What's in the sachet?
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At my hotel here in Brno, Czechia, the shampoo comes in small sachets, manufactured in Düsseldorf, labeled with the word denoting the contents in a long list of suitable European Union languages. I can't tell you which languages they picked, for reasons which will immediately become apparent. Here are the first four:
- Shampoo
- Shampoo
- Shampooing
- Shampoo
Just so you're sure.
Update added later: Within minutes, people were emailing me to explain that shampooing is French. Please. Give me a break. Sacre bleu. I am a sophisticated globe-trotting linguist. I have been moderately well acquainted with the miserable French language for decades. I wasn't asking for language identification assistance. In fact I cut off the list of examples just before champú precisely because I didn't want people emailing me to explain that this was Spanish, and so on. Leave me alone! I'm using WordPress. If I wanted comments, I would simply click the "Allow comments" box just below where I'm typing right now, wouldn't I? Wouldn't I? But I didn't click it, did I? So what does that tell you? That my trackpad clicker is broken? That I forgot? No! It tells you that I didn't want to click it, doesn't it? Precisely. When I want your assistance in translating "shampooing" into English, I promise I will ask for it. Is that understood? (Don't answer that; it was a rhetorical question.)
By the way, while I have you on the line, I must just tell you this. When I published "The miserable French language and its inadequacies" back in 2005, comments were off (we never allowed comments on Language Log in the early years), but I got hate mail. A young man from Quebec emailed me to tell me, furiously, that my hostility to the French was anglophone ethnic prejudice and he was offended, etc. etc. Now, in the whole of my Language Log career I don't think I have ever managed to write anything funnier than that piece. No one could possibly read it (I thought) and think it was anything other than stand-up comedy. Yet at least one reader did not understand that. Sigh.
Just below the box where I am typing, there is a line that says
▢ Allow comments
I have not clicked the box. Tu comprends?