John Preston

Unpredictable pleasures

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’ The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this.

issue 20 November 2010

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’

The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this.

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’

The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this. The first is that Western Greenlanders must pee in their trousers an awful lot if they need so few words to describe it, and the second is that anyone who chooses to include a snippet like this in an anthology plainly possesses a collector’s eye for absurdity.

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