Book Review – Lost in Translation (By: Ella Frances Sanders)

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As a person who is often searching for the right word and has a tangential interest in learning single words from foreign languages to add to my speech, Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words immediately interested me. I don’t know how I first came across it, but it was already in my online cart when my mother found a copy at a second-hand shop and I was prompted to finally pull the trigger. The book promises a definition and illustration of more than 50 words from various languages that have no direct translation in English. But are these words as far out as they seem?

Now, I’m not a linguist, but I think it’s fair to say that words with no direct translation are fairly common, especially when one considers a word’s connotations. Of course, we the readers don’t want the mundane minutia of the various connotations of words that may or may not have ostensibly direct translations, and this book does skip all that and get right to the words you never thought there would be a word for. But sometimes the connotations of a word in its foreign language creep back in and muddy up the waters a bit.

Each word is given a two-page spread with an explanation (including the language it’s from and whether it’s a noun, verb, etc.) on the left hand page, and a definition worked into an illustration on the other. The artwork is simple and emotive, having a child-like or “homemade” look to it. It looks a bit stiff at times, but I enjoy the style, and, with few exceptions, it helps guide the reader to the “feeling” the words are trying to convey. I would understand the argument that the artwork can make the book hard to read, but I personally didn’t have this problem.

The book starts out pretty well, specifically with “pålegg”, meaning: anything you can put between slices of bread. And following that are several equally interesting words that quickly bring the question to my mind of “how many people in these languages actually know these words?” I mean, as an English speaker I can get along entirely fine without knowing what “akimbo” means, as I’ve never heard it spoken by anyone, and can’t remember reading it in any text that wasn’t defining the word. I only remember it because I have a fairly good memory for useless things (like how to pronounce “Van Gogh” in Dutch), and it seems probable that if there was an English word for “the roadlike reflection of the moon” that most people wouldn’t understand you if you used it.

That doesn’t mean these words aren’t nice little things to know, and they do make you think about the little things we could have words for if we wanted to, but just as I started getting used to that the book started sprinkling in some words from compound languages. Or rather languages that use a lot of compound words (think German). And I have a bit of a problem since, if directly translated, those words would just become two English words that would connote a similar meaning, for instance: if I said the words “blue smile” or “grief bacon” in the context of people being insincere or stress eating, you’d likely understand what they meant, and just because other languages happen to be able to combine two words more easily doesn’t make them “untranslatable”. It’s like that old myth/saying that the Inuit have over 100 words for snow or something like that. It’s technically true, but that’s because they combine words, so every type of snow or snow-related thing gets its own word. And I think that’s almost cheating in the context of what was being presented to me.

So I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth as I started wrapping up the book (it’s only 50 or so “words” long). It just felt like an interesting exercise improperly executed. There were some words like Goya, meaning the feeling of getting lifted away by a story, but then those are followed by things like Szimpatikus, which has the same roots of several English words, and could almost be considered a direct translation of some slang versions of them. Even for such a short book, the balance seemed all wonky.

But when I reached the end, I found I had enjoyed myself, and probably in equal amount to what I had spent on the book, though it is teetering on the edge. There isn’t a lot here, and it does have some strange thematic problems, but overall the artwork is whimsical and the idea wonderful. I will be keeping the book by my desk when writing in case I need any inspiration for single words I’d otherwise have to put in a sentence, but I don’t know how I’d feel about it if I wasn’t a writer. It feels like an idea a publisher nabbed and printed before it was finished to prevent being scooped. I’d recommend that anyone give it a flip-though, if you enjoy it then you’ll probably want a copy. And until the day that it comes out, I’ll be hoping that someone else starts up a similar project to this book that doesn’t have the same disconnect.

Review – Crayola Crayons (120 Crayon Box Part 3 – Greens, Yellow, and Oranges)

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And now it’s time for part 3 of this series (that is taking longer than expected) looking at all of the colors that come in the Crayola crayons 120 box set. This time it’s greens, yellows, and a few oranges; let’s take a look.

Jungle Green – Starting off, “jungle green” is what I can only describe as a “wet” green color. It’s not really blue-ish, but it just seems damp. The coverage is good, as most of the greens will turn out to be, but I’m just not sure how useful it would be for anything other than those weird sea-green shorts.

