Posts Tagged ‘spanish’

Having your guts for garters

I was chatting to a student today about a movie, the English title was:

george cloony

some chap looking at a goat

The men who stare at goats.

We had both noticed that the Spanish poster was a little different.

Los hombres que miraban fijamente a las cabras.

Fair enough, stare is mirar fijamente (look fixedly)… but what caught my eye, and led my student to ask about it, was the tag line.

Sin cabras no hay gloria.

No goats no glory, which, as she said, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever until you explain the whole guts/goats thing.

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****!

Weston Master II Originally uploaded by RV Bob.

It just slipped out. I wasn’t even thinking about it. We were in the photography school and I was calibrating my camera (well attempting to calibrate it). I had bought a weston III light meter (which is forty years old) but during the calibration I kept having trouble with it. After half an hour’s use it stopped responding. “Hostia!” I said. Then I realised I’d sworn in Spanish rather than English (hostia is literally ‘host’ and could be translated as ‘bloody hell’). There was a new student there as well, Monica, and she was pretty impressed, seeing as my normal Spanish conversational level usually makes it pretty clear that I’m a foreigner.

Ricardo, the photographer said that the selenium in the light meter was probably exhausted. Damn, I mean, hostia!

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