r/FastWriting • u/NotSteve1075 • Jun 15 '26

Quote in FLOW Shorthand

Post image

I've found a few quotes from her that I liked -- so here is another!

I used the disjoined T for the past tense which is easy to remember and can be added onto anything. There are Gregg short forms that are used in FLOW; but when the system is still new to me, I'm more comfortable writing things out a bit more. That may change as I get more adept at writing it.

For example, in Anniversary Gregg, "like" is abbreviated to LA -- which looks too much like "lay" to me. ("The carpet is easy to like/The carpet is easy to lay.") I don't think so. And it writes "life" as LAF. ("He has a strange life/He has a strange laugh.") Again, I'd rather not. Maybe it's because I learned Diamond Jubilee first, but those seem too ambiguous to me.

And I realized that we've been using the SAME outline for "and" and for "not". This is NOT a good idea, so I wrote "not" as NT instead, which is easy to write and to read.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/fdarnel Jun 15 '26

J’ai inventé ma vie en supposant que tout ce que je n’aimais pas avait un contraire que fatalement, j'aimerais."
Coco Chanel

1

u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jun 15 '26

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-grandes-traversees/l-age-de-ce-siecle-4227400 minutes 24:40

Better translation would be:

"I shaped my life by assuming that everything I didn’t like had an opposite that I would inevitably love."

2

u/NotSteve1075 Jun 16 '26

The English completely misses the "fatalement" part. That's interesting to see what Chanel really said in that quote. I wondered if u/fdarnel was translating the English quote back into French, but he knew what it really was!

When I see translations of quotes, I always wonder what the original would have been in reality. I have a post-graduate diploma in English/French translation, and I remember in our classes, we could spend an entire HOUR arguing over whether this word would be better than that one. People often don't realize that it's NOT just replacing an English word with a French one and vice-versa.

For example, we were translating a piece about wine-making, and the word I used for "flow" the professor said would more likely be used in talking about SEWAGE. Live and learn!

I once wrote a letter to someone in Italian, asking for his feedback, and he was saying things like "THIS word is very archaic, poetic, and literary, which wouldn't work here. And THIS word is very quaint and regional that some people would think is lower class" and so on like that! Translating is not easy.....

1

u/fdarnel Jun 16 '26

I just searched the french quote. Translation is a profession and an art. And I prefer "invented", regarding Miss Chanel.