of it at a warm and flickering open fire, for it is the
spell binding tale that makes the children’s eyes shine and their imagination enlivened
to an extent not comparable to anything else. Thus the story becomes unforgettable
and locked up in our hearts, prepared to be passed on from grandfather to
father and from father to son, generation for generation.
Today
I am going to tell you of a journey far from lying lazy on a beach with a piña
colada in your hand and a fancy straw hat on your head. It is an
adventure that leads us through picturesque meadows and deep forests, perilous mountains
and dark mines. But let me start here in Graz, where it all started. By the way, you might consider listening to this while reading!
Every journey begins with an adventurer! You are allowed to admire my photoshop skills!!!
One day, it was late afternoon I remember, I
sat in my little front garden, chilling and smoking my pipe as usual, when
suddenly an old man with a gray frock and a long beard approached. He jumped
over my gate and started to shake me while crying where the ring was and if
anybody knew from it – apparently a lunatic. But as I reached for my phone to
call the police, he hit me with his staff and pushed me into the house where he took
my hand and grabbed my wedding ring. After looking anxiously at it while murmuring
some strange words, he threw it into the open fire … where the ring melted down.
Then he told me that I had to accompany him on a perilous journey with no
prospect of ever returning. Still being stoned by the herbs I’ve smoked
straight before, I immediately agreed and packed my things. We took the plane
to New Zealand - economy class (such a tight-fisted bastard) – and arrived at
about 7 o’clock pm (after 12 hours of being packed like sardines in a can) in a
place called the Shire.
The Green Dragon Inn in the Shire
Guys, you have never seen a more idyllic landscape; unspoiled
nature with the greenest of greens and the surrounding smell of herbage and
wild flowers, everything seemed to be just perfect - the people were unnaturally
small though. After standing there for like ten minutes, gazing at the
breath-taking beauty of the scenery, Alf (the man’s name) nudged me and said we
would have dinner in Bree, a village not far from here. The inn was called ‘The
Prancing Pony’, a shabby and somehow shady looking honky-tonk. Despite its
dubious appearance, I can’t but recommend it, especially the food and drinks.
They serve dishes of good old hearty cuisine and their own self-brewed beer, accompanied
by folk music and an overall cheerful sentiment. The village of Bree itself,
however, I wouldn’t recommend, particularly not if you travel with women and
children, as it is a gray and depressing place, completely different from the
Shire. The next day we bought a horse and rode eastward to a place called Rivendell,
a charming little city in a valley that seems to excite your senses, in that at
some time you zone out and see nothing but the mesmerizing gleam of the setting
sun, hear nothing but the distant whooshing of waterfalls and the ripple of the
small rills that run through the city and feel nothing but the mild breeze that
carries the leaves of the Mallorn trees. Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m straying
off course. Anyway, Rivendell wasn’t on our route merely because of its beauty
but because we would gather here with some acquaintances from Alf. And those
were some odd fellows indeed that seemed to accompany us on our further journey.
A group photograph of our party - Alf is the third from the left!
However,
we left our horses back and went on by foot, heading for a mountain chain which
we intended to cross over a pass, the Pass of Caradhras, named after the
mountain. The climb was rather smooth but as soon as we reached the path it
became more and more challenging due to heavy snow fall, severe cold and
avalanches that made an advancing impossible and eventually we had to back out
and leave the pass. After a
Ascending the Caradhras wasn't easy, no not at all!
short consultancy we decided to cross the mountain
below through the Mines of Moria, a mine complex that was long ago dug deep
into the mountain. Alf somehow accepted this way only reluctantly and soon I
found out why. The mines have definitely seen better times and appeared to be merely
ruins rather than the expected glorious halls of stone. To imagine that this
was once the realm of a great and wealthy king and his folk appeared to be
difficult owing to the fact that the mines were completely abandoned and no treasuries
or any riches at all reflected the light of our torches. Later on it appeared
that these ruins weren’t just cold and dark but also mostly perilous since we
had to cross narrow bridges and ran the risk to fall into the seemingly endless
downs – which poor old Alf actually did, when parts of the ancient bridge broke
away and he slipped. Ironically it was the last bridge before the exit.
The Chamber of Mazarbul in the Mines of Moria.
In some respect you could still discern the former splendour!
In
grieve we decided to change the travel route and seek shelter in Lothlórien, a mysterious
forest at the foot of the mountain’s slope, to endure the night. We reached the
border of the forest at dawn, all of us completely dirty and even more exhausted.
Fortunately we met a group of guards that helped us find the way to Caras
Galadhon, the capital of the wood realm. As we reached the city, my conception
of pure beauty was once again redefined. The whole city was built on and around
the trees or rather the tree trunks and seemed to float elegantly in the sky.
The light appeared to be too pure to be true and yet it was all but impossible
of thinking about any artificiality there. It felt as if there was a guarding
spirit that pervaded every leave on every branch of every tree and fulfilled it
with some sort of life, in other words, as if nature itself had its seeds there,
in the heart of the wood – may that sound completely unbelievable, but I tell
you, go there and you will feel the same magic. However, after three days my
companionship decided to end the journey and separate in remembrance of Alf, which didn't really bother me altogether since the route intended to lead us to Mordor, an apparently very unpleasant land in the far east. To make matters worse, it appeared to be basically a dark, dreadful fortress and a volcano surrounded entirely by a high mountain chain - sounds totally charming. The prospect of crossing a dry and waste desert in order to reach an even more dry and waste desert didn't really appeal to me though.
Lothlórienby night - Impressing ain't it?!!
Thats why, after an extended stay of another two days, I packed my things and hiked
southwards to a harbor at the great river Anduin, where I entered a ferry
setting off in a westward direction until I reached Edoras wherefrom I took a
plane back to Graz. All in all, this was both the most adventurous and awesome
journey I have ever gone on in my life.
But for the time being I preferred
lying on a beach with a piña colada in my hand and a fancy straw hat on my
head.
First of all it is pretty small; dwarf-like
I would say. It wears a frock coat and a tri-cornered hat, sometimes depicted
with a shamrock. The lore of its real appearance differ however, in that some
say that he wears emerald green clothes whereas others claim they have seen him
in red clothes. The generally more accepted version is that of the emerald
green though. Besides, it is often associated with a crock (some sort of pot),
where it hides his gold. To humans it mostly appears as a little old man. 
