Day: September 11, 2011

Ben Jonson and the ground charlatans

Like today’s miserable vendors of pirated CDs, early modern Venetian ambulants are trading on someone else’s stolen content, but at least they’ve had to learn it by heart.

What did the Catalan-speaking seamstress say on arriving in London W11?

“No tinc hil.” See also Sense dormir la noia, which was apparently a magazine programme on the local radio in that 24*7 metropolis, Sant Sadurní d’Anoia. Homophonic punning is easier in muddy languages like Catalan and English. David Deterding has a brain-churning collection of phonetic jokes in the latter. An example: When you’ve seen one…