ESL Meetup

Apostrophe to an employer: "Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple--no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it?  You must be able to despise the people you exploit"--Good Morning, Midnight

Yesterday afternoon I went to an ESL Meetup, for foreigners learning English.  I met several Chinese and Koreans and Brazilians. (One Chinese thought that "past" and "passed" were pronounced differently--that's one of those things Anglophones hardly think about!) We were given lists of English idioms and it was fun to explain them.  For "jail bait," I told them that Britney Spears acts like jail bait. For "laughing all the way to the bank," I cited Kim Kardashian! Afterwards I bought a copy of Gulliver's Travels at the Chapters-Indigo at Yonge & Eglinton.

I finished going through the pictures online that Francine Prose talked about in her Caravaggio book.  I was especially impressed by his still life of unusually blemished fruit: looking at them, I wanted to eat them, more so than perfect fruit. I couldn't help noticing that the book could have used better editing.  Rarefy and Velazquez are spelled "rarify" and "Velasquez," and Prose describes Caravaggio's "Madonna in Ecstasy" as having a non-existent skull in her lap. (She must have been thinking of a de la Tour madonna from 1640!)