Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo‘s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined…
Montse Tura has spoken of an “‘adaptation’ in the interpretation” of the hoary old sectarian anthem, El Cant dels Segadors (The Reapers’ Song), on the regional “let’s hate Spain” day, September 11. kalebeul has learnt that this will not consist, as had been widely rumoured, in the correction of historical errors in the text. Instead,…
I tend to take my coffee and chocolate cake in what I have just realised is a social club for the mentally disabled. They are very polite and seem to accept me as one of them. One day last week a woman rushed in and started bellowing into the public telephone. Her lungs had just…
Along the lines of Langwich Sandwich and Tranny, a clunky & limited news aggregator covering this region for until I settle down. That means some of the news stuff will disappear from this page, where it was never greatly loved anyway.
From a review by Deborah Cameron of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: If the principle of least effort were all there was to language change, we would presumably end up communicating in monosyllabic grunts. The reason this doesn’t happen is that there are countervailing tendencies, among them what Deutscher calls the principle of expressiveness,…
Onze Taal > some inaccessible site: “Mierenneuker [ant-fucker] is the swearword most frequently used against the [Dutch] police.” Here, however, is the case of the man who was fined for calling a traffic warden an ant-fucker, appealed, and won: according to the judge, “ant-fucker” can also be complimentary. The British equivalent of an ant-fucker is…
‘”[Shahzad Tanweer] is sound as a pound,” said Azi Mohammed, a close friend. “The idea that he was involved in terrorism or extremism is ridiculous. The idea that he went down to London and exploded a bomb is unbelievable.” Nothing much rhymes with “euro”.