Whenever I go back to Brooklyn, the accent that I’ve worked hard to get rid of (but not quite as hard as Maria Bartiromo) seems to reappear, so that “give me a slice of pizza” becomes “gib me a slica pizzah”. Of course, pizza is one of those words that’s easily understood whether you’re in Brooklyn or Bangkok (though the pizza there doesn’t come close to Spumoni Gardens, my personal pick for best pizza in NY. One of their square pies is pictured to the right.)

I thought about this after reading this exhibit filed by Kemet (KEM) last night. As you can see, the exhibit, which has to do with Kemet’s recent purchase of Arcotronics for 17.5 million Euro, is in Italian and since I don’t read Italian (though I did learn a few choice words growing up), it’s hard to figure out what they’re saying. Until you get to this word: gross up, which apparently doesn’t translate into Italian. Other than the words copy and exhibit, it’s the only words in English in the nearly 50-page exhibit. So even in another language, a gross up is still pretty gross.

As a quick follow-up, if any footnoted readers know Norwegian and are willing to translate an article that ran about me last week, I’d be very appreciative. It’s not in Google News, so I can’t use their translation tool, but am curious to see what it says.

This entry was posted Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 10:56 am written by Michelle Leder and is filed under Buried treasure . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.