Oct

7

When I went to New Zealand as few weeks ago I thought it would be pretty easy since they speak English there. But when I went there, people would speak to me and at first I couldn't understand more than 60% of what they were saying, and much of that just by context. With the accent and the many many different terms for things, a lot just slipped by me as noise not information. Where I was staying a guy stopped me and said, "where is sife wi?" I look at him and say," Huh?" He says, "Sifewi"…finally it dawns on me he is asking for Safeway. That's how I felt all the time down there.

For example, they say "trundler" for shopping cart; Tramping, for hiking; ski field for ski area; kitting up instead of gearing up; cuppa instead of cup of tea; long black instead of double espresso, tall white instead of cappucino, and the list goes on.

The guy who developed the algorithm to decode cellular data from noise and other cell phone had a great idea.

The information conveyed in the market is hard to understand, but it's there. Like language, the information and how it's conveyed changes and evolves.

A French friend who has lived in the US 20 years said she can hardly understand people speaking in France now, and the kids there say she speaks like people did in the old days. It would be like using terms such as "groovy" or "far out, man" these days.


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