Taking the ‘Commuter’ Out of America’s Rail Systems
While the plunge in ridership has left some wondering if commuter rail is dying, others see a rare opportunity to reinvent the suburb-to-city service into something very different. But it won’t be cheap or easy.
April 23, 2021 •
Boston s commuter rail lines took a ridership hit of unprecedented magnitude when the pandemic engulfed the country.
(David Kidd/Governing)When Garrett Wollman was considering his housing options in the greater Boston region back in 2001, the possibility of a carless commute beckoned. After all, the city has one of the best mass transit systems in the country, including an extensive regional rail network that ranges down to Providence, R.I., and up to beach towns like Gloucester and Manchester.
Yuval Pinter writes:
When an English speaker doesn t understand a word one says, it s Greek to me . When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it sounds like Chinese . I ve been told the Korean equivalent is sounds like Hebrew .
Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?
Well, there s a Wikipedia article on the topic Greek to me with a table of correspondences, a page at Omniglot It s all Greek to me with a similar table, and a forum thread at wordreference.com. Michael Quinion has a Q&A on the origins of the English expression, which includes the suggestion that the Spanish-American word gringo comes from the expression “hablar en griego”.