Even if you stay clear of the Russian gun smugglers in the port, it’s still often very difficult to follow Antwerp dialect, with its Anglicisms (makkadam, “asphalt”), Gallicisms (memmaure, “memory”), games (‘t Chingchangsplein for Sint Jansplein, “St John’s Square”) and surreal inventions (I get halfway through melkkaarenoungdenaar, “lousy haircut”, and then lose track of what…
After WWI French government sold off old Remington rifles to dealers who resold them to rebels in Spain’s Moroccan territories. Writes Arturo Barea in La forja de un rebelde (The forging of a rebel): ‘The bulky lead bullet made a peculiar sound as it left the mouth of the rifle, a sound that resonated on…
Strange historical trivia: the codename for Hitler’s programme to help Franco in the war on Spanish Bolshevism (or whatever), Feuerzauber, was used again for the Mogadishu hijack rescue which formed part of the Federal Republic’s war on the Red Army Fraction‘s leftist terror.
From a review by Deborah Cameron of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: If the principle of least effort were all there was to language change, we would presumably end up communicating in monosyllabic grunts. The reason this doesn’t happen is that there are countervailing tendencies, among them what Deutscher calls the principle of expressiveness,…
The Telegraph is publishing ((free) login required) the wartime recollections of WF Deedes, who passed through Hengelo and, one assumes, Oldenzaal on his way to Germany with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in 1944-5.
Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse. Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so: The…
Here’s another nugget from that dark and dirty vein, Spain’s colonial adventures. It’s from Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria (The misfortunes of the motherland; 1899), in which he reflects on national destiny following the disastrous loss to the US of Cuba and the Philippines: If others’ troubles could console us, a brief examination…
Savage Minds links to The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920 by Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L Haldane, GCMG, KCB, DSO, author of How we escaped from Pretoria and A brigade of the old army. It’s almost as entertaining as Gertrude Bell and includes gems like the following two, taken from Appendix IX – Notes on modern Arab…