Pine Green – A theme with this first section of greens is going to be my wonder at why they were named that, and this continues the trend. While it is the color of some evergreens, I wouldn’t say this slightly-blue dark green represents pines. It covers kinda splotchy, but does make a good forest tree color, especially in the winter.

Jungle Green (Shamrock) – Now here’s going to be a little problem in this review; there is supposed to be another color called “shamrock” here, but instead I received a second “jungle green”. I do understand that this sort of thing is bound to happen, but I am a little disappointed and I hope it isn’t a common occurrence.

Asparagus – An unpleasant, yucky looking green that does indeed resemble some shades of asparagus (though not any I would be eating). It covers well enough and has much more shading ability than the majority of other colors in the set. Unfortunately its uses are quite limited and not on the nice side: like swamp yuck or vomit.

Tropical Rain Forest – Looking a little too blue for its namesake, Tropical Rain Forest is a deep aqua color. It covers fine and is a nice shading… well… shade. In tandem with other colors it works very well but little vegetation or really anything is around that will use it as a primary color.

Mountain Meadow – An oddly specific name for a rather plain looking green. Mountain Meadow is a slightly lighter and bluer color than regular “green”. It covers well in the normal range and has pretty standard green applications, though there aren’t any specific applications I can think of. It is a pleasant looking addition that adds some nice variation in shades (tints).

Forest Green – A color name that, along with “hunter green”, always confused me. This vaguely evergreen or dying-plant color covers poorly for a green and shades a little more than usual. While it isn’t a color that would be unused in the forest, it isn’t a usual main one and would be most at home coloring evergreens or parts of hunter’s vests.

Green – One of the standard 8 Crayola colors, Green is a very recognizable color with good properties. It’s nicely situated near the middle of the green spectrum and is suitable for all one’s foliage needs as well as for almost anything “green” made by humans. It covers quite well but has more pronounced darker spots than other colors in the area.

Fern – Vaguely fern-like, this pale green does a decent job of covering and highlights or lighter spots on plants. If I had been consulted I would’ve called it more of a “mint” myself, or “green army from Risk”.

Olive Green – Quite olive-colored (the green kind at least), and not really similar to military uniforms, I feel like Olive Green has a bit of a singular purpose. It isn’t the best at coverage and other than green-olives and pickles it looks a bit yucky.

Granny Smith Apple – Slightly darker in my experience than its namesake, Granny Smith Apple does resemble the famous apple skin and is a nice color to use in other plants or un-ripe fruits. It doesn’t provide the greatest coverage (being rather stipple-y) and will likely need a “support” color.

Screamin’ Green – And interesting name for a poor color, this neon lime green is an eyesore and not too great at coverage. Its uses would be limited to coloring neon signs, what one would write on black paper to make it “radical”, and perhaps radioactive waste. But I guess that’s more from a realistic perspective. Kids do like their neon.

Yellow Green – Much more green than yellow, Yellow Green is a light vomit-esque green color that covers decently but isn’t that pleasant to look at, though in the right light it could be the color of unripe fruit or changing leaves.

Electric Lime – The other neon green, Electric Lime is almost invisible on the paper and has very poor coverage. This is one where darker paper would be necessary and also the only use I could find for such a color.

Inchworm – Similar to Inchworms from children’s books, but not those from real life, this color covers well but has a bit of shading to go along with it. It could be used as a green highlight, for changing fruit or leaf colors, or, less pleasantly, for swamp muck in summer.

Spring Green – Another nearly invisible color that is much easier on the eyes. It is a vaguely green yellow that I could also call “autumn green” as it looks like grasses as they yellow in the fall or come back in the early spring. When colored in, it covers fine enough but has the consistency of grass and the green and yellow separate a bit.

Green yellow – An aptly named green-tinged yellow; Green Yellow is quite light and hard to see. It covers fairly well but with subtle shading that is hard to see at first. It is a good green highlight color, a likeness for grass turning yellow in the fall, and the color of some pears or apples.

Canary – A very muted yellow that is probably the hardest color to see in this section. I wouldn’t say it’s very good at imitating its namesake, but it does cover decently. I would still have a hard time trying to find a place to use it.

Almond – Not a dead ringer for either of the colors I associate with the nut, this Almond color much more resembles the off-white inside than the brown outside. In the end, though, I’d probably call it a very white yellow, perhaps an “eggshell”. The consistency (and thus the coverage) is very smooth and the uses are very interesting: cream, or eggshells, or sun-bleached something (paper?), but it’s subtle enough that it likely won’t be used to its full potential.

