The other day, with in temperatures in the mid-30s, some folks dragged me out of retirement to go walking on a bunch of limestone. I was in sandals, but my feet were still pretty warm, and the fine dust gradually started creating fissures in my naturally dry skin. But then, eureka. Snails like limestone, whether…
Possible evidence of the Spanish Conquest of England, seen on a neighbourhood barbecue (“BQ”) notice on Wick Road, Hackney. Though perhaps, given the character of some of the dogs round there, the adjective was simply intimidated into agreeing. Adjectives have feelings, known as adverbs.
Transblawg picks up again on an Economist thing suggesting translation as an outlet for under-billing associates, and quotes one of the comments: I am also a US qualified lawyer working in document review in Spanish and Portuguese. I have been steadily employeed in these temporary projects for quite some time, but inoalls is correct, these…
The other day in the London City out of scientific interest I ate from a hipster stall a portion of /pʌɪˈɛlə/. It wasn’t paella – it looked and tasted like sewage sludge, black, oily, foul – but I couldn’t work out (and didn’t dare ask) what method had led to this madness. A couple of…
None of the immediate context enables one to say whether the South Tangier refugee relief committee was anxious to grasp Helena Maleno’s breasts à la Egyptienne because they read her as a Spanish prostitute (adjective española classifies noun puta (restrictive)), or as a fucking Spaniard (adjective puta describes more fully the noun española (non-restrictive)): Agredida…
Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez’s Crowdsourcing dialect characterization through Twitter subjected 50 million geotagged tweets to lexical analysis (beginning with stuff like auto/carro/coche/concho/movi) to come to this conclusion. Neither author belongs to the academic linguistic establishment, and they challenge the traditional view, which in Spain at least has defined linguistic variation to a considerable extent…
I knew there was still some of my tortilla de patatas lurking on the unlit fringes of a garden party, grabbed a small dark piece, popped it in, and crunched. I must have got its lung and probably its dick, but I kind of feel I missed its arse. I’m glad I didn’t take one…
