Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 September 13

= September 13 =

What does "denying" refer to?
Medvedev shattered Novak Djokovic's Grand Slam with a straight sets victory in the US Open final here Sunday, denying the world number one a record-breaking 21st major men's singles title.

What does denying refer to? Did Medvedev deny world number one rank in Tennis? Rizosome (talk) 01:41, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Djokovic is ranked number one in the world and has 20 major wins. Medvedev beat him, thus "denying" him that 21st win. Commonly-used sports terminology. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:46, 13 September 2021 (UTC)


 * See deny sense 5, on Wiktionary: "(sports, transitive) To prevent from scoring." Grammatically, though, the use in the quoted sentence is ditransitive, like sense 3 on Wiktionary. The sense is then, "To prevent from obtaining". --Lambiam 07:44, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

description au couteau
Here and there within the article Stephan Vanfleteren, readers may chortle (or despair) at my mistranslations from French. The translations are in the main text; the originals are in the notes. My French is appalling and I tremble at the thought of the mistakes I might have made. (Improvements are of course welcome.) In one place I know I'm a bit lost: the source talks of a description au couteau de Theofiel. Looking at the relevant photographs within the relevant book, I imagine that a description au couteau might well be an incisive portrayal, but it could be a painful portrayal or something else. Comments? -- Hoary (talk) 09:17, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I guess nothing to do with l'eau Cointreau then? That's my French exhausted, sorry. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:27, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * That's a rather tough passage with some deliberately flowery language you tried to translate, so it's no surprise you found it a challenge. In any case, in this case "au couteau" would mean something like "using very broad strokes". The metaphor is that the artist - Vanfleteren - was deliberately using an imprecise instrument (a knife) to produce what would normally be polished sculpture, leaving all the imperfections apparent. More generally, the quoted passage emphasizes the fact that Vanfleteren is not trying to embellish his subjects in any way in order to emphasize that they are men who lead or have led hard lives. I'll see if I can improve your wording a bit. Xuxl (talk) 12:27, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Xuxl. These are indeed men who have led hard lives, or anyway that's the way it appears from the photographs. And none more so than Theofiel, photographed (the book's captions say) from 2004 to 2006. He's a (prematurely?) old man, with a very pronounced stoop, and long, greasy hair. In some of the photographs he's working; in others, he seems to have collapsed, sometimes amid the detritus of what I presume is his own life. None of the photographs of him appears within Vanfleteren's selection from Belgicum, but a look at this selection may help all the same. Incidentally, I do like the term capharnaüm. -- Hoary (talk) 12:45, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Capharnaum is a biblical term originally, and it has come to mean a large mess of objects piled on every which way. It apparently can be used the same way in English (according to Capernaum) but I'll confess I've only ever seen it in French. Xuxl (talk) 17:14, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Merriam-Webster does indeed have an entry for the word. I'm a little tempted to reintroduce it to the translation, but doing so would primarily obfuscate, so I'll refrain. -- Hoary (talk) 23:09, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The couteau used for painting is a couteau à peindre, in English a painting knife. --Lambiam 19:55, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, good. So something like "laying it on with a trowel", perhaps -- though if so, this would grossly exaggerate. But luckily has already done a good job. -- Hoary (talk) 23:09, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I thought about a painting knife before reading the original paragraph as well, but it doesn't really work with the text. The author is speaking about carving a portrait with a knife instead of proper sculpting tools. Xuxl (talk) 12:04, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
 * More of a hatchet job then? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:38, 14 September 2021 (UTC)


 * How does the notion of sculpting enter? The author uses the neutral term description. This is about photographs. --Lambiam 06:38, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Here we have a text explicitly linking description au couteau with couteau de peintre:
 * Hélène Zimmer a le don de la description au couteau, couteau de peintre à la James Ensor : une bigarrure expressionniste, hantée par des grotesques formidables.
 * (Hélène Zimmer has the gift of description with a knife, a painter's knife à la James Ensor: an expressionist variegation, haunted by formidable grotesques. -- from Google Translate)
 * This is about the use of language in Hélène Zimmer's novel Vairon. The similarity with Vanfleteren's haunting in-your-face portraits of Theofiel may be that these can, perhaps, in the view of the author also be labelled as "grotesque" and "expressionist". --Lambiam 06:57, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Here (i, ii, iii, iv) are some of the photographs of the Theofiel whereof Jean-Marc Bodson and we speak. (Bigarrure and bigarrer too are utterly new to me; I know so little.) -- Hoary (talk) 06:26, 16 September 2021 (UTC)