Via EFDL, El Plagio Literario. Quim Monzó, Luis Racionero and Lucía Etxebarría apparently see themselves as practicians of intertextuality rather than plagiarists. But surely virtually no Spanish readers will have read or even heard of their sources, Courrier International, Gilbert Murray and Antonio Colinas. And so, if they don’t indicate their debt for such an…
Literally: When at Seville in 1809, Lord Byron lodged in the house of two unmarried ladies; and in his diary he describes himself as having made earnest love to the younger of them, with the help of a dictionary. “For some time,” he says, ” I went on prosperously, both as a linguist and a…
Apparently the UPN, the PP’s brand in Navarre, is doing deals with the PSOE, feeling itself fagocitado by the PP. Phagocytosis is the incorporation by a cell of solid particles, which it may then store or break down. A brief glance at CREA suggests that in Spanish the nouns fagocitosis, fagocito etc are almost exclusively…
Re the War of Jackson’s Sneer, Colin Davies notes the presence of trolls in Spain but suggests they have still not discovered the woods and grottoes of the Royal Academy. Not so: it’s just that the RAE, for reasons that are logical but probably doomed, calls them trol. If their behaviour is anything like that…
Code-swapping, rather than Gibraltar-Andalusian. This week’s instalment comments on the stateless national soap opera, maritime conflicts and confusions with Spain.
foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.” (via Norm). Still all a bit of a fuss about Sweet Foucault.
Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (“It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948”). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he…
Samuel Johnson reports on making acquaintance with London in 1737 that In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked…
In English: Dubbed into Spanish: If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has…