At lunch, a colleague, a professor of English, remarked that he had heard I was moving to Berkeley.
Strangers have complimented my English, remarked on how tall I am "for an Asian" and — more times than I can count — asked where I am really from.
The trouble with the English, remarked Salman Rushdie in typically apt fashion, is that they don't know their history, because so much of it happened overseas.
The anthem is plainly on the sugary side because the man standing next to me, on discovering I was English, remarked: "It is good you cannot understand German, otherwise listening to this you would probably vomit".
Segments of him, off-camera, filming his lover, Arsinee Khanjian, translating into English the remarks of guide Ashot Adamian on a magnificent 13th-Century church in Armenia are intercut with the filmmaker entertaining in his apartment a series of beautiful women who all ask to use his phone to speak passionately in a foreign language, presumably to another man.
Sir Joseph Hooker, a famous 19th century English botanist, remarked that before Charles Darwin, botanists thought that flowers existed "in order to beautify the landscape".
In France, where the vocabulary for describing wine dwarfs the capacity of English, to remark on a wine's "salinité" is to toss a welcome though perhaps voguish verbal bouquet.
Although the introduction to the textbook I used in English 101 remarked "a high level of uncertainty" as a "constant feature" of contemporary life, I had taken it, as I am sure it was meant, in a metaphysical sense.
It's a glorious afternoon, and I apologise for being so demonstrably English in remarking on that fact, but the legendary screenwriter – tall, with salt-and-pepper stubble and warm, alert eyes – waves away my words.
Instead of retranslating such quotations we have merely used the original English, while remarking any changes Tocqueville may have made in his translation or citation (for he sometimes exercised a right to be unfaithful that we as his inferiors do not claim).
