Etiquette issue #2: false certainty (Boris Akunin)

Perhaps the most general rule of English language etiquette for Russians should be to avoid anything which smacks of Sovietism. Fifty years ago I might have said “Teutonism”, but that has largely gone from the world. However, Sovietism is still with us in large parts of what used to be the Land of the Soviets.
     One of the many unappealing aspects of Sovietism was the conceited, self-congratulatory nature of so much public discourse. One of the features of that was a habit of expressing a false certainty about the future. This sprang, I presume, from thinking  in Marxist terms about the so-called “laws” of history—laws which have proved pretty unlaw-abiding as it turns out.
     In today’s Guardian, the Russian-Georgian detective writer, Boris Akunin, is reported as having commented on the problems of political opposition in post-election Russia, and the likelihood of violent confrontations between protesters and the authorities.

“Russians furious about Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency fear a wider crackdown after hundreds were arrested following a post-election protest. ‘It is absolutely certain that the period of peaceful protests and marches is over,’ the novelist Boris Akunin, a member of the protest organising committee, told Kommersant FM radio.” (italics added)

     The phrase “it is absolutely certain” sounds objective, but in fact Mr Akunin is talking about events which have not yet been planned, much less taken place. He would have been entirely within his linguistic rights to say “I am absolutely certain”, since he is the full authority for his own views. But to say “it is certain” means he has definite foreknowledge about events, when he does not. Mr Putin might change tack, or choke on a lump of raw fish. The protesters might get bored of protesting, or all decide to emigrate. Hillary Clinton might change sex. Chelsea might win the FA Cup. The Guardian might start publishing jokes.

     To claim perfect foreknowledge of world events is to invoke the gloomy shade of Herr Marx. No falser bottom than his ever polished the seat of a chair in the British Museum Reading Room. I am sure Mr Akunin does not wish to emulate the Prophet Karl, which is why I think it useful to point out how a simple substitution of “I am” for “it is” would change the statement quoted from one which has the horrible ring of authoritarian scientific pessimism to one of personal worry on the part of a man who is involved in, and fully aware of, the situation he is discussing.

Common Mistakes #4, #5 and #6: Don’t cry for me, Mr Putin!

The Voice of Russia website once again comes out top of the ratings for instructive misuse of the English language. The story that is on everybody’s lips today is what might have been headlined: “Mr Putin’s Big Blub”. But it appears to have been ignored by the Voice of Russia. I think I know why. It seems to me entirely likely that the emotion which overtook the President-elect on Sunday night, so strongly that he could not restrain himself, had something to do with the way he feared his victory would be reported by the English department of the country’s official international news portal. That might explain the Voice of Russia's deafening silence on the only aspect of the election which has made international headlines in the broadsheet and tabloid press alike.
     Everyone knows the expression: if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Since it is rude (and possibly illegal) to laugh at state institutions in Russia, most people who read the paragraph below will think it best to have a “Putin moment”, as I gather we should now call it, rather than a good hoot. But should the President-elect be bound by that convention? Perhaps he ought to remember what Eva Perón said about Argentina in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical biography of her.
     Incidentally, the song was banned in the Philippines during the period of Ferdinand Marcos’s power vertical. One can only assume he preferred to be surrounded by laughter. If so, he would have felt at home in certain sections of the editorial department of the Voice of Russia, which published this passage yesterday in an article headed Observers Acknowledge Legitimacy of Presidential Elections:

“The activity of Russian citizens made a great impression on foreigners. The latter say that this is solid proof that the political self-consciousness of the Russian people is growing…. The instalment of webcams at the polling stations was a novelty this time. After the protest rallies of the opposition, which repeatedly stressed that numerous violations were registered during the latest elections to the State Duma, the Russian government made its utmost to ensure the transparency of the presidential elections in the country.” (italics added)

     The Common Mistakes (CM) in that passage are as follows:
     CM #4: “self-consciousness” can mean a simple consciousness of self, but in this context it means nervousness or lack of self-confidence. I suspect the writer intended exactly the opposite and wanted to say: “the political self-confidence of the Russian people is growing”.
     CM #5: “instalment” means a part payment of a mortgage, a hire-purchase contract or something similar. You can talk about the instalment of a bishop, or the Grandmaster of a Masonic Lodge, but never of a piece of apparatus. What the author ought to have said was “the installation of webcams…”
     CM #6: “made its utmost” is, I suspect, simply a mistranslation of the Russian word, делать. It is a very common mistake. The Russian word means both “make” and “do”, while in English those two ideas have different words attached to them. The author ought to have written: “the Russian government did its utmost to ensure…”

