Getting others to pay for our mistakes
More than €13,000 were collected by the Xaghra feast committee before it was announced that the money wasn’t necessarily going to the families of those who died, but was open to claims for compensation from anyone who had suffered material damages – fireworks delivery vans and lorries that were blown up, for instance.
I’ll bet the people who gave that money were pretty teed off at the thought that they might be paying for somebody’s van. But they shouldn’t have given any money in the first place. Those weren’t Pakistani flood victims made homeless by a natural disaster. They were people who blew themselves up – not deliberately, it’s true, but they knew the risks and they played along.
You’ve got to have a death wish to be in that line of business in Malta, where people seem to be so very cavalier about life and death.
The collection of money in the immediate aftermath of the explosion reminded me of a passage in Jay McInerney’s novel, Brightness Falls. There’s a party at some rich man’s house in The Hamptons. Suddenly, there’s a commotion. A whale has beached itself and lies dying. Nobody knows what to do about the whale.
There’s a flurry and a panic. A man picks up a champagne bucket, chucks out the ice, and begins hustling his fellow guests for donations “for the whale”. Yes, but what are you actually going to do with the money, a woman asks. The whale will be dead soon, she says. The man is nonplussed. He hadn’t thought about that.
Our do-something reaction in times of crisis is to start a collection. But it’s not much use, is it? And in this case, it is certainly not deserved.
I’m astonished that the bishop and the parish priest have gone along with it instead of giving all involved the stiffest talking-to of their lives. We get lectures about the value of life and then when we blow ourselves up and leave widows and orphans and human wreckage, we get treated like heroes. It’s not right.
It’s not only those who make fireworks who need that kind of hectoring. It’s also many of the staff in the newsrooms of English-language newspapers. I don’t think it’s my imagination when I notice that there is more and more literal translation from Maltese to English – and when the Maltese is utterly hopeless to start with, that just makes thing worse.
Take this sentence from The Times’ report on the Xaghra feast fund, for instance: “The fund will be used to cover the victims’ families and other objects,” Xagħra archpriest Fr Carmel Refalo kept saying, refusing to elaborate what else the money would go for.”
Families and other objects? Surely they meant objectives, but even then it’s wrong because a family is not an objective either, no more than it is an object. Kept saying? I imagine they meant ‘repeated’ or ‘insisted’. Refusing to elaborate what else the money would go for? I will exhaust myself, and you, explaining just how much there is wrong with that, so I won’t.
I’m beginning to find reading the newspapers really painful, and the frightening thing is that they are just about the only English most Maltese people read, so this way of speaking and writing becomes the ‘correct’ form when it so plainly is not.
BLOW UP THE HEIR AND LEAVE TWO SPARE
Maybe it’s because I don’t come from a family where people routinely had 20 children on the understanding that some of them would die so they would have plenty left over, but I was taken aback at the words of fireworks chemical importer Charles Briffa (a rival to the Muscat family business) in Malta Today.
He said he had warned Nenu Farrugia not to employ his entire family in his fireworks workshop – you know, just in case it blew up and he lost the lot of them.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and don’t put all your children in your fireworks workshop.
What is the thinking here: employ just one son so that if he’s blown up you’ll still have a couple left over to change your nappies when you succumb to dementia?
And how do you choose which one to put at risk, anyway – eenie meenie miney mo, or do you just pick the one you like least and shove him in there among the explosives?
“Oh bother, Johnny’s dead.”
“Never mind, we’ve still got Tony and Salvu. They’ll do.”
Primitive Maltese pragmatism: it’s so brutal that you just can’t beat it.
Then Briffa moved from the utilitarian view of life and parenthood to sheer inanity. “Airplanes fall all the time around the world” – another literal translation from Maltese, heaven help us – “but in Malta, instead of airplane accidents, we have fireworks accidents and it looks a lot worse than it should because we are a small country. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that people die from the blasts” – yet another piece of Maltese idiom which just doesn’t translate into English without making the person quoted sound like a total nut-job – “but it’s part of the danger of working in this area.”
Oh, really? Then why bother trying to get our ‘accidental explosion’ rate down to what it is where fireworks are made in a civilised way?
