A new one for me and for the Real Academia Española from El Universal, Caracas:
El primer ministro británico, David Cameron, endureció el tono, tras una cuarta noche consecutiva de disturbios en el país, al asegurar que “la respuesta está en marcha” y al autorizar el uso “ballenas” para frenar la violencia.
I suppose that this could have been a misinterpretation of the Wales in the reminder from some that the Welsh are racially apart and don’t have riots. No I don’t.
[
An oldie:
–¿Cómo se llama el marido de la ballena?
–El bus, porque siempre va lleno.
]
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Trev,
How would you translate ‘hawk’ as in ‘hawk and spit’?
Am guessing ‘whale’ is a nickname for the water cannon trucks
I guess “hawk and spit” could end up as “birdie kebab” the other side of a machine translator.
I wondered whether a “ballena” mightn’t be a rubber bullet, which in some incarnations resembles a miniature whale. Could always google it, but nah.
Why should you when you have your Google slave.
http://www.consejopolicia.gob.ve/index.php/noticias-cgp/en-los-medios/103
For the linguists: I think these vehicles receive really colourful names in other languages. Now I’m too lazy to google. But I do think to remember that in old YU they received the name of Tito’s wife Jovanka.
I’m left wondering whether hawk and spit might not be a cool euphemism for an attack helicopter.
Ok, that’s reasonable.
I found this and I’m out.
http://www.lexipedia.com/english/hawk+and+spit
Bigger repertoire than Roget and a gold mine for language learners, but I still prefer words to lines on screen :o)
Turning historical, you may conceivably not know this – uses the same tools devised for the Spanish corpus.
Great! Many Thanks!
Have I got an answer in there somewhere?????
No, you haven’t.
Carraspear seems to get the closest
“Emitir una tosecilla repetidas veces a fin de aclarar la garganta y evitar el enronquecimiento de la voz.” DRAE
He’s right, of course, but Friday afternoon is quiet and there’s some devil in the detail.
Erasmus complains about diners who, not knowing what to say at the table, scratch their heads, pick their teeth, wave their hands around, play with their knives, or cough, hawk or spit–aut tussiant, aut screent, aut expuant.
Presumably as part of the Latin craze, screo, screare turns up in Renaissance Spanish as escrear, escarrear and possibly more. There’s a nice example in this translation of the works of Bernard de Gordon, a late medieval Montpellier physician, where it is explained that hawking is distinct from spitting because it’s a lung-cleansing activity, so that I think hawking is coughing which involves the expulsion of matter into the oral cavity:
That word then seems to die out, but carraspear only surfaces in the 19th century. So what did they call hawking in the interim? Was it assimilated to coughing, toser? Or did they just stop bringing up their phlegm and die of horrible lung conditions?
The former must be true. There’s a marvellous bit in this life of St Francis Borgia where he stops at an inn and is put in close proximity to an elderly man with respiratory problems, who, thinking that his face is the wall, coughs (up) and spits in it all night, filling it with a pestilent shower of gob:
There’s another, more convincing example here, in which various bishops show their disapproval of what one of their colleagues is saying by hawking and spitting noisily. Unfortunately I don’t entirely get the joke.
Pura mofa de la disputa en sí, o bien del obispo de Aliphi que obtiene en el catarro lo que le es menester según jus divinum.
PS: Synonyms for carraspear: toser, esgarrar, desflemar. Looks like toser is the simplest, but doesn’t have the onomatopoeic value of carraspear, which for this reason is closest to hawk.
Bloody ‘ell. What have I unleashed? Trev, when do you have time to eat???
I think what we’re trying to get at, Colin, is whether you are a man of the 14th, 17th or 19th century.
Going off on a tangent here, but the always interesting An Und Fur Sich had a theologian’s perspective on spitting on faces. It’s no doubt stretching an already unreliable tale to think that St Francis Borgia was thinking of Jesus curing blindness by divine gobbing, but I wish we had had sermons as interesting as this when I were a lad: http://itself.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/lent-4-bring-yer-spittoon/
Perhaps Colin is planning an escape to Indonesia. Isn’t Oregon closer?
If only I knew . . .
@looby: That’s splendid, but unfortunately prone to sect-forming:
Quite clearly a procedure devised by eocnomists.
mkae thta neocomists
Did Colin know what he would get himself into?
“a rather old cetation/transportacean joke”
Well, that didn’t go where I was expecting. The only cetacean/transportation joke I knew was:
Where do you weigh a whale?
At a whale-weigh station.