Amando de Miguel’s made a collection here. The Central Americans perform well as always, with their Supermen, Stalins, Ceaucescus and Roonies, but my fave’s the army recruit called Felicísimo Lindo Condón, Really Happy Pretty Condom.
Abogánster = abogado (lawyer) + gangster. Here‘s some good stuff by Carlos Monsiváis about legal culture in a country where justice is generally viewed as the belonging to the rich. He says that abogánster is a 1940s term whose archetype was Bernabé Jurado, legendary for eating evidence, buying witnesses, overseeing torture leading to false confessions,…
Here once again is polemics prof Geoff Nunberg making a dick of himself–check his update–while trying to do the same to George W Bush. Anyone who has spent any time with luvvies or second-hand booksellers will be aware that writing may be regarded as a commodity and that commoditisers are not necessarily unsympathetic idiots. […
Hardly seems worth cutting into vacation beer time for this, but here is the man referring to this over-aggressive post of mine: Trevor has me claiming that the object-present participle form of compounding is a recent invention of the political right and originates with nigger-loving. And in a new post: I was hardly claiming, as…
Sez he: The fact is that the right owns those object+present participle compounds, as surely as it owns values, media bias, the lapel-pin flag, and sentences that begin with “See….” In fact you could trace the whole history of the right’s campaigns against liberals via those compounds — from tree-hugging and NPR-listening back through the…
Standing first shows up in the CREA corpus in 1976 in its normal Spanish usage (apartamentos de elevado standing, later appearances typically alto standing). I think its application to real estate is a phoney Anglicism–the first couple of pages of usage in English@Google all appear to be by Western Romance dialect speakers–so I’m very slightly…
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.
Given the interesting record of Basque philology, I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Basque fragments found at Iruña-Veleia (near Vitoria-Gasteiz) turned out to be fakes. The inscription urdin isar, blue/greyish star, certainly leaves me curious. Off-hand I can think of no pre-C18th texts in any Western European language that refer to stars by their…