Yellow – Another one of the classics, plain yellow is a surprisingly deep and saturated yellow. The coverage is very good, and the shade is only slightly unnatural. It works well for many flowers (dandelions, sunflowers, etc.) and summer clothes, though on its own it is a little overpowering, and it needs to be augmented with other yellows.

Laser Lemon – High in my category of less-than-favorite is Laser Lemon, a particularly hard-to-see shade of slightly-neon yellow. It’s nearly transparent and the coverage is hard to discern but I’d say it’s patchy. It would make an interesting highlight or sign color, but that’s being generous.

Goldenrod – Goldenrod is a vaguely gold color that is more like a darker version of the following Dandelion. It’s the darkest/deepest of the yellows and as such is a tad on the messy side and its inconsistency doesn’t help. It’s a useful color for shading, darker flowers, and perhaps older plastics, but I don’t see it coming out often.

Dandelion – A bit darker than the flower it’s named after, Dandelion is a nice strong yellow that isn’t particularly pleasant, but also isn’t very yucky. It’s got great coverage but the layer has some inconsistencies and darker patches. It still looks fairly natural and is easier on the eyes than many yellows, making it good for large patches of the color, bees, flowers, and many human-made items like raincoats.

Banana Mania – This one sounds like a disease from a comic book, and is a much more orange/peachy color than one would expect from a “banana”. In fact it would work well for small fruits like apricots and peaches in their various forms as well as skin tones, though not as well, since, while it does cover well, it covers unevenly.

Unmellow Yellow – Like Laser Lemon but a bit more yellow and less neon, Unmellow Yellow has a terrible name that doesn’t really evoke a color in my mind. This one is hard to see, and hard to find uses for, looking both unnatural and unlike many man-made objects. The best I can come up with is yellow on TV/computer screens and the like. It does almost look like it’s glowing with its decent but incomplete coverage.

Sunglow – The name here is a semi-accurate description for this morning-ish orange color. It’s very light, almost fluorescent, and covers quite poorly, but it is a good rising/setting sun or hot coals kinda color.

Atomic Tangerine – These names aren’t getting any easier for me, but this one is apt. This color has minimal coverage and a “neon” quality, but it is actually dark enough to see on the paper and would be vaguely reminiscent of a tangerine that happened to get irradiated. Low sunset or safety vests is about all I can think of here.

Macaroni and Cheese – I’m gonna call this one flat wrong, and if you have macaroni and cheese that looks like this it might be tasting a bit funny. This slightly brownish orange covers quite well but I have a hard time placing it. Maybe those orangish brick buildings or left-out grapefruit peel.

Neon Carrot – Very similar to Atomic Tangerine and perhaps a little on the light side for its name, this color has passable coverage and is hard to see, being both very light and lacking that punch the other neon colors have. Its uses are very limited and it just seems to lack purpose.

Outrageous Orange – A real safety vest color, this one has quite poor coverage and high shading, making getting an even “coat” almost impossible. It is a neon-ish color and would do well as the tape used by surveyors or blended into a sunset, but it lacks a natural look.

And that’s another 30 colors down, and in my opinion they were a bit disappointing, and without many uses. Next time we’ll be finishing up the set with the final 30 from orange to earth-tones (much more useful) and taking a look at the included crayon sharpener.

Rainbow Peephole – In the Collection

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As a toy, kaleidoscopes were fun for a little bit but they never really amounted to much. Depending on the type, they were fun to look through for a moment, and then they just went back in the drawer for me. So I don’t know if it’s worse or better that the Rainbow Peephole makes things cheaper by just being a plastic lens in a bit of cardboard.

I guess comparing it to a kaleidoscope is a bit much, even. It’s really just a diffraction lens and it doesn’t distort things. It makes weird outlines of rainbow colored light around them. They’re still for sale for about a quarter a piece (which almost seems a bit much) but God knows when mine was made by Rainbow Symphony, a 3D glasses (the old kind) company.

The reason for their existence is mostly of course to illustrate a scientific principal to children (while being cheap), and they do accomplish that goal in their chintzy glory.