A wee dram

People who imagine there is a right and a wrong way to speak English, or that the language has a set of rigid correlates to external phenomena, would do well to ponder the notes of whisky tasters. I read yesterday the views of three professional experts about a Macallan 11-year old malt recently bottled by Douglas of Drumlanrig.
     They all agreed on the colour, which was “pale straw”. But the taste was a different matter. Dougie said it was “Fresh, sharp, clean. Lemony spice with ginger and sea salt.” Nicola wrote, “Cadbury’s fruit and nut with a lovely aftertaste and tingly freshness.” Jim noted: “Unbelievably smooth bouquet of flowers mixed with vanilla.”
     So, was it ginger, or fruit or flowers?

Not the Macallan 11-year old

     As for the “nose”, one talked of “sweet citrus and honey”, another of “butterscotch and vanilla”, and the third of “chocolate and fruit”. The only thing they agreed on apart from the colour was the fact that this was “a smashing wee dram”.
     But that is a phrase unknown to most Russian speakers of English—at least the words “smashing” and “dram”. And most would think the word “wee” referred to a different sort of liquid, especially if it has been described as the colour of “pale straw”.
     I have never tasted “wee”, but I can imagine that it might be lemony and sharp, with ginger notes and hints of sea salt, not to mention a nose that suggests the tingly freshness of citrus and vanilla. I wonder why nobody bottles it.

The developing tragedy of British tea-drinking habits

I get so many tips about articles I might like to discuss from the Voice of Russia website that it is a pleasure to have a change and find a mistake on the BBC. When I was young, one of the many sources of laughs used to be Japanese user manuals for things like transistor radios or gramophones (that was a sound reproduction device involving plastic discs, an “arm” and a needle). The electronic gadgets were so well made that we bought them even though it was hard to understand the instructions. This was not because they were written in Japanese (though they sometimes might have been), but because we were doubled up with laughter at the ludicrous misuse of the English language.
     Now that the Japanese editing industry has caught up with the country’s electronics manufacturers, we are left with the Voice of Russia website if we want a good laugh in that way. The problem is that there is no independent need to consult it. We used to read the Japanese radio manuals because we really wanted to know how to install the batteries, or find Radio Luxemburg on long wave. The radio you had would be the only object in the house which could do that. With news, which is the product that Voice of Russia offers, it is quite different. Today we have so many literate news websites that there is simply no need to consult one that is written in a language that is half-way between Mandarin Eskimo and a 10-year old Zulu’s attempt to write a science fiction version of the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev in Xhosa.
      It is Sunday morning and I am quite hungry, but I will not get my breakfast until well into next week if I start analysing the mistakes in the article “Japan and China may face serious conflict in the East China Sea”, for example. That is why it is a relief to turn to the BBC website, where there is only one mistake in the article under discussion. This is a notice for an item on Weekend Women’s Hour which deals with a question at least as important as that of war and peace in the East China Sea: namely, should we go back to loose tea or stick with the tea-bag?

Tea first: the early morning Earl Grey, while anchored just off
the Talisker distillery on Skye

     I have strong views on the making of tea (I am a loose leaf Earl Grey man, preferring the gutsy Ahmad variety to the insipid Twinings). But I have even stronger views on the subject of the BBC’s misuse of English. As “BBC English” is thought all over the world to be some sort of gold standard, it comes as shock to read this in the trailer advertising the programme about the British tea ceremony:

“In the past five years sales of that icon of British social life, the teapot, have fallen by nearly forty percent. Now a leading British store has started a campaign to bring back the civilised art of tea drinking. But can we stop the tradition of making a pot of tea from going down the spout?”

