Salut!

An image-conscious man and his umbrella

What is worse? Being paid to take photographs others want untaken, or being paid to stop them being taken?

One way of shopping

Everyone is arriving.

You can tell it from the last two digits that appear on French car number plates: 59 (Nord, the area in and around Lille); 93 (Seine Saint-Denis, but let no one suggest you should therefore mind your valuables); 69 (the Rhone, including Lyon), 44 (Loire Atlantique), 72 (La Sarthe) and, of course, the Dutch, Belgians, Germans and, more than expected given the collapse of sterling, Brits.

Some of these good folk may be Salut! readers. They may also be the people who from now until the end of August will make shopping at Intermarché a bit more stressful.

Bahia: not our finest hour

Whether Bahia Bakari is 12, 13 or 14 years old - each age having appeared hundreds of times since she alone escaped alive from the crashed Yemenia Airbus 310 - she has a powerful story to tell, one that would be uplifting and harrowing at the same time.

Mark my words: dash it all, do we really need hyphens?

Yves*

Very well, I got over my distaste for exclamation marks, perhaps as befits someone whose websites all have Salut! in their names. But will I ever learn to live with hyphens? Keith and Bill, two of Salut!'s most prolific contributors in terms of comments posted, jointly inspired this week's My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

A former colleague who regularly comments on the content of this column once asked why I thought it necessary to include a hyphen in the phrase "little-known fact".

From another former colleague came this answer: "With the hyphen, the words clearly refer to a fact that not many people are aware of. Without the hyphen, it could refer to a small fact that is widely known."

Although my second correspondent was correct in explaining the distinction, both had a point. As the original commentator observed, only the obtuse would misinterpret the phrase even without a hyphen.

It's raining papillons de nuit

At least it is not just us.

Initially, we wondered what we had done at the house to attract not just a few gaily coloured butterflies, which present a welcome enough sight, but also countless creatures that look like common or garden moths but apparently glory under the name papillons de nuit.

Forget Michael Jackson and Madoff: there's murder on our doorstep

Salut! has not been in hibernation. It has just been busy.

Mark my words: language à la carte

Everyone has a favourite menu mistranslation. The colleague editing my column for today's edition of The National, Abu Dhabi remembers being offered "rubbish salad" in Greece. Perhaps Salut! readers can improve on his example and mine ...

In the sleepy French Alpine town of Sisteron, perhaps because everyone seemed to be taking lunch so early, the plat du jour at the Brasserie des Cascades was sold out long before 1pm.

Fortunately, that left a wide choice, from which I considered, before deciding against, the "pavement of salmon" or the "warm goat", delicious as I am sure both would have been.

Mark my words: that'll learn 'em

If you thought center, theater, labor and traveler bad enough, think again. If old Noah Webster had had his way, it would have been worse still. The father of Americanised English is discussed in this week's My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

Noah Webster, who would have been 250 years old last October, has a lot to answer for. That was my first thought about a man whose name survives on the covers of some of America’s best known dictionaries.
My second thought was that, give or take a little bickering, we might actually have got on rather well.

The murdered earl, the hunted informant and me

Yesterday was a busy day in the life of a journalist much sought after by the electronic media.

Like sheep

... la transhumance. What a great word, talking - as we do here sometimes - about words.