Our son-in-law Peter has sent us a link to something quite extraordinary. Despite its dull theme and the potential to bore his audience numb with the use of jargon, Hans Rosling, a global health expert from Sweden and co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières in that country, gives a statistics presentation that's spirited and gripping. Every would-be teacher should watch this talk for Mr Rosling's virtuoso display of teaching skills. Because of the importance of the subject matter, so should everyone else.
It's always a challenge for professionals to avoid jargon in their field of expertise. Because they are so used to it, I suspect they don't even recognise it as such, and yet for newcomers and laypeople confusing vocabulary and acronyms can induce a humiliating sense of exclusion. As I said in my previous blog post, I've been trying to make sense of Gordon Pape's financial advice for Canadians on the verge of retirement. His book is aimed at ignoramuses, but it's still difficult for someone like me to distinguish between securities and equities, annuities and income trusts, assets, capital gains, benefits, dividends and holdings, or between treasury bills, bonds and certificates, without the aid of a glossary. As for the GIS and the GICs, the REITs and the RRIFs, the DSC and the ACB, MERs and ETFs... Well, do you know what they all stand for? I'm thinking of compiling my own crib sheet with the help of this site: The language of finance, before my interest in this subject wanes, as it's bound to, rapidly.
More bewilderment on Monday when I joined the Spanish-speaking group to read Lo más olvidado del olvido, from Isabel Allende's Cuentos de Eva Luna and an article Por la Paz en el Mundo from this month's edition of the local newspaper for Spanish speakers, Mundo en Español. I found the article easier than the story, but even more demanding was the general chit-chat in Spanish before we started on the reading, because all I could come up with was Italian vocabulary. I have been giving too much thought to the story of The Aristocats, which George and I have been attempting to read in Italian!
Fresh from my struggles with Spanish I went to visit Claude at the Manoir Héritage, who handed me a new assignment: to translate some phrases from English into German for her, for use at a health clinic. She'd met a foreigner at one of these places unable to comprehend what was required of him, and had promised to ask around for help. So after talking to Claude in French for half an hour I went home to look up words for "urine sample" and "stool test kit" in German. That too is very specific vocabulary.
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