Tunisian liberal blogger

The excellent Mouse Hunter links to tn.bl*gs, a Tunisian bloggregator. Tn.bl*gs–which is completely unrelated to Mouse Hunter–includes excerpts from an interesting blog by dissident lawyer, Mokhtar Yahyaoui. Although the regime has avoided the Marxist, Islamist, and nationalist foreign relations disasters of many of its neighbours, any country in which a president “wins” a fourth term…

Chav/chaval

A new one to me: chav is British English for “a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing” (via Naked Translations). The standard etymology is Romany, and the term’s Hispanic cognate, chaval, forms part of the lexicon of Spanish gypsy language, Caló. (The Grec Catalan dictionary suggests, on the other hand, that…