Sheesh! Someone called Luistxo has invented a complicated spec–read and shiver!–with which you have to comply in order to have a proper bilingual blog. Kaleboel has dropped its forked-tongue strategy, having discovered that people get much more excited when you are rude about them in English rather than their own obscure dialect. But that, of…
Maybe the British have had more practice than the Spanish, but while the Metropolitan Police and MI5 (“keep garden areas free from dense shrubbery“) public information campaigns are very professional, here I haven’t seen anything. Does the Spanish state really have such a low opinion of its citizens’ abilities?
Just about the only politicians who fear for the nation and for the national religion/myth and language as much as the French are the Malaysians. A couple of days back, Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Rais Yatim said that Malaysians were destroying Bahasa Melayu by using it in a rojak manner, mixing it up with…
Mel Gibson has decided to make a movie version of the legendary sacking of London by Essex Girl. He is apparently hoping to film most of it on Friday night, before the Vomit Comet heads out east once more. Tennyson sets the scene quite admirably:
An investigation is underway in Mehmood Booti, Lahore into the bizarre murder of three young men at a failing prayer school: There was blood splattered on the wall. A boardgame was found near the bodies. Police believe at least two assailants murdered the three brothers because they found two different footprints in blood at several…
There’s a very interesting Beeb article that suggests that the introduction of sign language increased deafness rates by enabling carriers of hearing impairment genes to get it together more easily. In particular, this comment by research leader Walter Nance opened a new window: When you think about how the onset of selective marriages among deaf…
Metrosexual. The Americans blame French cissies and Brit hacks, but the honours go to Galician AZ Alkmaar footballer, José Fortes Rodriguez: Some women just don’t get it. They’re not used to being turned down. They say: Go on, you want me don’t you! I say: Am I talking Chinese? I don’t find you attractive. And…
I don’t think that John McWhorter’s “YO!” has really “floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation, and … become what linguists would call a pragmatic marker.” It’s just like football: there are always a few pragmatic markers hanging around on the margins of matches, and then there are Dutch defenders who…
Ah, how we all laughed at mad old Arnie! Mr Schoenberg, who was born on the 13th and feared the number all his life (Twelve tones? That’ll do nicely…), of course died on the 13th, just when he thought his illness had passed. And now the epidemiologists (c/o Bristol-Myers Squibb (Taiwan) Ltd) seem to be…
As the barking of the mad dogs of Mechelen recedes, Hispanic PR Newswire mutters in our ear that its market is suffering from a severe case of the proverbs: Often, excuses come disguised as popular wisdom… Unfortunately, the sayings nearest and dearest to us, those passed on through generations, have also culturally conditioned us to…