howsmyenglish

So, here I am. I flew here! On a plane! Just imagine. It's like I'm back in time, back when flying wasn't as usual and everyday as it was just one and a half years ago - at least, for me.
Anyhow, I'm here. I'm spending time with my Grandma, brother and his partner. It seems, we all of us have missed each other more than ever before. At least, I don't think we've had such a nice time together before. I just hope I won't ruin everything by telling it to the world :D
The weather is nice, I'm getting a break from the heat back home. I drove a car today! It's a first for me in Germany, and also - the car is much bigger and quite different than our car. Still, I managed it fine, and I'm quite pleased.

In academic news, I was asked to peer-review an article for a well-known journal. This is a first, too, and I am pleased that they thought me knowledgeable and trustworthy enough to do this, but the article is so bad I just want to throw my computer against the wall when I sit down to read it.
I expect I'm doing too much. I'm reading and trying to annotate it, to hint at necessary changes and such. But fact is that it just needs to be thrown away and written again, completely. And I don't believe that mere annotations will help the author do it well. But... it's so... _commonly badly done_. There are, maybe, around 70% of articles in my field, which are written similarly badly. And I feel someone needs to tell them. Am I wrong? How long should my review be? How long should I spend trying to figure out what the author wanted to say - an author, who evidently used Thesaurus for every second word to sound more scholarly. Have you had such experiences? Any advice or stories to tell? I'd be glad to have some perspective.
On the other hand, reading this article made me realize that I'm really good in my field and just as soon as I'm done with this article, I'll sit down and jot everything down that I can for my diss and I'll send it to my adviser and OMG, let me finish this just ASAP, please.

Impostor syndrome, inferiority complex and the sheer conviction that I do not have anything original and worthy to share with the world slowly but steadily leave my universe. I'm writing an article for my former prof. Of course, the greatest thing of all is that it is also going to be part of my dissertation, and that thinking about it helped me to figure out the third out of three major chapters of it, but. I'm writing an article for my former prof and I picked the subject myself, because I really think that it might interest him. And I only rarely look at what I'm writing and think "oh god, let no one ever read this". Deadline is August 30th. I intend to make it. Way to go, I!

This is a thinking out loud post, which means that my thoughts are just developing and do not reflect all I think and/or know about the subject. But I absolutely welcome helpful comments.

( The thing is, I'm going to give a talk )

It's not easy to fight even a mildly bad mood writing about ( don't open if you're eating or are easily disgusted )

This is totally for my own use, and might not interest anyone else, so cut.

( but if you remember the first round and would like to understand what it was about... )

Day two of trying to outline chapter three (out of three main chapters, which is kind of great). I must say, dissertation writing is a torture. You spend a whole day trying to figure something out and find the right whatever-it-is, then, at the end of the day, when your brain goes blah, you sit and lick your wounds, trying to tell yourself that it is OK that nothing seems to work out, you're not a complete failure, give it time, you'll be fine, crying, whining, being lucky if there is someone near at hand, who can help and say that you really aren't an idiot, it's not just in your head. Going to bed and trying to think positive. Waking up and doing it all over again. Really. You know. I think, dissertation writing is a great thing just to... learn just how stupid you can feel, finish it (oh, yes, please, please) and never ever feel this way again.

Somehow this thing - trope - has completely passed me by. I've only started thinking about this word (this idea) a couple of months ago. I mean, sure, I know a lot of tropes - if you google something about them, you find long lists with things like "femme fatale", "damsel in distress" and "trophy wife", and you think, aaaaah, suuuuure... But still, somehow it is hard for me to get used to the whole concept. Just... to start thinking like that. I even have trouble explaining what exactly is my problem. So, if you don't mind, I'll just talk out loud about tropes and my diss, and, maybe, you'll want to add something and in the end I'll be a little smarter...

When I was telling my friend about one of the things for my PhD, she said: she (the author we talked about) is inventing new tropes! And I was like... wha? And she said some things about tropes I didn't really understand - once again... I believe, she said that a trope is not just a character, but a character you can actually meet in the street? Does this sound right? No idea, why I'm soooo ignorant and unable to grasp this thing... Anyhow, my friend says I'm not dumb and that I actually understand this, but I lack terminology. I really hope she's right.

The thing is that she (that author we talked about) writes a lot about women and she has two kinds of them (tropes?): one kind are poor-women-who-suffer-because-of-men and the other strong-women-with-agency-of-their-own. Then, there are men. There are bad-men (usually equals men who treat women badly) and good men (very little of them, some of them are barely present, but they all treat women nicely).

So... what I would like to know: are they all tropes? I mean, who decides what's a trope and what's not? I mean, are they predefined somehow? Or can I just come and say: look, there are these four tropes... Does someone even understand what my problem is? Because I don't.

If you didn't understand any of this, but know and understand about tropes, could you just write a comment and use the word "trope" in a sentence? Maybe even a couple of times?

( while I continue thinking about this I'll add new thoughts under the cut )

This is for a translation. There's a boy, who stands out in the village, because he's moved there from the city. Teachers and classmates don't like that, and one, threatening the boy, says:

"You think you're a hero. I'll take the oil out of your hair!"

Saying "oil" he probably means the boy's hairstyle (even just the fact that he has one), but also his modern city clothes and ways.

Here's the question: can you think of an idiom or some better way to express what he's saying?
Or does "I'll take the oil out of your hair" sound OK?

Dear people, I need some thinking help please.

I wrote at some point that I'm working on a PhD, and I even said something about wanting to write about my progress from time to time. Well, that time has come. I need to interpret something and I do feel that I've been thinking about it for too long, so I'd really appreciate it, if you would read the following and tell me what you thought.

So, we're talking about an author (an autobiographer), who comes from a subaltern community (underprivileged is waaaay better that what he experienced) and whenever he speaks about his village, the place he comes from, "his community", he mentions a lot of death... I mean, there is a logical explanation for this: his family lived next to a cremation ground and this is where he spent a big part of his childhood, but still... I do think the death symbolism is totally important. But what interests me now is that when he doesn't mention "his community", his language usually is pretty factual and dry, but when it's "his community"+death his language becomes very poetic and metaphoric.

Here's a very short example (it's a description of a village (where people of "his community" lived) that had burned recently; the translation is mine, it's very rough):

As soon as my glance fell on the place, it seemed as if a volcano has just erupted or as if all the cremation grounds in the world had taken revenge on this place. The whole place looked like it had been put on a single cremation pyre. Buildings and trees seemed to have committed suicide. One tree was partly burned and partly green, it was evident that its suicide hadn't been completely successful. etc., etc. he goes on to mention collapsed walls, burnt and broken clay utensils, a "barking half-burnt dog", a dirty child, an old man sitting on a half-burnt bench and staring at him...


And here's the question: What would you say does he achieve through this metaphoric (or poetic? or both?) language?

(I've no idea how understandable is what I've written, the thing is that I have the feeling I've been thinking about this for half of my life and... well, part of what I want to say may exist only inside my head... anyhow... I'd be happy to talk about this.)