Account of a murder trial at the Old Bailey on January 17 1676: There were two men drinking, and there arose a dispute between them concerning a Spanish word, one affirmed that it was not properly exprest, the other gave him provoking language for saying so, he reply’d, Sir I know not how to bear…
Account of a murder trial at the Old Bailey on January 17 1676: There were two men drinking, and there arose a dispute between them concerning a Spanish word, one affirmed that it was not properly exprest, the other gave him provoking language for saying so, he reply’d, Sir I know not how to bear…
Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English: For they say the king of Portugal cannot sit at his meat, but the giants and the ettins will come and snatch it from him. (Beaumont and Fletcher, The knight of the burning pestle (1613)) I think that means that an ettin/eten/etayn is not, or is not…
A few from Jonathan Faydi, who lives in one of my favourite towns. Dunkerk is Dutch for Dunechurch; Jesuit traitor Henry Garnet and other Gunpowder Plot conspirators awaited news of Guy Fawkes in an English one (usually spelled Dunchurch), evidently unaware of the danger of shifting sands.
For freaks: Antonio Nebrija’s 1492 Gramática, the first systematic study of Spanish, summarises the various types of metaplasm referred to here, making clear here that he regards them as acceptable corruptions. Valdés attacks Nebrija for his Latinate affectations, but it’s unfair to regard them respectively as descriptivist and prescriptivist extremists.
Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian: A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for…
Two Italian bodybuilders in the gym, one lifting great heaps of metal while the other stands over him and shouts in his ear things like: “STUFF YOUR DICK IN YOUR MOUTH, WHORESON” and “I FACK YOUR MOTHER”. I wonder if the Italian army is like this. (It is a common misconception that the first hint…
Benjamin Zimmer links to a paper by Jane H Hill on Mock Spanish (with references to Jocular Yiddish, and others). I wonder how much of this is applicable to the experience of Welsh immigrants to Renaissance London, with a context that included repressive cultural legislation and the use of caricatural Welsh English (eg devoiced initial…
I suspect Ian Fleming knew (Noel Coward, allegedly: “Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is no, no, no, no!”) the stereotypical Signor No in Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-ish):