Welcome

My name is David Burrows and I am a freelance translator of Spanish into English. This blog contains some of my favourite words, a (mostly) amusing explanation of said words as well as some of my musings about translation. I hope you enjoy it.

Thursday, 17 June 2010

Concatenation

From the verb, concatenate - to link together in a chain or series.
Origin: from the Latin, concatenare: 'to link together'.
ConCATenation, arf arf.

This word, which is used far less than it should be, gets my vote as, firstly, it has five syllables whilst still being easy to say and read, secondly because it actually contains six other smaller words (prizes if you can find them all) and thirdly because the very act of concatenation, especially in the written form, as I am trying to demonstrate in this very long sentence by using many conjunctions and subclauses, is quite fun to do but challenging at the same time because it has to make sense at the same time as being grammatically correct. However, all good sentences must come to an end and it is far harder to do this in English than in Spanish, where I have read a sentence that spread over at least three pages.
Unfortunately, the word is mostly used in computer programming, which is dull for anyone who hasn't been freed from The Matrix. We should reclaim it and try to use it whenever possible.

1 comment:

  1. I accept the challenge and will drop this in to my next sentence

    ReplyDelete