Alex Mayrhofer’s gazetteer, used in the previous post, has a cool homophone feature which helps you distinguish between, for example, Swanmore, Hampshire (what’s with the Aireborough, Alex?), UK and SÄwan Maira, Pakistan. Impressive as the South Downs may seem after a heavy night, Alex’s 3D landscaping reminds one that pub crawls on the North West…
Apparently (via Onze Taal) a Serbian village is changing its name from Smrdić (“old and dirty”) to Izvor (“spring”). Said Smilja Kostic: “All the young people used to leave the village because they were ashamed to live in a place with such a name.” This seems to me dubious reasoning: despite its tempting name, there…
Peru’s trying to extradite him from Chile for “falsedad ideologica”, which I guess you could translate as “ideological insincerity”. He’s a politician, for xrissake.
Sarkozy’s going to need to look for some soon, but I fear that the current Parisian definition is the guy with the newest fridge. The earliest mention I’ve found here also floats in on a wave of urban violence: It is in the anxious and transforming 15th century that we begin to discover forms that…
Silly me: I thought you were meant to paint fascist graffiti on fascist memorials. There must be some branding issue. (The definition I use is roughly the same as the American Heritage one: statist + nationalist + anticonstitutionalist.)
Franco Alemán points out that Google (correctly) translates “Fidel Castro” as “Fidel I castrate”. No less sensationally, it turns out that “Fidel” is actually a French acronym for “Fichier informatique départemental pour études locales”, “Departmental computing file for local studies”.
Do head-to-heads on Spanish words and you’ll find that the page count at Google Print averages around 30% more than the word count over at CORDE. The content and search functionality are different, but it’s another nail in the coffin of the Real Academia Española.
I don’t know if Arabella inspired the younger generation the way her grandfather did the older, but the first modern mention I’ve seen is the following, from El País of 10/11/1976: Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, has joined the London squatters and occupied the second floor of an abandoned house to open a restaurant,…
The failure on the part of Romance lexicographers to include common words and meanings (eg bragueta = codpiece) in their bibles forms a formidable obstacle for those who would better understand their societies. Stanley Brandes published a really cool book 25 years ago–ie before the advent of easily searchable corpses–called Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and…