Martin Sewell > TheDamnBlog. Panic was once engendered in a stoned drummer in a stuck lift by mentioning to him that the lift brand was named for someone who died (singing Higher and higher, no doubt) when his plane fell out of the sky. (This has nothing to do with Spain, where there are no…
It’s a funny old world in which the celebration of states’ primary ethnic identity passes without comment while people are falling over themselves to ban poor old Chief Illiniwek.
Here’s one: blah (n.) “idle, meaningless talk,” 1918, probably echoic; the adj. meaning “bland, dull” is from 1919, perhaps infl. by Fr. blasé “bored, indifferent.” The blahs “depression” is first attested 1969. And here’s another: Blah as an actual word originated in the U.S. as an imitation of the sound of meaningless talk. In 1918…
More evidence that our /l/ and /r/ may constitute a single phoneme for Spanish speakers: At Starbucks they always write your name on the cup so that the coffee machine operative can say “Have a nice day, [your name]!” When I give the name “Trevor” it often gets converted into “Trébol”, so this evening I…
Re this, this: A gent from Grolsch is in a bar with colleagues from Heineken and Bavaria. The Heineken man orders a Heineken, the Bavaria man a Bavaria, and the Grolsch man a glass of urine. “Why don’t you get a Grolsch?” the others ask. “Well you’re not drinking beer either,” says the man from…
After WWI French government sold off old Remington rifles to dealers who resold them to rebels in Spain’s Moroccan territories. Writes Arturo Barea in La forja de un rebelde (The forging of a rebel): ‘The bulky lead bullet made a peculiar sound as it left the mouth of the rifle, a sound that resonated on…
… was one of the comparatively few in which I never sat, hoping that one day things would get better. Anyway, it’s gone. Here’s a memory from someone else, which I hope he won’t mind me quoting: That’s sad – it was quite a place. Full of the strangest people. There used to be a…
One dreadful consequence of writing this blog has been a realisation that ideas whose sublimity none has dared impute in the bar down the alley, Sally, are regularly rubbished by those too distant to receive the hair-mussing they so richly deserve. Here, for example, barrett writes “Ghits”, by the way, is an abomination and reminiscent…