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Cell Phone Sommeliers on the Way?
Japan is reportedly toying with the idea of educating and licensing "sommeliers" to help potential buyers wade through the vast sea of options available for a new cellphone purchase. "Japan's communication ministry is looking to the private sector to manage the potential nightmare exam and certification process, with children's online safety highlighted as an important part of the plan. Mobile sommelier sounds like a pretty sweet title, we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
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If you need a professional to pick out the features you need on a phone, chances are you don't need all those features in the first place. If you really needed them, you'd know enough to ask for them in the first place. These guys are just overblown salesmen trying to talk you into something you don't need. As for me, all I ask out of a phone is that it gives me a dial tone when I pick up the receiver.
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Here I am, thinking that someone in Japan had come up with a cellphone that could recommend wine pairings.
Though the original stock comes from Scandinavia the terroir of this particular batch came from Shanghai. You can smell the rich, earthy aroma of circuits left on the assembly line until they were perfectly ripe. Taste high-impact plastic exterior, make sure you taste it on the back of your tongue. As you can tell it's quite a balanced flavor. Quite correct sir, vintage 2002. It takes time to bring a phone to that level of complexity.
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I don't remember a cell phone that actually produced a dial tone
Yes, that was my point. Never had a cell phone, never care to have one.
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Now that you have mentioned a consumer demand for it, it will be new cell phone feature soon!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
He means he wants one of these, 'cos he's elderly and kind of stuck in his ways.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... the voice plans themselves can be confusing. If you just had a fixed rate per minute, or even a number of included minutes plus a fixed rate per minute thereafter, it wouldn't be that bad, but there are so many kinds of minutes: peak, off-peak, evening (and when does "evening" start?), weekend, same carrier, same account, "friends/family", rollover, etc.
That's in the U.S. I've never looked at a Japanese cell plan. For all I know, they might be even more complicated
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
It's far more likely that this will just result in more used car salesmen-types in the cell phone sales market. The sommelier analogy is almost offensive to real sommeliers. Certified or not. You are not going to get people who truly understand the intricacies of cell phone technology, features, software, services, plans to take a retail sales job. It just doesn't work that way. Sommeliers are a respected profession that requires years of apprenticeship. It is about culture and tradition.
Cell phones have always been about fads and over-hyped widgets. It's all about pushing out the current model and signing people up as fast as possible. The market is too cutthroat to allow for anything else. For this same reason, sommeliers don't stand around selling wine at your local grocery store.
I walked into a supposedly high-end cell phone store a few months back. They had towering signs that said things like "Ask our experts anything! They will help you figure everything out!". I walked up to one of the reps who wore a big badge saying "I'm a cell phone expert, ask me anything!". I asked a simple question: "Which devices do you have that run Symbian OS?". I received a blank stare and "What's a simmian?" in response. Followed by "We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
I'm not holding my breath that this program will make any difference.
Well, if we trust the results of a google search, it comes from a coarser latin a very long time ago. No idea if it's true, but here's a link. From the linked article:
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
What the fu-
What is this?
WHAT LANGUAGE IS THIS?
Because, sometimes English words don't exist which have the nuance of a foreign word -- they can lack that certain "je ne sais qua".
A highly trained individual whose job it is to help you select from a wide array of choices
I once had a native speaker of French as me for the English word for "gourmet", to which I had to explain that we had never come up with a single word which conveyed as much as "gourmet", so we stuck with it. The word carries with it a lot of implied meaning and suggestion that aficionado or whatever wouldn't convey.
Let's face it, English is just plain littered with words which have never really been translated. Sommelier is one of them. If you need to express a particular connotation or inference which is attached to a certain word, using substitutes makes the word understandable to more people, but might lessen the actual intended meaning. Subtle nuance is something which is difficult to replace with a synonym.
Words from other languages which have been kept intact aren't that uncommon.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have gnu, will travel.
What we need is not used-car salesmen with delusions of grandeur. What we need is better truth-in-advertising regulation. Like this:
We have to remember a couple things:
1. Japan is very far ahead of us as far as cell-phone technology is concerned. They've had fully-functional video phones for at least a year or two, for example (as in, you can communicate via real-time video).
2. Japanese retail is much more about service than most US retail. We just want to get in and get the product, but the Japanese are all about greeting you at the door, pleasant smiles, and all of that.
Therefore, a sommelier isn't all that strange in the context of Japanese retail. It's strange to Americans, but to the Japanese, it must make sense, otherwise they wouldn't bother.
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They do, but it isn't what you would think. Here's some fun examples (note double vowels means to hold the sound longer):
Japanese: Depaato
English: Department Store
Japanese: Supa
English: Supermarket
Japanese: Terebi
English: Television (TV)
Japanese: Pasokon
English: Personal Computer (PC)
All of these words are derived from English words but have been kana-butchered because Japanese does not have all of the sounds English has and some are even shortened forms of the full words. For example "pasokon" which you would hear sounded like "pah soh com" is really from the first parts of "personal computer" being "perso" and "com".
Some words actually sound pretty close to their English equivalent:
Japanese: kohi (pronounced co-hee)
English: coffee
But when written in katakana or even romaji you sometimes wouldn't figure it out the actual English word as an English speaker. Only until they show you the object or describe what they are talking about do you suddenly make the connection.
So they do use English and other foreign words (not related to English) as any language is allowed. But even if they did, the word probably wouldn't sound exactly like it did from the originating language.
You could also say similarly of English which takes and borrows at will. In fact English will even allow you to force words to be used in different contexts than are technically sound. For example words like "guestimate" are used more commonly to express estimates that have no basis or technical reasoning. You may have issues trying to use that type of verbage (verbage--yet another made up word) in published works but for communication it is just fine. Additionally we still takes words like rendevous from other languages (French) despite using it in English. So are we speaking French or English? Well English obviously.
I had the same complaints about the languages my parents spoke because sometimes they would alternate between the native language and English. So I would hear certain English phrases thrown in at random times and get frustrated and ask why they wouldn't just speak in one language or come up with a valid translation or expression of their thoughts in the other language. The answer is they switch between languages because sometimes it is easier and quicker to express a thought or concept in one language versus another.
I also get an awful lot of complaints from my Spanish speaking friend who says we (American) English speakers tend to butcher the pronunciation of many borrowed Spanish words. For example the word "churro" in Spanish is specifically pronounced "chu ro" but English speakers tend to sit on the "r" sound and say something "chr ro".
So language (in general) is a funny thing. But of course you would have learned that in your required foreign language studies classes that you didn't sleep through, right?
To end, I'm going to leave you with one last Japanese kana-fied English word. But I'll write it in romaji without correct spacing (there are no "random" spaces in Katakana words) so you can read it. Some hints: the word is actually taken from 2 common english words combined to express a concept and the first portion "ai" is sounds like the English pronoun "I" or "eye" but is commonly written with two katakana.
Japanese: ai su ku ri mu
English: ?