We’re not talking about accidental explosions here, anyway. We’re talking about unexplained explosions, which are completely different. I hate to be the one to break it to Charles Briffa, because after all he’s making pots of money from selling the stuff and is understandably concerned about any future direction that legislative change may take (not that there will be any, what with all the vested interests), but it doesn’t merely look bad because Malta is a small country. It is bad.
So many explosions in such a small place with such a small population and over such a short period – it can only be because, to crib the L’Oreal strap-line, we’re not worth it.
If one of our leading fireworks chemicals importers thinks he is wise and sensible to advise his clients to risk blowing up only one son rather than three, and boasts in the newspapers about his sagacity, that just about sums up the way we look at life.
Majtezwel put a rocket under the lot of them. It seems to be what they want.
This article is published in The Malta Independent today.
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Primitive indeed. You cannot make it up if you tried.
I wonder what Nenu Farrugia’s retort was to Charles Briffa’s words of wisdom, bearing in mind that he had taken his children to the fireworks factory since they were ten years old.
The irresponsible behaviour in the fireworks industry is mind-blowing.
Brilliant
Just a small point, I suspect the word “oggetti” as used by the parish priest was more in the sense of “other things”, in a very generic or wide sense, than anything else. As to the abysmal standard of English … you’re very right, sadly.
The money collected should be forwarded to the state for all the expenses rendered with civil protection, AFM, ambulances etc.
“The victims’ families, and other objectives” .
I have a feeling it might be correct.
It’s that time of year again. Is there another political party in the democratic world that each year spends almost a whole week celebrating the anniversary of its country’s independence, culminating in a partisan address by the party leader und prime minister? Tal-biki indeed.
http://www.maltarightnow.com/?module=news&at=Illejla+jibdew+i%26%23267%3B%2D%26%23267%3Belebrazzjonijiet+tal%2DIndipendenza&t=a&aid=99822997&cid=19
That’s because they can organise a five-day event, something which the Labour Party is incapable of doing. The question is: how can they govern the country for five years?
Leonard, it may come as a surprise to you but what is celebrated nowadays is not so much independence from Britain as “independence” (freedom, rather) from the Mintoff regime. Malta must be the only country in the democratic world where more people have been injured celebrating independence than gaining it.
The PN continues to celebrate Independence Day as if Malta was still under the Mintoff regime.
Leonard, the Mintoff regime is still around. Check some of the front men of Joseph Muscat’s party.
Now isn’t MaltaNightRow the real flipside of MaltasTar?
Let both tribes join hands for the festi tal-indipendenza to commemorate 40 short years of monkeying around and six years of bull. The Prim Sindku plays the role so well they think it’s all for real.
Six years of bull, eh? Must be why some ladies dress up as cows for those wild Brussels parties.
Yes, Antoine, I guess troglodytes might find it a bit odd. To their eyes even a two-year-old’s birthday party may seem a bit ‘wild’ .
How old is that photo accompanying the story at Maltarightnow? The last time I was at Festi Indipendenza, there wasn’t a quarter of that amount of people during Gonzi’s so-called mass meeting, let alone during the “diskussjonijiet taht it-tinda” (which I’ve heard will change as from this year) or the other bullshit which they organise fuq il-Fosos.
Once again Daphne you hit the nail on the head. Another great article.
Here is my suggestion. The band club which ordered the fireworks should pay the widow of any fireworks victim the equivalent of at least the minimum wage for the period of time that the victim would, otherwise, have reached the pensionable age. Just making a once only monetary collection to donate to the widow concerned is just a sop to the collective conscience.
Why? With due respect, no-one forced anyone to do the work.
@ A.B.C.
Hear, hear.
Is it really that hard to understand the concept of liability on these islands?
What essentially happened was an accident at a place of work. It could have just as easily been failed scaffolding causing a number of simultaneous deaths or a poisonous gas leakage at a factory.
It is a question of health and safety at work – a concept which is also absolutely alien to most employers as well as employees following the “mhux xorta?” in combination with the “nothing has ever happened” line of thought.
Most people have a strong opinion about fireworks factories now, but I bet few actually think about how safe and professional they carry out even mundane tasks.
