Winner-takes-all electoral systems

The Spanish electoral system means that the two major parties are usually obliged to seek a deal with parties that, with varying degrees of ferocity, reject the 1978 constitutional settlement. Although Martí Saballs and his commenters clearly know little about the British system, the idea of seeking stability by implementing a territorially-based first-past-the-post system and/or…

Panna

The Guardian lists a bunch of furrin terms used in football, including panna, used in Holland to refer to the nutmeg and, apparently, especially in Surinamese Dutch. It would be interesting to know where it came from. The only remotely related word I can find in SIL’s brilliant Suriname languages site is the Carib pena,…

Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Dodgy Stuff now online

Offhand I can’t recall ever having met an English dictionary dealing with non-standard and mistaken usage in quite the same as the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, now searchable here. You construct a query like this.