Linguistic self-hate

David Millán notes that while autoodiar appears in neither the Spanish nor the Catalan standard dictionaries, it forms part of the rhetoric of Catalan nationalism. Autoômnibus is present in the above works, but autoodio is of course self-hate rather than a pathological dislike of cars. I haven’t checked, but I suspect that the word and…

Biblioteca de Catalunya / Google

Excellent news, with an interesting addition to the library’s name. The Library of Catalonia is … the national library of Catalonia, clarify those vile Spanish. (Recently when I went to pick up my new membership card the guy on the desk looked at my ID and then at the card, and snipped up the card…

Suspend Basque autonomy?

Fernando Savater suggests that, since the Basque nationalists always say they want a peace process like the Northern Irish one, surely the Madrid truce bomb means it’s time to suspend autonomous government, which is what the Brits do every time the parties in Ulster relapse into “hey, but fratricide is just so much easier” mode.

Faulty basil

The guys Geoff Pullum is looking for are http://www.translationgold.com/–just google the phrase and check the source of the result pages. The priority audience for their translations seems to be machines rather than humans and their primary aim is to boost Google rankings for pages written in the original language. Since you can achieve the same…

Arty-farty

Mr B may be between jobs, but there’s no end to the man’s industry. Here he is in action up at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. [ “The world is inhabited by two categories of people,” anticipated officer Fumero to himself as he slunk after the couple through the Plaza Real and into the…

Older sources for portobello mushrooms

MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian (via Transblawg) is rightly surprised that the latest OED update only manages to take portobello mushrooms back to 1990. They appear in 1989 in Bruno Ellmer’s Classical and Contemporary Italian Cooking for Professionals and in the 1942 edition of Agriculture Decisions, a publication by the US Dept of Agriculture, which is…

Why Chirac didn’t get on his bike at the 1997 Amsterdam summit

Not many people know this, but apparently (background) he went up to his host Patijn and demanded something that better reflected France’s phenomenal contribution to European society. “What kind of thing had you got in mind?” asked the mayor. “Well,” said Chirac, who had noted with envy the PR points scored by Mitterrand with the…