Resoldre contradiccions

“[…] we travel back an hour or two in time, a few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that 'character' is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.”

David Lodge, Nice Work, Part I, Chapter 2, p.39

Oratòria

“After eight years even our cats and dogs know that elections matter.” (Al Gore, 16 Juny 2008, Detroit, Michigan)

Què va dir Michelle Obama a la TV?

"She didn't, in fact, say anything of interest or controversy during her live performance, which means that she and her handlers should right now be enjoying the glow of perfect success.

Obama had approached the appearance, to quote Barbara Walters' on-air reading of the morning's New York Times, "with an eye toward softening her reputation." To this end, she did not do her hair in the Jackie Kennedy flip that André Leon Talley—the Vogue editor who Page Six alleges to be her style guru—pegs as central to her "image strategy." Nor did she go for the leonine sweep featured in a forthcoming US Weekly cover story ("The untold romance between a down-to-earth mom and the man who calls her 'my rock' "). She went with a coif that, though chic, was studiously nonthreatening and positively cubicle-ready. If you stuck with The View during commercial breaks and caught the Tums ad starring some Hanna-Barbera characters, you will realize that she borrowed the look from Jane Jetson."

(fragment d'un article a Slate)

Goodbye to All That (by Robert Graves)

That my father is a poet has, at least, saved me from any false reverence for poets. I am even delighted when I meet people who know of him and not me. I sing some of his songs while washing up after meals, or shelling peas, or on similar occasions. He never once tried to teach me how to write, or showed any understanding of my serious poetry; being always more ready to ask advice about his own. Nor did he ever try to stop me writing. His light-hearted early work is the best. His Invention of Wine, for instance, which begins:

Ere Bacchus could talk
Or dacently walk
Down Olympus he jumped
From the arms of his nurse,
And though ten years in all
Were consumed by the fall,
He might have fallen farther
And fared a dale worse…

À bout de souffle

Alè

1 Aire que s'escapa dels pulmons en l'expiració.

2 perdre l'alè Restar gairebé sense poder respirar com a resultat d'un esforç violent, d'una forta emoció, etc.

3 prendre alè Reposar abans de reprendre un treball, etc.



Anglès: breath; perdre l'alè to get out of breath; prendre alè to catch one's breath, get one's breath back




Francès: haleine F, souffle; perdre l'alè s'essouffler PRON, perdre haleine; prendre alè reprendre haleine




Alemany: Atem; perdre l'alè ausser Atem kommen; prendre alè Atem holen