BrE or AmE in your country??

Jasper   Sat May 30, 2009 5:27 pm GMT
URIEL: on another note, one researcher thinks he has found the Lost Adams Diggings.

Using a healthy knowledge of psychology and a knowledge of Forensic Archeology, he deduced that the reason nobody has found the area until now is that they were looking in the wrong area. The real site of the Diggings, he suggests, are located much further south, in an area so remote that it seldom sees humans.

If you have any interest at all in this topic, please let me know, and I'll get you some sites.

One thing I can say for sure: New Mexico, in terms of buried treasure tales, has it all over any other state; I don't know why. These are absolutely absorbing tales, for those with a certain bend of mind.
Uriel   Sat May 30, 2009 7:37 pm GMT
I'm not much of a hiker and certainly no rock climber, so I tend to stay on the beaten path (away from rattlesnakes and out of arroyos when those clouds start piling up). But if I do go hiking or take my dog out for a walk in the desert or down by the river (that would be the Rio Grande, of course, which actually has some water in it right now), it certainly makes me think of what it must have been like for the Apaches and the Pueblos way back when, or of how different and daunting it must have been for those first Spanish settlers to slog up the Rio Grande in the 1500's. Everything on the horizon is so far away it would take days or weeks to get to any landmark you see (or at least so it seems), and it would take some serious craft to find water if you were to wander away from the river or if the river was dry or running underground for a stretch. And yet they did it, and native people thrived here for thousands of years before that.

When my dad returned from his last tour in Europe and finally got his rifle and shotgun back from his ex-girlfriend, I thought for sure he would start hunting again, the way he had on the East Coast -- NM is abundant in wildlife. But he said, no, it was too much trouble here -- you pretty much need a packhorse if you want to hunt the remote areas.... which is pretty much any area outside of city limits. The lack of roads and the rugged, rocky terrain makes vehicles impractical, and of course elk weight 800 lbs or so -- not something you want to try to drag back to camp yourself!

I've never heard of the lost Adams diggings; you'll have to enlighten me. I do know that due to the length of human habitation here -- some of the longest in North America, apparently -- NM is lousy with archaeological sites. Mostly it's all pottery and petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and the like, and of course the whole prehistoric Clovis culture is named after the town of Clovis, NM, where the first arrowheads and rock tools typical of that technology were dug up.
Cian   Sat May 30, 2009 8:31 pm GMT
On Spanish words in the Southwest and the definition of emptiness:
Uriel inadvertently brought up an interesting point about the names of landforms in the Southwest. One comes across Spanish names like mesa and arroyo (arrojo) and more or meteorological occurrences like virgas. It seems that the language utilized to describe the Southwestern United States has the same tinge of Latin spice to it as its cuisine.

Of course, the most famous mesa in the United States is not in the desert but on its edge in Colorado. When my great grandfather was in the Civilian Conservation Corps under F.D. R., he helped to excavate the ruins of Mesa Verde (The Green Table).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GoofJSGtFI&feature=related

Beyond the greener mountain lands that suck the sparse moisture out of the clouds in the region, (indeed, the desert is caused by the rain shadows) there is a spare beauty to the American desert, one often hidden in vignettes and little coves. It is past my understanding why people keep calling the area empty (look back through the posts if you need examples). As if, in order to have something in it, the something Must be of human making. No, the dessert has something beyond human making in my belief. Who could imagine that descending the smallest fissure in the dry, crust of rock would unfold vistas that the most accomplished sculptor of modernist art would be forced to blush at with his own ineptitude.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g67jcvNlvm0&feature=related

I wonder what definition we are working from, what assumptions we start with that would lead one to call such a place empty. To me, there must be more in such a place than any canyon of steal, cement, and glass that I have ever been through. I find those city landscapes more hollow and empty than any natural one I’ve been to.

