Unsolicited Advice

I don't speak Russian. I actually mean that this time. Aside from "yes," "no," "please," and "thank you", I know maybe half a dozen words, all of them food. I have some minimal knowledge of how the grammar works, and a decent enough idea about the names to twitch when TV gets it wrong. I do know the Cyrillic alphabet well enough to read things aloud. Russian spelling is roughly phonetic, although not quite one-to-one; if you see it in print, you can take a pretty good stab at the pronunciation, but there are sometimes ambiguities in how you can spell something you've only heard. It doesn't help that Russia traditionally celebrates bloody regime changes by fucking with the orthography . Despite this, I'm persistently mistaken for a russophone. When it happened in Arizona, I just chalked it up to general ignorance, but then I moved to Boston and got the same thing from several native speakers of Russian. Inquiries get the answer t...

One of my readers thoughtfully sent me a copy of " Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes " a while back (in Kindle format, so I will never have to load it into a box and drag it to another apartment, THANK YOU). I reserve comment on the content until I've finished the entire thing, which I haven't yet, but after maybe a dozen pages I can already make at least one interesting observation:  English is not the first language of the author, and possibly not the first language of the book, either. Specifically, even the introduction sounds  extremely Russian. I have a lot less trouble spotting these things than I do articulating them. I'm extensively and sometimes weirdly cross-wired, so the amorphous patterns of different languages bring up a lot of synaesthetic comparisons that are awkward to explain to other people. Russian has a very distinct one, common also to authors like Vladimir Nabokov, which persists even when they're writing in French or Eng...

Further random cultural notes: I would like to point out that the yobisute style of speaking occurs in languages other than Japanese, although it's most explicit there. It had a prominent place in English up until, oh, fifty years ago or so. The BBC's Sherlock  plays with it in the modernization; the protagonists call each other 'Sherlock' and 'John' in the modern day, because this is the appropriate localization (...chronolization?) of the two of them calling one another 'Holmes' and 'Watson' a century prior. Strangers address them both with titles, as 'Mr Holmes' and 'Dr Watson', to pay them the proper respect. First names are only for family and lovers -- the Holmes brothers, note, call one another 'Sherlock' and 'Mycroft' -- but the precise relationship of the detective and his doctor is more in the nature of a close friendship than anything involving professional distance. Hence, dropped titles as a sign ...