Gerald Howson in The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay claims that the satirical periodical, El Codorníz (The Quail), once published a front page spread of Anglo-Saxon ladies in bullrings and remote mountain villages headlined, “WHERE DO THE ENGLISH SPINSTERS GET THEIR HATS?”
Here’s another l/r swap: loro comes from the Carib roro and was used to designate both (reddish) parrots and (again on the basis of colour) native American slaves, as in “vos fasemos merced de toda manera desclavos negros o loros o otros de los que en españa son tenidos por esclavos e que por razon…
Savage Minds links to The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920 by Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L Haldane, GCMG, KCB, DSO, author of How we escaped from Pretoria and A brigade of the old army. It’s almost as entertaining as Gertrude Bell and includes gems like the following two, taken from Appendix IX – Notes on modern Arab…
Vincent Pinte, commenting at Technologies du Langage, suggests that the “de” between the “Dominique” and the “Villepin” that denominate France’s deranged and disastrous prime minister need not necessarily evidence noble origins. Apparently–I certainly wouldn’t know–medieval prostitutes customarily used only one name, their first, and were subsequently assigned surnames on the basis of their location, eg…
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…