Malta: A land where somebody who carries out a job to within 80% of its requirements is called a “perfekxinist”.
You are completely right in all that you have written.
Also, the Bishop of Gozo is in the Holy Land.
oh!
Instead of collecting money they should have signed a petition for the introduction of tougher legislation on firework production.
More than €13,000 WERE ( ? ) collected….. Mind your English, please.
[Daphne – Yes, WERE collected: thirteen thousand euroS (plural) WERE collected. WAS collected is Maltese English.]
But I think that the actual plural of ‘euro’ is ‘euro’.
[Daphne – It isn’t, no more than the plural of dollar is dollar or the plural of pound is pound. Euro might be the plural in other languages which don’t add an S to make the plural, but in English, it’s euroSSSSSSSSSSS.]
Yes, “were” is correct, because the total collected was collected from multiple donations–“were collected.” The entire sum, the collective noun, was not collected from a single source.
No—“13000 WERE collected” but “MORE than 13000 WAS collected”
What I found particularly distasteful was the way the Times covered the funeral with its huge photos of weeping widows and with the use of language such as, “showering tears and flowers onto the coffins below.”
I am aware that losing family members is extremely painful, more so when it is so sudden, but I do not want to intrude on that suffering as though it were a show at a funfair – The pictures and the coverage made me feel dirty.
@ Chris
How true; less journalism, more sensationalism. I remember when photos such as those on The Times today were only to be seen on the political newspapers.
Times have changed and so have we, for the worse.
The problem is the family themselves. Grief is a very private matter, but the family seemed all out to put on a show, in what they must have considered to be a fitting tribute. It takes all sorts.
Well, at least those who gave me money did so out of their free will. Michael Falzon, in an interview in Maltatoday last Sunday, said he wants to give taxpayers’ money to firework factories… to make them safer.
What? Now isn’t that burning the taxpayer’s money?
So let me see if I’ve understood this correctly – We’d have a prime minister whose family imports firework chemicals, and a festa-fanatic minion of his who’d propose using tax from hard-working people to subsidise the deadly hobbies of others.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100916/local/dom-mintoff-hospitalised
I advise you to consult English writers who NEVER use the plural when it comes to money. That’s among the first mistakes that were pointed to me when I was at London University.
You cannot afford to persist in misusing the written (and even spoken ) English, especially YOU of all people who never tire of criticising others.
[Daphne – Maaaaa, xi dwejjaq ta’ nies. Gej bil-London University. You don’t go to university to learn English usage and grammar, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to know these things before you get there. Clearly, you misunderstood your tutor – or was it a correspondence course? Right, given that you couldn’t understand when I spelled it out to you the first time round, I’ll just spell it out again, this time more carefully.
$5,000 – this is a cipher for the words ‘five thousand dollars’. When you read that figure, you don’t read it out as ‘dollar sign five nought nought nought’ but as ‘five thousand dollars’. So a full sentence would read ‘Five thousand dollars WERE spent on furniture’ because ‘five thousand dollars’ is most obviously a plural. There are, in fact, five thousand of those dollars and not just one. However, if you were to put the words ‘a sum of’ before ‘five thousand dollars’, then the sentence would read ‘A sum of five thousand dollars/$5,000 WAS spent on furniture’. This is because NOW the verb no longer refers to ‘five thousand dollars’ (plural) but to ‘a sum’ (singular). Here’s an example – it’s in the first line, so you don’t have to read all the way through: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/thousands-spent-on-br-chiefs-at-vienna-nightclub-1554854.html Do you honestly believe that The Independent is wrong and that the first sentence should begin ‘Thousands of pounds WAS spent….’? Now, do you get it?
OK, that’s done. Now I’ll move on to the next bit. MONEY is a generic or collective noun. POUNDS/EUROS/DOLLARS are units of currency. Therefore, ‘Money was spent’ BUT ‘Several pounds were spent’.]
@Daphne
Try monosyllabic words and shorter sentences.
Is the name K Farrugia just a coincidence Daphne?
[Daphne – I imagine so, yes.]
