Cataloonies boycott water in Spanish

This is hilarious: Catalan separatists ERC survived their major political challenge this year (forget being kicked out of the government and losing the referendum) by getting hotel staff to remove the Spanish labels from the bottles of water provided at a press conference yesterday.

Why the Madrid metro drives on the left

Because it was built that way when it opened in 1916 and it would have cost too much to change it when road transport switched to the right in the 1920s.

Arana’s El Catalanismo

It seems to me a perilous sport to quote the father of Basque racism, Sabino Arana, in support of that vulgar ideal, the unity of the Spanish nation.

Die, critics

My front page aggregator removes diacritics, rendering local media tycoon Godó as God, which I doubt would displease.

Book plugging in the digital age

Sounds like LanguageHat also got approached by Grant Barrett’s minder at McGraw-Hill offering “a look at our book” in exchange for a plug. I invited her to send dead tree all the way to Spain and have heard nothing more, which you may wish to attribute to Spain’s splendidly relaxed postal service or to a…

Linguistic policy of Hispano-American language academies

“[Language] academies, oscillating in the disjunction between description and prescription, will have to document prescription taking into account descriptions of use,” says Pilar Chargoñia. Burn em down, I say. (Here via here is news of lobbyists who want the RAE to undescribe various popular uses of terms.)