Uriel, you have--in mentioning rain shadows--named one of my favorite descriptive compounds. Here is a brief list of some others.
storm beach
desire path
architecture of sand bodies
beheaded stream
braided stream
dead ice
desert varnish
laminar flow
misfit stream
glacial milk
Pele’s tears
Ribbon fall
River capture
Star dune
Trembling prairie
alpenglow

P.S. I hope you didn't think I was from Phoenix. Though, it is a nice enough city. How do you like Albuquerque? I presume, since you are from NM, you have been at some point if not live there. I would like to spend some time there in the future, and I have heard good things. Are the arts as big there as they are in Santa Fe?
Jasper   Sun May 31, 2009 7:33 am GMT
Cian, you're right, of course. Nothing can be compared to the desert in terms of richness, variety, etc.

I guess I was using the term "empty" because the original conversation grew out of a comment about one-storey bungalows, which involves human habitation.

I quite agree with you, though. While some people think of the desert as sagebrush and sand (one color) I can look at a desert vista and see many different shades in the mountains: mauves, greens, yellows, lavenders, reddish tones, etc—a wide rainbow of colors. We have already talked about the incredible diversity of ecosystems, and oddities you find like groves of aspens growing in the middle of the desert, hidden lakes, or verdant valleys, etc...

Uriel has mentioned four different desert areas. I know three of them: the Great Basin, New Mexico with its mesas, and Arizona with its cacti; but where is the fourth?

Oh! By the way: did you know Alaska has a desert, complete with sand dunes? It's as dry as the Sahara. Hard to believe, isn't it? Well, look here:

http://www.nps.gov/kova/
Uriel   Sun May 31, 2009 5:02 pm GMT
The Mojave is the fourth. The US is considered to have four separate deserts, even though most are adjoining, because they vary in characteristic ecology, temperature, and altitude.

I'm from Las Cruces, Cian (way, way in the south, near the border), but I have friends and family in Albuquerque and I go up there quite a bit -- I was up there just last weekend, as a matter of fact. I like Albuquerque a lot. It's the biggest city in NM and there is a lot of art there, if that's what you like. In fact, I'm much less of a fan of Santa Fe because Santa is such a hoity-toity little boutique town, where everything is ridiculously expensive, including the cost of living -- they even had to have their own minimum wage, higher than the national one, to allow their residents some shot at being able to afford to live there. Albuquerque has a little bit of a reputation as being dangerous and having some bad areas and crime, but that's probably because the rest of the state is full of little towns where there isn't as much opportunity to misbehave. Or better places to hide the bodies. I would have no trouble moving to Albuquerque if the chance ever arose, though -- it's a nice place. And it does seem like everyone ends up there at some point, even if they move away later!

Santa Fe and Albuquerque are cooler and more forested than Las Cruces, and get a lot more snow, so they are geographically different in look and feel. They are also culturally different -- southern NM has much more Mexican influence, while the northern parts are more Spanish and Anglo -- and Indian, of course, although there are tribes throughout NM. And the cuisine is a little different up there -- Santa Fe style is New Mexican fusion junk, not true Mexican. ;) (People get picky about food! But seriously -- corn and black beans in salsa? WTF?)

We have a lot of Spanish words in our everyday vocabulary here, to the point of not even really having English equivalents -- I guess an arroyo would be a dry gulch or a dry streambed, but no one ever says that. We also have a lot of direct translations that have crept into the vernacular -- you get down from a car (bajar), not get out of it; you put gas (poner gasolina); and you might put attention, not pay it. Mesa (table) for a flat-topped hill crops up elsewhere as tablelands, and badlands are a direct translation of malpais. Up north they even still call irrigation ditches acequias, although we don't down here.
12345   Mon Jun 01, 2009 4:39 am GMT
BrE in the Netherlands. But due to Hollywood most people say things the American way.
In schools BrE is taught both written as spoken.
Lex Diamondz   Mon Jun 08, 2009 6:43 pm GMT
Well, I live in the United States so obviously, AmE

But I'm from the Caribbean, and over there the BrE influence is much greater. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEnwxqCQm8&feature=related
Spain   Mon Jun 08, 2009 9:32 pm GMT
British English. We have one million permanent British residents, most of them on the Mediterranean coast and islands. We also receive millions of Brits on holiday. And the British Pound at 0,86 Euros Spaniards fligh to London on cheap charter price justfor shopping.

American toutists are only seen in cities like Madrid or Barcelona.

I hear British English spoken around me -on a Spanish seaside resort- every day.