Gej bl-universita ta’ Londra. Dan mhux xi wiehed tal-Universita ta’ Soho ghal li jista jkun?
Jew forsi xi wiehed minn dawk li ghallem l-Ingliz tal-Matsec ta’ Michelle Muscat? Nahseb ikun professur tal-Ingliz tajjeb meta Joseph Muscat jiftah Universita ta’ Malta ohra.
@K. Farrugia
Does this help?
It says “Staff were also angry that thousands of pounds were spent on unofficial business …” And this is by the BBC.
Enough to disprove that it is not true that the plural can NEVER be used with money. What else did you learn at the University of London?
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/94135/bbc-spends-50000-pounds-day.html
The Financial Times Ltd 2010
April 28, 2010
Humanity’s fight against Nature
…extremely costly.Millions of passengers were left stranded by a bureaucratic reaction…compensation claims.
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WERE SPENT on buying drugs and vaccines and on other…initial fears – has killed tens of thousands of people around the world in the…study and share results on the virus were too slow; and some countries proved… By Andrew Jack in London
I have to butt in here. When I was at London University in 1969 nobody told me how to speak or write English. I suppose they considered my English good enough. The tube cost sixpenz and seats at West End theatres 10 shillings or 12 shillings. At this price, after climbing around one hundred steps, there was always a huge chandelier between you and the stage and, almost invariably, one or two columns, but still great fun was had by all of us students.
Now, London University apart, let us come to these blessed SSSSS after currency denominations. I have been trained never to say never or always. However, very often, in Britain and the USA money is not pluralised. This applies to both the written and spoken language. ” This book cost five pound” ” A ten dollar bill” ” I paid ten dollar” ‘I gave him ten pound”.
I could go on and on. I know this is grammatically wrong but it is very common usage. It is an accepted form whatever any of us, experts of English, might say or like.
Call it idiom.
[Daphne – Oddly enough, I seem to remember going through just these arguments months ago on this blog. Yes, there is such a thing as never or always in this case. Money cannot be pluralised, except in the sense of ‘monies’, because it is a collective/generic noun. Units of currency, however, are by definition plural unless there is literally only one.
The usage ‘this book cost five pound/I paid ten dollar’ is completely incorrect, which is why it is restricted to those who speak English even more badly than the Maltese: the British and American under-class and those who mimic underclass usage because they think it’s hip to do so. Say you paid five pound for something in England and you’re immediately marked down as, at best, working class or, if you’re obviously a foreigner, somebody who has picked up the language from working-class people. You’ll hear a lot of people saying they paid five pound for something on Eastenders, for instance.
‘A ten dollar bill’ – Anthony, really! The indefinite article refers to the bill (one bill, one piece of paper) and not to the ‘ten dollars’. And that’s precisely why ten-dollar should be hyphenated.
Ahjar nibda naghti privat tal-Ingliz go xi klabb tal-Partit Laburista.]
Now that’s one certificate I wouldn’t mind having.
Anthony, hemm ghalqa wara l-Munxar tidhlilha, forsi tizra kocc patata u naqa pastard for a rainy dejn?
Jew forsi xi scholarship minn fuq dar il-gvern li hu kontra tieghu.
X`London university? Sorry, but his last sentence is full of mistakes. “Especially you of all people who never tire of criticising others”.
Have loads of American friends who hail from both north and south. I never heard them say “I paid ten dollaR”. That’s equivalent to some Maltese saying they spent 8 cenT on something. A ten-dollar bill or twenty-dollar bill is altogether different…..just one piece of paper.
Daphne, jien jekk taghti il-private lessons, l-ewwel wahda inkun fuq il-bank ta to brush up my English. U mhux qed niccajta issa.
You agree with me. Gramatically incorrect but common parlance on Eastenders.
The vast majority of English people ARE Eastenders.
[Daphne – And the vast majority of Maltese are people who say petlor. It doesn’t follow that petlor is correct or that you and I should begin to say petlor too, though I must say that the language bosses in this benighted country are doing their damnedest to persuade us that we should all begin to speak like the working classes and their recently evolved sons and daughters with their horrid accents.]
