Keith Geaney’s Post

It struck me yesterday that two of my greatest passions in life have diametrically opposite goals. When you sing in a choir, the objective is to sound as much like everyone else as you can. Great pains are taken to ensure that everyone pronounces each vowel in the same manner and that everyone has the same even tone. When Sir John Eliot Gardiner founded the Monteverdi Choir in 1964, he scoured the length and breadth of the UK looking for singers who not only were technically excellent, but also had voices very similar to each other, in order to obtain the most uniform sound possible. When you're writing fiction, you want to strive to develop a truly unique voice. Reviewers are fond of saying 'Here's the next X' or 'today's Y' when a writer's style reminds them of another writer (which, of course, can be flattering, disparaging or anything in between) but I think the ultimate achievement is to have a style that is neither imitative nor imitable. Obvious proviso: your style should also be good. Having an inimitably bad style is arguably an achievement in its own right, but it won't get you to the top of the bestsellers list.

A map of British English dialects, including a few (like the Janner dialect from Plymouth and the Potteries dialect from Stoke-on-Trent) that I'd never heard of before.

I've been thinking about freedom today, as in: ❌ Mel Gibson's response to being filleted ❌ the George Michael song ✅ how much creative leeway you have as a translator. There's always at least a certain amount of creativity involved in translation but you do need to stay within throwing distance of the source text, unless you've spoken to the client and let them know that a certain passage just wouldn't mean anything from a cultural point of view to a speaker of the target language. We as translators are always committed to quality but we need to resist the temptation to veer over into copywriting or transcreation when the source copy is a little flat. In an ideal world, a translation should improve on the original, albeit not at the expense of the meaning. I proofread a translation recently of an advertisement where the source described the product as 'sophisticated', and the translator had described it as 'sophisticated and durable'. Cue flashes of a customer buying the sophisticated but delicate product, having it fall apart on them and calling Trading Standards. By all means, look for the most elegant way to phrase a sentence when you translate, but there is no need to ransack your own stores of silk for a purse when you have been given a sow's ear. Sometimes a purse would be overkill anyway.

Here's hoping this is just the result of an unfortunate line break and not a more exotic ingredient altogether.

It's Sunday. Time for a rant about video content and people's mania for misusing it so frequently. How many times have you clicked on a link saying something like 'Ten languages with unique alphabets', expecting a numbered list and maybe a few illustrations of the alphabets, only to get a forty-minute video? 'Hello, and welcome to my channel. Today, we're going to talk about languages and the different alphabets they have, because not all languages are written using the same alphabet. You've probably already encountered the Latin alphabet during activities like reading the title to this video or every other item of written material you've ever encountered. But, some don't use alphabets at all – some use syllabaries or logograms! I'll talk about those in an entirely different video, so I'm not quite sure why I'm mentioning them now. Anyway, if you're new here, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and click that notification bell to get...' At which point the army from Monty Python and the Holy Grail appears on the hilltop and yells 'GET ON WITH IT!' Or how about this? 'Hello...today we are...going to learn...how to flash...a ROM...in Android phones. First...make sure...you have...an Android...phone...then...go to your computer...switch...it on...' GET ON WITH IT! A YouTuber going by the handle of Cenk Tester published a video in 2015 called 'How to Fast Honk', about how to honk your car horn multiple times in quick succession. The video lasts for seven seconds. It's perfect.

I've been thinking of branching out into the catering business. I'm pretty tidy in the kitchen (without being a cordon bleu molecular gastronomist), and I've already come up with a few recipe ideas: All-butter biscuits – no other ingredients, just butter, moulded into biscuit shapes. 50% reduced-fat cheese – a packet of cheese, except it's half-empty. Spicy Beef – the packaging will show some kind of meat stew but will actually contain a subscription code to my OnlyFans. If you want the VIP content, look for the packs that say 'Now with extra sauce!' Malt Bae – beer for pretentious wazzocks. Sold in a solid gold baboon testicle.

Ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate. Polyvinyl acetate. Vinyl polyoxide, trimethylolpropane triacrylate, polyoxypropylene and many more besides. We, as a species, have discovered or invented plenty of different adhesives over the years. The one I encounter the most frequently doesn't have a chemical formula, because it's a social adhesive. I call it BeardBond. Like most men, I don't get complimented on my appearance very often. The one thing that does consistently draw appreciation is my beard, and 95% of the time the appreciation comes from other bearded men. I've never felt that there was anything sexual to it; it's more like a not-so-secret handshake from a fellow member of the Beard Club. It's become an indissociable part of my brand now. The funniest part to me is that I didn't even have a beard until about ten years ago. Compare and contrast with my dad, whom I've never seen without a beard (unless you count a photo in which he was about eight years old).

Doing a bit of soul-searching and hard introspection at the moment: I'm in the process of creating a website to host my writing, which involves lifting up the doormat of the present and watching the assorted beetles of my past writing scurry and panic in the light. My hard disk has about a hundred Scrivener folders at various degrees of gestation, from blastocysts via teratomas to viable homunculi. The Hunger Games-like selection process is involving a lot of twitchy cringing. Still, I'm glad I wrote all of them, because that's better than not writing anything, which is something of which I've also been guilty in the past. #hashtag #hash #tag

Selfies are not my stock-in-trade, here on LinkedIn or anywhere else. I'm going to say that this one doesn't count, though, because it was taken by somebody else. When you're singing on stage and you need a folder to hold your music scores, but the stage lighting is so subdued that you can't read them, the production team give you lights that look like miniature streetlamps to clip onto your folder. If you happen to be sitting behind someone whose lights are poking out over the edge of their folder, it makes you look like the Phantom of the Opera's estranged cousin: the Insect of the Cathedral.