Uberrimae Fidei– utmost good faith– is a legal concept at the heart of a good deal of contract interpretation. It goes more or less like this: If I ask you to enter into an agreement with me, and I have relevant knowledge that you do not have, but which would affect your decision if you…
In the early summer of 1939 my Mum turned twenty. She was pretty, vivacious, joyous, and privileged. Her father’s prosperous business gave her and her siblings private schooling, the loveliest of fashions, and long summers in their beloved Wales. Life was good. By her twenty-first birthday, my Mum was in uniform, living in barracks, in…
All of us who learned French as a second language learned about Mrs. Vandertramp. None of my francophone friends have ever heard of her, and they think it’s the funniest thing they ever heard. In French, there exists a handful of verbs which are not conjugated in the usual way with avoir, but with être….
It may be flattering to think that Thor, Odin, or Zeus, or the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam (or any of their thousands of sects), can’t get along without me. But I’m afraid I’m not their guy. This isn’t to pick and choose amongst the constellation of deities claiming sole place– that’s your business,…
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five’? Well to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being that this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask…
The human mind is an amazing thing, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit. Take something as simple as reading and understanding text. In our English speaking world we take for granted that sounds can be transliterated into phonemes formed by (more or less) predictable combinations of letters, that the phonemes can be jammed together…
Don’t get me wrong– spellcheck and predictive texting are wonderful inventions and save us all a ton of work. But just as fire can be your best friend, fire and spellcheck can destroy you if you don’t keep them under control. There are, I think, at least three reasons why “language tech” is treacherous. First,…
We are universally horrified by the atrocity of war in Ukraine. As we should be. But we should be neither surprised nor complacent. War and its attendant atrocities are as old as our species, in fact, older. Savagery by one group of primates against another is well documented. Birds, and even insects, carry out massive…
My dear old Dad made it to just past 102. His mind stayed sharp until the last year or two, and even then he could still carry on an interesting conversation. But because he slept so much and his dreams were so vivid, the boundary between reality and imagination became blurred. Really blurred. One evening…
In Canada, as in most northern countries, spring means potholes. In French they’re aptly described as nids de poule, “hen’s nests”. Whatever you call them, potholes result when a tiny bit of water makes its way into a crack in the pavement, where it freezes and expands. The expansion in the brittle, frozen asphalt creates…