Look at that by - (read ebook pdf .txt) 📖

Even though one could have a lot to say about the ‘προσδεθείτε (fasten)’ and the ‘εφόσον (while)’, and even more about their forceful co-habitation on the one hand and with the elegant, clean-cut and flawless ‘fasten seat belts while seated’ οn the other, it was the ‘κάθεστε (you are seated)’ of the label that had turned his stomach as soon as he had noticed it, sometime in the 80s, on an Olympic Airways aircraft. The prob-lem consisted in the ambiguity of the verb itself which denoted at the same time both the momentary action when a person in an upright position, bending their lower limbs, lays his or her backside onto a seat and the more or less continuous and permanent action that cannot take place before the former happens, so that its two meanings were in constant feedback, the one being simultaneously a cause and effect of the other. An ambiguity which, in order to be lifted, a single par-ticiple might suffice, but both ‘καθισμένος (seated in demotic)’ and ‘καθήμενος (seated in katharevousa)’ were blatantly unable to play this role, being outside the company’s language policy. The solution, on the other hand, to omit ‘προσδεθείτε’ thus leaving ‘fasten seat belts’ stranded, which would then have no other hand left to hold but the lighting of the homonymous light signal, would open Pandora’s Box. And it would because, if there was a lesson to be drawn from the

+ by the way, προσδεθείτε (fasten your self) also suffered, but to a lesser degree, from the same flaw.

+ under the condition of course that a suitable re-placement would be found, yet both αφή(flaming) and ανάφλεξη (ignition) didn’t cut the mustard and all we were left with anymore was the pomp-ous ενεργοποίηση (activation).

Simos Panopoulos - Look at that

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tragic accident with the minister, it was the fact that passengers ought to remain fastened during the en-tire flight even when it was not indicated by the rel-evant lights.

“Enjoy your flight,” the captain of the aircraft urged the passengers in the meantime, completing his usual briefing before take-off. Pointlessly, as far as Babis was concerned, given that for the next forty-five min-utes of the flight (an hour if you counted the taxiing, take-off and landing, even more if he also added the time waiting for the luggage at the conveyor belt) he was doomed, – instead of, as originally planned, sub-merging himself in the book Ta kamakia by V. Vasi-likos which he had placed in his backpack the night before – hitting on his unknown co-passenger. And indeed, did he have the