Struggling with weariness and reading bits of Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas (1883). There was no sugar cane in Peru at the time of its conquest, he writes, and the first plantations were not established until 1570. The first Peruvian refiner suffered from the abundance and cheapness of Mexican sugar until he hit upon the smart…
This is the kind of site that drives me freaking crazy. Beat the people at Biografica.org and ElUltimoCafe.com with iron rods, deinstall Flash from their machines, and sentence them to 10 years hard labour doing stuff like, er, saying where and when the exhibition is. Jesus wept.
Bitter tears from the greedy idiots who bought–or thought they’d bought–unregulated investments–stamps–in the expectation of becoming fabulously rich instantly. And a big hand for the media who, with unaccustomed taste and tact, are seeking to profit from any distress by setting up email, as opposed to stamp-on-envelope, help facilities.
Benjamin Zimmer links to a paper by Jane H Hill on Mock Spanish (with references to Jocular Yiddish, and others). I wonder how much of this is applicable to the experience of Welsh immigrants to Renaissance London, with a context that included repressive cultural legislation and the use of caricatural Welsh English (eg devoiced initial…
I suspect Ian Fleming knew (Noel Coward, allegedly: “Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is no, no, no, no!”) the stereotypical Signor No in Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-ish):
There are remarkable similarities between the styleguides of the Guardian and of the University of Kent. Check eg “a or an before h?”, “abbreviations”, “accents”.