     “Going down the spout”? What on earth does that mean? “Going down the tubes”, or “pan” maybe, if you are American or want to sound as if you are. But surely everyone knows that the expression is “up the spout”. It means that something has been pawned, or put in hock, due to a severe cash shortage. It can also mean to make someone pregnant, which one might have thought was a reasonably Women's Hour-ish sort of subject. Even at a purely physical level, the spout on the average teapot is so small at the outer end that it would be very hard to get anything down it, without using a funnel or a syringe. Which only goes to show that not even people at the BBC drink leaf tea—a situation which possibly ought not to surprise me. It is the kind of person who is too busy to care about how they make tea that is too busy to care about how they write English.
     The BBC should consider outsourcing its website editing services—preferably to the Japanese, since their English is improving, unlike that at the BBC which is going the other way. And they also have a decent respect for the tea ceremony, just as the British did when BBC English still ruled the airwaves.

Irish literature and W.B. Yeats's sex life

Last night the Irish Embassy hosted a fascinating evening of literature and poetry readings. The occasion was the first publication of a new journal Ирландская Литеатура, subtitled (a) Irish Literature in Russia Translation and (b) Litríocht na hÉireann aistrithe go Rúisis (which, for all I know, means: “Don’t forget Croke Park 2007”). This is a joint initiative between Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland’s oldest and most prestigious university, and the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. The journal carries parallel texts in English and Russian. Readers who wish to know more may wish to visit: www.irlandskayaliteratura.org where you can also download the whole journal.
     The Irish Embassy is ahead of the diplomatic pack when it comes to promoting its own country’s arts in Russia. Partly this comes from the Ambassador himself, who is a noted poet (and appeared once reading his own verse on my radio programme: http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/28742746/37222188.html ). Last night’s event was timed to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of the life and work of Ireland’s foremost poet, W.B. Yeats, at the Foreign Literature Library in Moscow. Yeats won the first of Ireland’s four Nobel Prizes for Literature (coincidentally the same number as USSR/Russia has won). He promoted, with a kind of savage honesty, the cause of Irish culture in the face of hostility from both the British imperialist class and, when they had moved out, the Irish political establishment that took over from them. Any serious exhibition of Yeats’s life is likely to be very interesting.

     Pictured above is the first paragraph of the Introduction to Ирландская Литература which contains an interesting language point. Readers will notice that the author, Robert Tracey, writes about the “conversation” between Europe and the Americas and between Russian and Ireland. This is translated as диалог in the Russian text, when разговор might have been used as it would be the normal translation for the word “conversation”. But what appears at first sight to be a slight mistranslation is, in fact, very apt. A dialogue is more public than a conversation, which implies a certain intimacy. The reason why “conversation” can be used here by Mr Tracy is interesting.

     In the late 1990s the arts of the political “spin doctor” reached such heights that, for example, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, began to think that the words in which policy announcements were couched were more important than the substance of the initiatives themselves. This is not my observation but that of his own spin doctor-in-chief, Peter Mandelson, whose autobiography I recently reviewed in Passport magazine (see: http://www.passportmagazine.ru/article/2416/).
     One of the many Mandelson-Blair tricks was to call government public relations a “conversation”, implying that they were having a cosy chat with the British people on the same sort of candid, chummy basis that friends might have over a pint of beer or a mug of tea. Of course, that was complete tosh. Blair was friends with no-one, not even Peter Mandelson in the end. But it was successful tosh, and David Cameron has continued the practice. This is how, to the justifiable mystification of many Russians, the English language evolves.
     Yeats accused the politicians of his own day of using the methods of “medieval Spain”. One wonders what he would have said of twenty-first century political “conversationalists”. I would very much like to know, not least because it is hard not to admire a man like Yeats who had a vasectomy at the age of 69 in order to re-invigorate his sex life. And it worked.

The Earl of Oxford, Jeremy Clarkson and the Devil's Wind

Russians are, on the whole, extremely polite people when you encounter them on a personal level. Yet their public manners give the non-Russian who does not penetrate the exterior the impression that they are abrupt, rude, thoughtless and self-centred—which some of course can be, as in every society. But in general, one of the surprising things for Russians is to realise how un-чопорный (see Confusing Words #3, 24 Feb), or unpolite (not impolite which simply means rude; I use unpolite as meaning simply without politeness) apparently cultured British people are capable of being.

