The bishop and the train to Teruel

Ja se’n va el tren d’Olotfent xup, xup,se’n va el tren d’Olot. Surt quan voli arriba quan pot;fent xup, xup,se’n va el tren d’Olot.Popular The real news this morning is, as always, from Aragon. In a development that will bankrupt Ladbrokes when I collect, Chairman Alf/Warren Mitchell has led the Chunta Aragonesista to a 0.04…

the scots and the ryanair effect

Re this post, check this article from The Scotsman: A DRAMATIC surge in the number of Scots learning foreign languages has left night classes oversubscribed and academics lost for words. The Celtic thrawness that has seen Scotland languishing at the bottom of the European languages league is softening, and the country is becoming a nation…

Aramaic phrasepage

From The Guardian, including handy stuff like “Which ones are the Orcs?” and “This film is terrible. I want my blood-money back.”

Anglo-Saxon spam and the Klingon 5th column

The studied use of archaicisms, vowel transposition and misspelled euphemism means that in spam a couple of hundred English proto-dialects are born and die every day. Here is part of a message received this morning from Jesus: launger eræctoins ma micelnes in eower beran mara sæd betera þe vaigra! When the men in the white…

Academies

“The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.”

empirialism

Oh, if only empirialism weren’t such a well-established (260 ghits) misspelling of imperialism! For what would suit those evangelical empiricists better? Word found in the comments section of swampman Chappell’s blog, currently awaiting recolonisation.

yo

That insolent colonial, John Chappell, has launched an all-out assault on this house, suggesting that I perform the work of a yeoman: 1a. An attendant, servant, or lesser official in a royal or noble household. b. A yeoman of the guard. 2. A petty officer performing chiefly clerical duties in the U.S. Navy. 3. An…

me too

The Calcutta Telegraph is generally acknowledged to be the Indian daily with the best Polish coverage, and so it is this evening, with a story about Polmos, a Zielona Góra vodka producer facing prosecution for handing out a free English course with each bottle. Said Renata Durda of the state Agency for Solving Alcohol Problems:…

Suggestion for EU official language policy

Irish opposition parties are trying to stir up the nationalist vote with a proposal to get Irish (ca 0.2M fluent speakers) adopted as an official EU language. I know when I’ve lost an argument, and I hereby renounce everything I have said on this subject in the past. Let’s make every European tongue (including the…

shatnes

As a second-class Anglo-Saxon, I would have immediately and incorrectly assumed that the use of the word shatnes in connection with wool and linen referred to the increase in hygiene and decrease in mortality that resulted from making undergarments from the latter rather than the former (PDF). Via LanguageHat.