Antonio Carlucci on language

The first thing I look at is the menu; if they can’t write a menu without a mistake then the food won’t be any good.

— Antonio Carlucci, The Guardian, 5 February 2009

Update: Archive extended

I have been cleaning up some folders and came across some youthful miscellaneous pieces I thought I’d add to my archive.

There’s a trio of articles on, respectively, coffee, fish and chips, and samoosas that I wrote for Student Life in 1997 (now called SL). And there’s one on smoking, published at the now defunct World Online (Tiscali, South Africa). The Student Life articles never appeared online, while the World Online piece has disappeared, obviously due to databases suffering the vagaries of time and corporate acquisition (see http://worldonline.co.za).

Advertisement

You can’t get lost in the samoosa triangle

(originally published as “‘n Moerse Samoosa” in Student Life, September 1997; to understand the racial ‘anthropology’ behind this article, first read “Fish and chips for the Soul“.)

THE TRIANGLE is geometry’s favourite form. Circles, rectangles, squares, trapezia — all are composites of triangles. And the triangle is powerful. In soccer, keeping players in inter-connected triangles is effective as attack and defence.

Some mysticism surrounds triangles. There’s Pythagoras and his hypotenuse. And there’s the Bermuda Triangle.

A triangle can be divided into smaller triangles. Take the Samoosa Triangle. Nationally, one can plot the points of a giant samoosa from Cape Town to Durban to Johannesburg. Apartheid kept the samoosa out of Vrystaat, but Euclideans say things are changing.