     I say this because of the response to my post about the Earl of Oxford’s fart (28 February). Though committed in the sixteenth century, it is still resonating more than four hundred years later and two thousand miles from the locus of the action. I have had more mail about this post than any other to date. Much of that mail has concerned the phrase “to let a fart” which some Russians wanted me to explain. In fact it is a phrase which has gone out of use, though it probably is the antecedent of the euphemism for the same action, namely to “let off”, that was still in use when I was a boy. This should not be confused with the phrase “to let off with a warning”. In my day, “letting off” without either prior warning or any sound to warn people nearby at the time, was known for some reason I never discovered as “doing a cabbage”.

     The “let” used in the quote about the Earl of Oxford should also not be confused with the modern use of the word “let” in the sense of “letting a house”. That means to rent it out for period, and no-one in their right mind wants to rent a fart. Murky visions come to mind of the process of conducting an inventory, for example. I must say that I do remember some colonial friends in my younger days in London who used to discuss the contents of their “wind”, but they were people who were indulging themselves in their first experience of curries and English beer.
     But despite the passage of time, and the fact that so  many euphemisms have gone out of use, the joy of vulgarity has not diminished, at least if Jeremy Clarkson is anything to go by. Reading one of his books of motoring journalism recently, I came across this description of a Mercedes SLR McLaren:

“The McMerc feels so much more exciting, so much more like a racer… A Ferrari feels light and technical. A Koenigsegg feels like it isn’t finished. A Zonda feels like you’re on acid and you’ve fallen down some stairs. The SLR feels like Jonah Lomu. And the noise is extraordinary. No car sounds like this. It’s a big, dirty, bassy rumble. My daughter said it sounded like a big fart. She’s right. A massive amplified fart from hell. It is unique. Nothing else combines genuine blitzkrieg power with such everyday normality. Seriously. [It is like] the Devil’s Wind.”

     So there you have it from Britain’s most widely-read journalist , and Britain’s only journalist who is read by, literally, millions of people in Russia. Next time you are watching Downton, a Jane Austen film, or an Agatha Christie DVD, remember that lurking behind the polite façade lies the Devil’s Wind.
     No wonder Russians find it so hard to get the balance of etiquette and oafishness exactly right when trying to fit in to British society. Luckily, though, they have this blog to help explain some of the “wrinkles” (and that is not a reference to the nose).

Connoisseur’s Choice #2: an evening in the cellar with Tullibardine

Good whisky, like the English language correctly used, is memorable. Sitting at a long table last night with a dozen other whisky aficionados in the basement of the Vinissimo wine boutique near Kropotkinskaya, I was told by the tastemaster, Yuri, from the site http://www.whiskyon.ru/, that a good whisky is one which, after you have brushed your teeth at night and got into bed, you can still taste as you fall asleep. I felt like saying: I know the feeling.

     But that is usually from an excess of the stuff, and rough stuff at that. Last night we were drinking moderately as we sampled four Tullibardine “expressions” as they are rather inelegantly called in the trade these days. We had three which had been matured in different types of wine cask, and one that was the straight Tullibardine spirit. And it was beautiful—light and airy, yet with a strong, fruity taste. I could have drunk a lot more.

     I have read what whisky writers say about the types of taste they experience. I find it impossible to express taste in words. What I do find is that different tastes provoke different associations in the mind. I am sure that this is different for every drinker, and differs in the same drinker from day to day. Which is part of the endless fascination of malt whisky. Appreciating it is a more a question of psychology than liquid gastronomy, if I might put it like that.

     Last night, I found myself listening with only half an ear to the description of where the distillery is, how it was designed and what the current company structure is, while I was back in my childhood, walking through the hills to Blackford, where the distillery sits, down in the valley beside the A9, half-way between Stirling and Perth.
     My family comes from Dollar and my father, who grew up there and walked the hills when he was young, used to love taking us on the 10-mile hike to Blackford. As I sipped the sacred spirit, I was suddenly up there in the cool wind, on a bright, late-summer’s afternoon, with the sound of sheep carrying across the burn and the first bracken turning a light golden, like the colour of the whisky itself.

Context is king: are we talking of sex or what?

