Re shepherds, Pío Baroja says that in the Navarre village inhabited by Silvester Paradox, hero of The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox (Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox, 1901) that the local guardians of public order were called ministers (ministros). (Silvestre Paradox is very strange and very funny. It’s a disgrace that…
Amando de Miguel says that Aura Grandal says that people in Ferrol, Galicia call policemen “chepas”, and that this derives from “shepherds”, which is what British engineers called the watchmen in the naval arsenals. I’m going to believe it, whether I do or not.
I know it’s banned in English, but it seems perfectly natural to me, just as natural as wetting one’s whistle: if it don’t rain it won’t grow, and the road to the kebab shop is awash with Blairite pub extensions. Gordonio, a medical treatise published in 1495, is against drinking between meals but recommends they…
Sarkozy’s going to need to look for some soon, but I fear that the current Parisian definition is the guy with the newest fridge. The earliest mention I’ve found here also floats in on a wave of urban violence: It is in the anxious and transforming 15th century that we begin to discover forms that…
The failure on the part of Romance lexicographers to include common words and meanings (eg bragueta = codpiece) in their bibles forms a formidable obstacle for those who would better understand their societies. Stanley Brandes published a really cool book 25 years ago–ie before the advent of easily searchable corpses–called Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and…
I know we’re not meant to read books using CORDE, but we do, and we enjoy it muchly, so we do. Here’s a bit from Diálogo argentino de la lengua by Avelino Herrero Mayor, published first in 1954 with 50 gorgeously anachronistic dialogues teaching the art of talking and writing propane, and then again in…
Explanations of bodagger and the like, over at SlangCity.com. Sez AC Kemp, slang operative since 1996, and now at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, “Last summer I even had a diplomat who wanted to learn slang to understand the jokes during cocktails.” (I don’t really understand why Spanish speakers lag so far behind English…
I rather enjoyed this bang site and was disturbed to find out that “splog” is now generally taken to mean “spam blog” instead of “Spanish blog”, as it does here.
The isleños (islanders), the Canarian-based dialect speakers based in St Bernard parish near New Orleans, are some of the less-publicised victims of the floods. Their victory against age-old enemies in the interests of yet more Anglo hegemony is commemorated in this 1970s song (more links; Mississippi song project): Setecientos setentaisiete, varias familias dejaron las Islas…
Someone who thinks I was born yesterday tells me this word is applied to policemen who shoot street children. (BTW: The Guttersniper has frenemies, an updating of the good/bad cop routine.)