A dos metros bajo tierra

When I told bunj that, thanks to its being rebroadcast on Bravo, monshu and I were getting into the show Six Feet Under, he looked at me ruefully and said, "It will only break your heart." But the upside to getting into something after absolutely all of your other friends is that you can ask questions like this:

When should I stop watching in order to preserve maximum enjoyment?

Despite bunj's comments, a sizable majority in a completely meaningless online poll seem to feel that it's never jumped the shark. But what do they know?

To give myself the illusion I was doing something more than just staying up too late wasting time watching television[*] last night, I put on the Spanish subtitles. Man, were they ridiculously bowdlerised! Any thoughts I had of increasing my feel for Hispanoamerican swearing evapourated the second or third time I saw "shit" glossed as basura ("rubbish"). Any time "fuck" was used with its literal meaning, it became hacer amor; expletives of all sorts were covered by ¡maldición!, just as almost any insulting epithet became maldito (with the exception of "faggot", of course).

It was interesting to see how they handled a Scrabble®-playing scene where Claire puts down H-E-L-L and her chirpy cousin modifies it to "HELLO". She ends up instead spelling the innocuous hila "spins", where it is transformed to hilar "to spin". And from an offhand comment of Nate's, I learned that Gomez Addams was rechristened "Homero", which is hilarious for some reason. (Although apparently this is only true in the Americas.)

New vocabulary: mañoso, chiflado, gracioso [en el sentido de "divertido"], aguafiestas, mensual [como nombre]


[*] And they say English doesn't have serial verbs! ¡Basura!

Six feet and rising

Incidentally, the title of my previous post is apparently the name under which Six Feet Under was broadcast in Spanish-speaking countries. Since the English original is an idiom, I was curious how it was translated into other languages. According to the Font of All Knowledge, for the most part, it wasn't; rather, it was left in the original form in many countries.

Exceptions include Portugal (Sete Palmos de Terra) and Brazil (A Sete Palmos). I find the choice of palmo interesting since a span is somewhat less than a foot and somehow I doubt Portuguese speakers bury their dead roughly one-and-a-half feet shallower than Americans. In the first case, the choice might have something to do with the use of the phrase palmo de terra in such expressions as não se vê um palmo de terra "you can't see a foot in front of you", but that's merely a guess. Finnish avoids the question of equivalent measures entirely by settling for the stripped down Mullan alla "Under the earth". Russian does, too, but by ingeniously playing on another idiom entirely with Клиент всегда мёртв "The customer is always dead". There's a certain affinity between this and the German version, Gestorben wird immer, which means--

( And here's where I get stuck )

But, of course, it's the Chinese version that has me completely baffled. It comes out as 六呎風雲 or, literally, "six feet wind cloud". The latter half is one of a seemingly endless number of Chinese idioms featuring one or both of these elements; my dictionary glosses it as "(1) wind and clouds (2) unpredictable changes (3) high-positioned; high and exalted; imposing". I guess (2) is most applicable in this case, given that the death at the beginning of each episode is almost always unforeseen. But what do the two halves have to do with each other? "Six feet of unpredictable changes"? What on earth makes this preferrable to the duly literally 六呎之下? No wonder I never made much progress in Chinese.