Today’s Guardian carries an article in the Comment section by Ann Widdicombe, the former Member of Parliament, who is famous for at least two things. First, she once said of the Home Secretary in John Major’s government, Michael Howard, that “he had something of the night in him”, which was so poetically apt that, though it was said fifteen years ago, nearly everyone who heard the phrase still remembers it. Howard was a half-Romanian, half-Welsh politician with a pseudo-toff accent who wanted to bring back capital punishment. He was born Michael Hechte, and is now Lord Howard of Lympne—which I always thought was a gland, not a place.

     Ms Widdicombe’s second memorable act was to claim—indirectly, it is true, but a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind old bat—that she had never had sex, which if your middle name is Noreen and you read Latin at Birmingham University is just about believable. I do not think it would be doing violence to the English language to say that Ms Widdicombe, though full-bodied in the popular meaning of the term, is no oil-painting. She has a bossy manner which might be attractive to a certain type of man or woman, but I would guess that in her case it is a wholly above-board sort of bossiness, and therefore nothing to get excited about. To paraphrase herself, there is not much of the night in her.

     But she does have a redeeming sense of humour, as was illustrated when she pranced about like a half-drunk Pantomime dame on BBCTV’s programme Strictly Come Dancing. Nikita Khrushchev, who was “full-bodied” in a different sense of the term, once said of himself that he danced “like a cow on ice”. But he added, referring to his regular humiliation at Stalin‘s late-night piss-ups at the infamous Kuntsevo dacha, “When Stalin says ‘dance’, a wise man dances.” Ms Widdicombe does not have that excuse—so her act of self-abasement in the nation’s living rooms is all the more praiseworthy.

     But it was not visions of Ms Widdicombe’s full body which came to mind this morning when I glanced at her article, it was a grammatical point, namely the importance of context in all reading. Half distracted by memories of last night’s wonderful whisky (see next post, above), I read a sentence out of context and got a shock. Ms Widdicombe’s combination of humour and lack of practical experience of “the night” caused me to wonder if she was not making a mocking reference to sex when she wrote:

“Treated as little more than replaceable inventory, they are forced to perform the same ridiculous, unnatural and sometimes painful tricks week after week, year after year.”

     Who are “they” in this sentence? Might it be married women, or prostitutes, I wondered? Or could it be the sort of man whom women like Ms Widdicombe refuse to have sex with even though they have teased and titillated them by their flagrant and wicked displays of mature but unbridled eroticism in televised dancing competitions?

     I looked back up the page to see what I had missed. No, it turned out that it was neither married women nor prostitutes, nor even frustrated men that the former politician was talking about. It was circus animals, in particular Anne the elephant who “endured 58 years of being hauled around the country before finally being moved to a better environment.”
     Ms Widdicombe, it will be remembered, served a very long time in parliament, which is often described as a circus, but has now retired and moved to a secure environment on Dartmoor. For all her weird moves on the dance-floor, she is a saintly woman, and I entirely support her campaign against the use of wild animals in circuses, where they are “bound with ropes, wrestled, slammed to the ground, shocked with electric prods and gouged with bullhooks.” That sort of treatment is completely inappropriate for gentle creatures like Anne, and ought to be reserved for people like Mr Howard who, let it never be forgot, campaigned vigorously when Home Secretary for the re-introduction of the death penalty. When it comes to violence, context should always be king.

Common mistakes #3: word order — plus the Queen forgives a fart

It is always reassuring to see experts make a slip in their own area of expertise. Last night a friend lent me a very interesting book about language, called Planet Word. It discusses many subjects relevant to this blog, including the different ways in which people around the world say much the same thing, and the resulting possibilities for confusion.

     I started reading it while drinking my tea this morning. I thought I must still have been half asleep when I read this sentence (p. 158): “We’re in a call centre in Newcastle, one of the boom industries of the twenty-first century.” My first thought was that I had no idea Newcastle was an industry, much less a booming one. Newcastle had always been represented to me by atlases, signs on the A1,  people who follow football and drinkers of Brown Ale as a place, a location, a city. There are many words which describe a large agglomeration of people in an urban setting, but “industry” is not one of them.

