Sumi, that link made me laugh.

I hate thinking about abductions, and I generally don't. The selectivity of the brain to be able to not focus on the terrifying and worrisome is a marvelous thing.

In other news, I love the drawings of things writers fuel themselves with: [link] Of course Michael Pollan chooses tea and a handful of almonds!

I just had someone express surprise that there are white Haitians. Seriously? Are we still there? Aside from the fact that white Haitians can go back centuries, are there likely to be many countries left with no white population? He thought that if there were white people, they were the children of long term tourists.

Yeah, because that's a big phenomenon.

Honestly, I don't know that I've ever thought about it, but if I were to imagine countries without native white people, Haiti would be among a few I would think of. Not that it's right, but I think I'm fairly worldly and know a bunch of Haitians.

Would you think that *all* the colonists moved away or intermarried? Isn't that weird?

My relatively uninformed impression is that they were kicked out and/or killed. And on reflection, it's a little weird, but weird shit happens! And maybe is more likely in such a small place? I don't know.

And the country is currently 95% black: [link] so it's not like non-black Haitians are common, at least.

On the flip side, they say Jamaica is 91% black, and I did go to college with a Chinese-Jamaican guy, so I have first-hand knowledge of a relatively small group in the general population, so.

My relatively uninformed impression is that they were kicked out.

I admit this is mine, too.

Wikipedia (that font of knowledge!) tells me that many ousted Haitian property-owners ended up resettling in Louisiana. Huh.

Words With No English Equivalent, Ctd

My wife and I are especially fond of "biritilulo," a word from Papua, New Guinea, that literally means "to argue over yams" but is actually a great, loud row deliberately started between two angry parties as a way of letting out tension. It allows everyone to realize that the conflict in question is silly and to get on with life.

More: [link]

One of my favorite foreign words is rather simple. It’s the German “doch”. It simply means yes, but to a negative question. For example, the question, “You aren’t going?” in English. If you answer “yes”, it is ambiguous (“yes, you aren’t going”, or “yes, you are going”). Doch removes that ambiguity. It always means (in this case), “Yes, you are going”.

On the flip side, they say Jamaica is 91% black

And I know plenty of non-black Jamaicans. So I wouldn't write off 5% white Haitians as not existing--they're especially unlikely to be vanishingly small, since there's a shade of a chance they're better off than average (though the post-colonial politics of Haiti were harsher for whites than most other Caribbean countries).

I dunno. I'd never say there were no white people in any country unless I knew it for fact. I mean, I'm not going to say there are no white Chinese people, I just know it's a tiny percentage. Unlikely to encounter them, but I'm not going to erase them.