Off-topic this week, I came across this remarkable headline: To beat the traffic problem in Trabzon scalpel was the first step. The subhead reinterprets the story to the disadvantage of the surgeon: Traffic problems in Trabzon take the first step was to shoot scalpel. Contacts there tell me that growing trade with Georgia and Russia…
Galen is an indispensable early source for historians of the walnut, the hazelnut, the testicle, and so forth, but this does not explain why galen is used in Swedish to describe a disturbed person.
In an FT piece a couple of days ago (via) we learn that “As Benoy discovered to its cost, interpreters need to be close to the subject matter as well as competent linguistically”. I didn’t catch the Zapatero Snakeoil Show chez les Obama the other day, but I did see most of Hillary’s slot on…
Here, in a magical photo by John Robertson. It would be interesting to know which Morris group it belongs to. We’ve been thinking about cockerel costumes rather like a pantomime horse, large enough to be split into two, large enough to fit a river, a mountain and a wolf (or three children dressed as them)…
A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.
Kindly contributed by C, here’s a sign from the toilets of a restaurant in Jaén: Don’t though any papers into the water close. Use the trash bean. There is too much material here to deal with in one post, but we can report that modern forensic linguistics, combined with a couple of glasses of wine,…
