The other day Ingrid, one of the other volunteers, and myself went to the launch of the Oxford Univeristy Press’s new dictionary. I was interested and thoguht it may be a good laugh.
It was incredibly weird. The dictionary was advertised as “THE BEST DICTIONARY EVER”. something that the organisers of the event did not want us to forget as they kept on repeating this throughout the night.
This greek woman gave a sort of “interactive speech” on how to use a dictionary and came out with some really crazy stuff, like “the dictionary is your friend, you shoudl treat it as though it is a human being. You should walk through it” (walking through a human being is a pretty gross thoguht, but anyway). It was a sort of guide for teachers as to how to use the dictionary.
However, there is one problem with all of this. The dictionary – surprisingly for the oxford university press, which is a reputable publishing company in my opinion – only allows you to look up English words and the definitions in Romanian. And not the other way round, which means that it is of little use to be honest. Hardly “the best dictionary ever”. Good god.
I’ve not been feeling very good lately. I miss the UK and there is some other stuff which I don’t really want to write about in case someone reads it. Sufficed to say that I am really sick of being shouted at in Russian for really stupid things like not wearing slippers even when it is warm.
October 29, 2009 at 2:26 pm |
Everything sounds a bit mental in Moldova!
Sorry to hear about the other things, you know where I am if you ever need to talk or anything
M
October 30, 2009 at 3:04 am |
How are you?
October 30, 2009 at 11:06 pm |
Hi Rach, sorry to see you’re having a difficult time at the moment. I agree being able to translate only one way’s a bit pointless.
Really admire you for going for it in the first place though.
November 8, 2009 at 12:47 pm |
Olive I’m fine, who is this?
