Sparsely, Sage and Timely
By David V. MitchellHere comes 2004
¡Feliz año nuevo! Happy New Year! At long last, I have learned how to get my computer to make the upside-down exclamation point required for proper Spanish punctuation. I long ago learned how to create the tilde that goes over an "n" to create an "ñ."
My Macintosh computer can do all these things, but when we first computerized The Light in the mid-1980s, our now-extinct Kaypro computers could not. Tildes are crucial in Spanish. Without them, "Happy New Year!" becomes "Happy New Anus!"
As far as I know, we’ve only made that mistake once, but it was a doozy. In Spanish, a person says the student "has 10 years" instead of saying she "is 10 years old." Back when our computers could not create tildes, we ran a story in Spanish that talked about a student who "has nine years." Only there was no tilde over the "n." Red faces all around.
My Guatemalan wife Ana Carolina, by the way, insists that the word tilde can refer to any accent, such as the one in García, and not merely a squigglely mark over an "n." My Harper Collins Spanish Dictionary agrees with her. In English, however, the word tilde refers specifically to "a diacritical mark (~) placed over the letter ‘n’ in Spanish to indicate the palatal nasal sound (ny), as in cañon," my American Heritage Dictionary says.
A bit more translation might be helpful here. Cañon is the Spanish word for pipe or tube while diacritics are marks that change the sound of a letter.
Even at a paper as small as The Light, so many hundreds of bits of text go into all the articles, announcements, letters to the editor, columns, classified ads, legal announcements, display ads, headlines, the flag, and the masthead that it is inevitable that some mistakes will occur. In last week’s paper, for example, the flag for the second time this year gave the edition’s date of publication as Nov. 26. (Someone was interrupted while updating the flag.) Luckily, the inside-page folios were accurate.
Readers, however, have at least as much trouble at their keyboards. We’re forever correcting spelling and syntactical mistakes in letters to the editor, even in those that call us los anos.
Sometimes how mistakes occur can be as important as the mistakes themselves. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was mortified to learn this lesson back in 1996 when the San Francisco 49’ers lost to the Dallas Cowboys in overtime.
It was not backup quarterback Elvis Grbac’s best day, and Brown after the game called Grbac "an embarrassment to humankind." What the mayor didn’t know was that Grbac was distracted by his newborn son’s spina bifida, which would require surgery to cover an exposed section of spine. Brown, of course, later apologized but his rude remark has not been forgotten.
As it happened, back on Dec. 5, I was much impressed by The Lonely Hearts band playing Beatles music at Rancho Nicasio, so when the Christmas Jug Band announced it would perform twice at the Rancho Dec. 14, I decided to go to the evening show. As I noted in my Dec. 4 column, the band’s new CD contains some marvelous material, including the hilarious Santa Lost a Ho.
The band’s performance, however, lacked the energy of its CD although I heard the afternoon show was livelier because there were numerous children in the audience. What they made of Santa Lost a Ho I can only guess.
But I wasn’t about to make Mayor Brown’s mistake, so I said nothing, and thank God for that. Singer Mike Duke later told Light reporter Ivan Gale that unforeseen circumstances had forced the Christmas Jug Band to play without several members. Curious, I called several people and got the full story.
Keyboard player Austine de Lone and string bass player Blake Richardson are on tour. Singer/songwriter Dan Hicks was barred from performing by a contract that limited publicity to an upcoming gig in San Francisco, so Norton Buffalo filled in for him. But the real blow, as it turned out, was the death of drummer Lance Dickerson. Dickerson, who previously played with Commander Cody and with the Lost Planet Airmen, killed himself last month.
Given all this, the band is to be admired for performing at all. Es verdad.