     Then I realised that the author, one J.P. Davidson, had made a mistake which is common to many non-native speakers of English. He had ignored the importance of word order in a language which, because it does not, like Latin or Russian, have cases, can be confusing if adjectival clauses are put next to nouns which they are not qualifying. Mr Davidson would have been better to have written: “We are in Newcastle, in a call centre, which is one of the boom industries…”

     After that, I’d better pay Mr Davidson a fulsome compliment or he will soon be scouring this blog for mistakes—which he will surely find. No-one is perfect, not even a Moscow blogger with a pint of tea at his elbow. Planet Word is a very interesting book, especially for people who want to learn to use English in the way the English-speaking world uses the language—as opposed to the way it is taught in language schools and course books. It discusses many other languages, but is written entirely in English—which is a relief to me as I can therefore understand all the jokes.

     However, some of those quoted in this very enjoyable book—notice that compliment too, Mr Davidson?—could be understood in any language. Let us consider the word “fart”.

“In his Brief Lives, the seventeenth century diarist John Aubrey recounts the story of Edward de Vere and his unfortunate deep bow to the Queen [Elizabeth I]: ‘This Earl of Oxford making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travel, seven years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, “My Lord, I had forgot the Fart”.’”

     Clearly she had not, or she would have forgotten to mention it. To forget means to fail to remember. She probably meant that seven years’ voluntary exile was enough by way of apology for an involuntary but non-lethal act, and that she had therefore “forgiven” the fart. That is a different thing altogether. After about seven thousand years (by the Orthodox calendar) we have, in a gender-neutral society, forgiven the Devil for feeding apples to Eve. But we have not forgotten.

UTFD

The Voice of Russia continues to take an unusual position on current affairs. A correspondent alerted this blog to an item posted yesterday on the station’s website, entitled Farewell to Political Winter. It mainly described the anti-Putin protest staged in Moscow last Sunday, in the course of which tens of thousands of protesters wearing white ribbons and other white garments made a ring round the Kremlin by standing shoulder to shoulder all round the 16-kilometre Garden Ring road. This was known as the White Ring, and was described by the Moscow Times in these terms:

“It was a festive atmosphere, and its success may provide a boost for the opposition's plans for further demonstrations after the March 4 election. People smiled and spoke with strangers or wore home-made costumes (see post 21 February, Common Mistakes #2), like pensioner Tatyana Kulyagina, 59, who came in a hat she had made herself with models of a riot policeman and Vladimir Putin and others perched on top. ’It has been much more successful than I expected,’ said Alexander, a member of the Solidarnost opposition movement as he handed out white ribbons near Tsvetnoi Bulvar. ‘I expected far fewer people. It is a wonderful atmosphere.’”   

     The Voice of Russia had a different take. This is an edited excerpt from the story (full text at http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_02_26/66956473/ ):

“The riot’s participants did not manage to cover the whole Garden Ring… As far as the riot had not been sanctioned by the authorities, the participants did not chant any slogans. Some people on cars who were driving by expressed their solidarity with the rioters with signals of their cars’ horn, and the rioters answered with whistles. An 18-year old girl called Olga says that she came to this riot because she had learned about it from the Web… ‘I realised from what I saw that the [December] election results were falsified. What I felt of this can be qualified as nausea. After that, I became interested in politics. I believe that if you don’t support the current authorities, it is your duty to take part in riots of protest…’ Participants of the other riot, called ‘Farewell to political winter’, were probably more passionate, though also not aggressive. The riot was organised by a movement called the Left Front. This Sunday, many Muscovites were celebrating Shrovetide. In Russia, Shrovetide traditionally is the holiday of parting with winter and welcoming spring. That is why the riot’s organisers named it ‘Farewell to the political winter’. Like the White Ring, this riot has not been sanctioned by the authorities either, but its organisers ignored the ban. The place where the riot was to take place, the Revolution Square in Moscow’s centre, was encircled by so many police cordons that only a small space which could hardly hold 1,000 people was left to the rioters.”

     The motto of the story of these two stories is surely UTFD—a variation on RTFI. Every Do-It-Yourself enthusiast who has erected his flat-pack shelf unit upside down, or assembled a new mirror with the glass facing the wall, knows that before starting work you should Read The Fucking Instructions. In the case of Russian web editors, when it comes to English-language texts, the same idea ought to be adopted only with the words Use and Dictionary substituted for Read and Instructions. UTFD, товарищи!