Handshaking protocols

The visitor arrives at the Virtual Center.

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Supervisor: Find your way all right?

Visitor: Something of a journey of uncertainty. But I’m here. Nice office.

Supervisor: I feel lucky to have it. It’s a new building. I thought we’d begin by going upstairs and you can meet Carl. His unit handles the machine translation coding.

Visitor: Sounds fine.

Supervisor: In here. This is Virtual Carl, he handles the translation side of things. He’s working on a modification to Unicode. He can tell more about what this unit does.

Visitor: Virtual Carl. Nice to meet you.

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Voice-over

Getting to the point when introducing people who share an interest but have never met can follow a simple protocol to establish a connection. Something like fax machines or computer modems beeping at each other to establish connection speed, coding, interrupting procedures, etc.

In this case, the supervisor uses a location, identity, task, wh3 approach:

Where (“In here”),

Who (“This is…”),

What (“he handles…” and “he’s working on…”).

“He can tell you…” is the handover for the drill-down phase into the detail substrata.

Interesting that stories of the future (eg scifi) generally still have humans using present-day lexis, grammar and pragmatics. For an example, read the script of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

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Tango and culture

Norman and Brian, aged 50-something Aussies, during a scene change, exchange impressions of the tango performance at Al Tortoni, Buenos Aires.

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Norman: Spectacular innit.

Brian: Awesome.

Norman: Don’t say that, mate. You sound like your daughter.

Brian: OK. Well, it’s OK.

Norman: Now you’re speaking our language again.

Brian: We didn’t have music like that growing up in Oz, did we?

Norman: Yeah, we never danced, did we? Culture like that we never had.

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Voice-over 

Adopting the jargon of a different generation happens, but for a while it doesn’t ring true. But at least Brian used “awesome” appropriately, whatever we may think about its origins referring only to god-like epiphanies.

Beyond quibbles about lexical change, Brian and Norman are engaged in a serious debate on why Australians (and New Zealanders) leave their countries on culture-seeking OE missions. 150 years of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand isn’t very long to build a culture (Latin America has had 500 years). And the British, despite having a great literature, didn’t cook or dance that well.

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Being Jewish

A chance evening meeting in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago.

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Ephraim: We come from Israel.

Angela: I lived for five years in Israel.

Ephraim: So you are Jewish?

Angela: No, my father was a diplomat in Tel Aviv. I went to school there.

Ephraim: You learned Hebrew?

Angela: I had to. The other kids teased me, so I had to find out what they were saying.

Ephraim: Unusual. Israel is generally a tolerant culture.

Angela: Children can be unkind. But it was a good experience. They say that which doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Ephraim: And eventually you prevailed over your tormentors?

Angela: I really like Israel. I’ve lived in many places, I can understand the sense of Diaspora. Of adapting to the place you live in, taking the best of it and keeping your core identity. I feel I could be Jewish.

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Voice-over

Angela shows ability is being able to relate personal experiences and to generalize from them. “Children can be unkind.” When she doesn’t recall the exact wording and source of the aphorism “That which doesn’t kill you makes you strong,” (Friedrich Nietzsche) she paraphrases and falls back on the standby of “They say.”

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