Daphne, I completely concur with you that the official language should not be that of the uneducated and that the Maltese language has been ‘hijacked’ by the working classes.
However, I think that both the working and the higher classes are to blame for this state of affairs because, historically speaking, it was the higher classes who never acquired or abandoned the Maltese language.
I am not writing this to seek confrontation but rather out of a genuine interest in the matter and because you may give me a knowledgeable answer.
[Daphne – I think that if you have the time and patience to go back to the ‘arkotta’ debate on this blog (last spring) you will find most of the answers you need there. The debate went on for weeks because very many people find it as interesting as we do. The ‘higher’ classes did not abandon Maltese. That is complete fiction. The mistake is made because most of the professional classes were pro-Italy and believed we should be part of that country because we shared its culture (we didn’t) and so insisted on speaking Italian rather than Maltese. But they were just one group of people. The rest spoke Maltese. My family certainly did. They only spoke English when they had to, and they never spoke Italian.]
Madonna, we’re in 2010 and there are people who still say petlor instead of petrol.
The last time I visited Malta I heard someone on the bus reciting a recipe and saying ‘oksuwa’ (meaning one Oxo cube).
Be a bit humble and admit you are mistaken. Ask 10 English persons and they will ALL agree that ‘ More than € 13000 WAS collected….’is correct English as it is spoken and written.
[Daphne – You are beyond belief in your impossible stupidity. Listen carefully now. Both WAS and WERE are correct in the case of ‘more than $13,000 XXXX collected’ because – listen carefully, please – THE VERB HERE REFERS TO THE WORD ‘MORE’ AND NOT TO $13,000′. ‘More’ is considered to be either collective, in which you can take treat it as singular, or ‘countable’, in which case you can treat it as plural. However, people who speak perfect English – and you get my drift, I trust – will never say ‘more than $13,000 was collected’ but always ‘more than $13,000 were collected’. This is because, when you are talking about units of currency, ‘more’ falls into the countable category. You would see this clearly were you to know – and I imagine you don’t – that when you speak of less being collected, the correct form is ‘FEWER than $13,000 WERE collected’ and certainly not ‘Less than $13,000 was collected’. It’s this level of perfection that will set you apart, so instead of trying to beat me at my own game, I suggest you take this to be useful advice that might help you impress others when you occasionally leave the sticks. So remember: LESS MONEY, BUT FEWER DOLLARS.
A word to the wise: if you want advice on English grammar and usage, an English person is the last you should ask, unless he or she comes from a certain background and, for instance, is a sub-editor at The Spectator. I’m sorry if I sound rude here, but you really need to be told: the sort of English people somebody like you might know will not do.]
@K Farrugia,
Why don’t you consult Maltastar’s editor about the correct form?
Thank you for pointing out my ‘ impossible stupidity ‘.
Pity no English persons access your block. Perhaps your mate Andrew Borg Cardona might have something to say about this: he prides himself in his English, and is not shy to admit a mistake occasionally.
[Daphne – They do. Around 30 per cent of the hits on this site come from outside Malta. I don’t see how that it relevant, however. My English is better than that of most ‘English persons’. It is my mother tongue. Yours, though, is dreadful.
Block – should be blog; block reflects your Maltese peasant pronunciation
Your mate – a British working-class expression, and certainly not one I would ever use myself
Prides himself in his English – ON not IN
Not shy to admit a mistake – literal translation from Maltese
English persons – PEOPLE not persons
Now please don’t come back for more or I’ll begin to think you have a closet full of whips and chains which you pay others to use on you.]
I’m English. Daphne is correct in her use of “were”. I also access Daphne’s blog on a regular basis.
The most-read item on timesofmalta.com is: Water Spout Over Mellieha (a very short article and a picture)
Says a lot about Maltese reading habits.
@K Farrugia,
Not sure what you’re smoking, mate. I been living in the UK for over 17 years and have yet to hear someone say 10 pound. Similarly throughout the years I lived in Canada, I never heard anyone say 10 dollar. It’s always been pounds and dollars, and more recently euros.
If you were to read or listen to the English media, or even be a regular shopper, you’d quickly realise how wrong you are.
He said MATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Naughty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!