Daily Archives: March 18, 2008

To Tread Where No Man Has Trod Before

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I’m working on a story that includes the sentence “One meter from his feet was a place no man had ever tread.” I realized tonight, after I’d read that sentence a few times, that it was incorrect. The past of ‘tread’ is ‘trod’. Worse yet, the past participle is ‘trodden’.

I’m okay with ‘downtrodden’, but while I can barely stomach ‘trod’ I just can’t imagine writing a sentence with ‘trodden’. It’s ugly. Even substituting ‘trod’ in my sentence is painful; I considered changing the verb rather than use that form. The only problem was, ‘to tread’ is easily the most parsimonious word for the job. Parsimonious, yes, but ‘trod’ carries an archaic air with it that I don’t want in the story. People just don’t say ‘trod’ anymore.

But ‘stepped’ is a junky substitute, lacking gravity. ‘set foot’ is probably the closest modern substitute for ‘trod’, but it’s almost a cliché. I could go long-winded and say something like “… was a place that had never felt the foot of man.” In this context, that’s a bit much. So I have ‘trod’. Honestly, though, I can’t use it. It’s like a big archaic raspberry at the end of the second sentence in the story, when I’m going all-out to set the tone. The more pleasant, albeit incorrect, use of the present tense bothers me less.

In the end, I will have to go with some alternative that, while lacking parsimony, does not go plop on the page. Alternatively, we could launch a campaign to make ‘to tread’ less irregular by allowing ‘tread’ to be the past tense.

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Thanks!

A Small Step on a Long Journey

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The rules are changing here, as far as the acceptance of foreigners is concerned. The Czechs aren’t particularly gung-ho about enforcing the new rules, but their neighbors in the European Union are. Now the Czech’s data systems have been integrated, reducing their ability to let things slide.

Currently I am completely legal here, but in the past I’ve let that slide a time or two. Getting the paperwork done to exist here legally will greatly improve my peace of mind, and get me reasonably affordable health insurance to boot. Overall, it’s the sensible thing to do. (It was the sensible thing to do long ago, but the recent changes have lit a fire under my butt.)

I don’t do well with bureaucracy in general, and although the communists were overthrown twenty years ago, some artifacts of that culture remain. There are plenty of government agencies here that exist for the sole purpose of existing, and to justify their existence they must create problems so that there are problems for them to solve. The Czechs certainly don’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing, but they’re awfully good at it.

Anyway, wading through all the requirements, getting all the documents together, and all that stuff is not the sort of thing I enjoy doing, and something that I tend to make even more complicated than necessary. Enter the professional bureaucracy-waders. You give them the power to represent you, and some money, and they take care of most of the crap. I have retained once such person, a nice guy named Robert. (Don’t tell him, but I expected to pay a lot more.)

The first step is to sign a series of nearly-identical forms granting him the power to represent me. He sent me the forms in an email, and today’s step was going to a friend’s house to print them out. They were Microsoft Word documents, but Word didn’t reproduce the wacky czech characters correctly, so I printed out a second batch using Apple’s butt-simple text editor, which did just fine. Armed with the documents, I set out in search of a notary. Soup Boy had told me where one was near my house, so that seemed like a slam-dunk.

The address Soup Boy gave me turned out to be a house. That was #7; across the street was #6, an office supply/copies/laminating shop that seemed like a natural place for a notary to be. (When Soup Boy had told me the address, I had originally assumed this was the place anyway.) I entered the shop, and in pre-rehearsed czech I asked for a notary. Confusion ensued.

It was not that I did a bad job asking for a notary; in fact I think I did a pretty good job. The difficulty was that no one present had any idea why the hell I would be asking for a notary there. What followed was a guessing game in which the shop owner and other shop patrons tried to figure out what I really wanted. One patron spoke pretty decent English. “What is it you want?” “Notař,” I replied. “Notary.” “You want something to write notes in?” I was actually pretty proud of my czech as I explained that I had documents I needed to sign and for someone official to stamp. Eventually everyone concerned decided that I did, indeed know what I wanted, and all agreed that they had no idea where I might find one in the area.

Tomorrow I’m heading to the embassy, and somewhere out there is a notary. Big steps tomorrow.

Thanks!