Tree Tops – In the Collection

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We’ve all had the experience of the “classic” toys. Ones that only really entertain for the amount of time it takes to learn how to use them or ≈5 minutes. At least that was my experience with tops. I like them, but I couldn’t be entertained with them for long (even EDC tops, which are a thing according to some people). And anything like that really benefits in my mind from having a joke tacked on to it. In this case it’s “Tree Tops”, wooden spinning tops that look like the tops of pine trees (the nice, light wood they’re made out of).

Surprisingly enough, they’re made by a fairly competent company, Areaware, and it shows in their construction. Once you get the technique down they really are fairly decent spinning tops. The company makes loads of things, most of which are things I don’t find interesting, but in the section of “toys and games” they make the Cubebot (I think you’d put “the” in front of the name), an elastic band toy that made it into my local arty bookstore, and a deck of minimalist playing cards I’d seen several times around the internet, and had considered getting.

The designer of the tops, Karl Zahn, who is helpfully credited on the cloth carry-bag, seems mostly content to create strange wooden furniture pieces, and most of his other Areaware contributions are wooden animal-shaped boxes and brass rings. There’s nothing really in his résumé that would indicate he’d make such a silly joke toy, but in any case, he made a good wooden top, even if I wouldn’t really consider purchasing any of his other items.

And that’s that. There isn’t much to the tops themselves. They are for sale still at the time of my writing in packs of five, either natural wood color or different shades of “green” (one’s yellow) like mine for a price that’s a little on the high side but not too bad. And you get a posh (rustic, minimal, I can’t accurately describe it so I went for a joke) box (which I don’t have) and bag to go with it. So if you’re lookin’ for good tops and good jokes, look no further.

Review – Tech Gear Pencil Case

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Finding the right case is a difficult thing, there’re so many options that come in all different sizes, and with features ranging from tons of little pockets and organizational tools to nothing at all. Even where a zipper is positioned can really affect how convenient a product is to use on a day-to-day basis. So today I’ll be looking at an inexpensive pencil case available in a wide range of areas (at least it was when I bought it at a grocery store, but it takes time to properly test a case and I don’t know what’s going on with them now).

The Tech Gear pencil case is a simple thing, being made of mostly black nylon in a rectangular-ish shape that’s about 8” long and 4½” wide. There are two support pieces, one going around the bottom, and another on the “lid” and they keep everything roughly in the right place. Just underneath this support piece is the zipper, which runs along the top edge. When unzipped, the “lid” (which has a rubber logo patch, 5-stripe “design”, and possibly a different color upper half) hinges back along one of the long edges revealing the inside, which is just a “bucket” about 1” deep where you can dump things. This “hinge” is reinforced by another piece of nylon both inside and out.

The inside is a smoother texture than the outside, with several of the seams covered up by a plastic-ish, almost electrical-tape feeling material. There’s a tag that tells you it was made in China, but otherwise it’s just an empty cavern into which you can dump whatever you want that’ll fit. And that is pretty much anything that is the same length or shorter than a standard, unsharpened pencil (about 7½”, you might be able to squeeze longer things in if you’re creative) and about 1¼” thick (even that might be stretching it). And that’s a fair amount of stuff. I’ve been using it to carry around my “to-review” items and never had a problem with space. I’ve only got around 15 items in it now, but it can hold 30 writing implements and a few other bits and bobs comfortably.

But it is a cheap case, so how well does it hold up? Reasonably, I’ll say. It’s been a long time since I went to school (and I just used a Ziploc for my pencil case then) and I know I would’ve been much harder on a case then than I am now, but after carrying it around for a while now there is very minimal wear (a loose thread here and there and the rubber patch on the front is a little scuffed, but nothing significant). Still, I can see a lot of the cheapness in its build quality; most seams are unfinished and liable to tear or unfurl, and the material itself isn’t that strong a stuff in the first place. The zipper works but the material is cheap and soft (and paint already flecking), etc. For someone like me who won’t put it through much hard work it’s fine and’ll probably last for quite a while, but in school I’d say it’s about a 1-year bag.

And that’s pretty much it. The bag has some organizational problems but it’s also fairly small so nothing should get too buried. And it’s got some craftsmanship problems but for the price you couldn’t really expect better. It’s good for what it is and if that’s what you need it’s easy enough to get. So if you just need something to dump your pencils in and won’t worry about having to replace it later because it’s cheap, this one’s a good thing to look at.