Toads in your mouth

The inhabitants of Llobatera, Venezuela call stomatitis (sores and/or inflammation inside the mouth) “tener sapos en la boca”. I don’t know if this is related to having a frog in your throat, and I imagine there’s no way of finding out.

Brothel news

A good friend of progressive bent had planned to improve life in a minor provincial capital by setting up a gay brothel (currently the locals have to make do with a weekend of madness in Barcelona every couple of months), but his accountant now tells him that the government’s new subsidies for employing women will…

Bedpanish

I’d spell it with a nn to banish all thoughts of bedspanish.

Tripartite's secret studies

Governments use studies to find out if they’re doing the right thing, but in democratic countries I think there’s a consensus that (a) they should be made public (we pay, after all), and (b) expenditure should be moderate. The revelation (here and here) that our nationalist-socialist regional government has been spending €0.5M a week over…

Tripartite’s secret studies

Governments use studies to find out if they’re doing the right thing, but in democratic countries I think there’s a consensus that (a) they should be made public (we pay, after all), and (b) expenditure should be moderate. The revelation (here and here) that our nationalist-socialist regional government has been spending €0.5M a week over…

Playing base

Wynand Myburgh may be part of the Mark Liberman/Chris Waigl “base” eggcorn complex. The 28 “base guitar” ghits in Google Books include such sterling refs as Asante & Mazama’s Encyclopedia of Black Studies, and the following passage from Black Ice by C Rowe Myers seems to confirm that in some cases writers are using it…