Random Bits

"I often perceive my native language as alien. Not until I found
myself abroad did I notice that my fellow countrymen communicate in a
kind of half-language, half-swallowing their words and uttering
semi-sounds. I experience my native language as an attempt by a
linguistic invalid to vonvey even the simplest though through
gestures, grimaces and intonations. Conversations among my
compatriots seem long, exhausting and devoid of content. Instead of
talking, they seem to be stroking each other with words, spreading a
soothing, sonorous saliva over one another...."

and then a little later, speaking about a colleague from Zagreb: "He
had a Zagreb way of talking that gone my nerves - the la-di-da stress
on the last syllable, the constant use of reflexives, verbal forms
referring to the self, that made him sound intimately related to
everything other on earth..."

both from: The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

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pensée: a thought expressed in literary form. A pensée can be short and in a specific form, such as an aphorism or epigram, or it can be as long as a paragraph or a page. The term originated with French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées (1670) was a collection of some 800 to 1,000 notes and manuscript fragments expressing his religious beliefs. The form was particularly popular in French literature, as in Denis Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques (1746).

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Bay of Fundy:

The Bay of Fundy is known for its high tidal range and the bay is contested as having the highest vertical tidal range in the world with Ungava Bay in northern Quebec and The Severn Estuary in the UK

The river becomes the Severn Estuary after the Second Severn Crossing between Severn Beach, South Gloucestershire and Sudbrook, Monmouthshire. The river then discharges into the Bristol Channel which in turn discharges into the Celtic Sea and the wider Atlantic Ocean. The Severn's drainage basin area is 11,420 square kilometres (4,409 sq mi), excluding the River Wye and Bristol Avon which flow into the Bristol Channel.