Completely off topic I know, but: what’s the difference between a cold and a flu? I’m currently recovering from one of the nastiest colds I’ve ever caught. I always thought that the really bad ones qualified as flu (for extra sympathy), but then a friend informed me that cold and flu are basically the same thing, all part of the same viral continuum.

I remember when I lived in Japan years ago being highly disparaging about Japanese people who’d routinely take time off work because they’d caught a cold. How pathetic!, I would say to myself. But it turns out that the Japanese word for cold – kaze – actually encompasses the entire spectrum from what we call a common cold through to the vicious stay-in-bed-for-a-week flu. So those people who took to their beds were probably suffering the same sort of thing that I’ve got at the moment, and now I realise that they were entirely justified in going to ground.

Fancy calling yourself a translator and not picking up on this important lexographical distinction. Here I was condemning the entire Japanese race as wimpy because I didn’t know the proper meaning of the word kaze. Talk about cultural misunderstanding. Now you see how wars are started.

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