It is held in some ovoids that the only way to understand what you wrote when drunk is to repeat the experience. Although fixed habits ill become a man without a fixed income, I have knocked back the odd glass of phylloxera blood from the Priorat and will now endeavour to explain to you, dear…
As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey’s Mission Builder (“Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions”). I suspect not, because whereas Brits usually look at me as if I have suddenly produced a…
I once read some complete nonsense by UCD prof Clarence Major, so I do kind of wonder whether he’s got any evidence for the claim (Prentiss Riddle → MSNBC) that relates hip “to the Wolof verb hepi (‘to see’) or hipi (‘to open one’s eyes’)”. The Peace Corps Wolof-English dictionary (PDF) lists xippi, but they…
John Chappell suggests (scroll quickly past the bizarre homophobic rant) that “pull a Spain” (“hacer una españolada“) is becoming the new “pull a Chamberlain”, an expression for poorly reasoned cowardice. That’s clearly true for Americans in pyjamas, but doesn’t yet apply to British+ anklebiters. Here are the official results (in ghits) from the gorpus: …
When the inspector calls, the chief weapon of fundamentalist fishermen–particularly those with long white beards–is Genesis 1:26-28: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all…
To be fair, Austrian writer Robert Menasse is going after The System in his German spelling reform diatribe, not the 2 l8, m8 clan, but it’s still heavy stuff. Apparently–and I find him a bit difficult to follow–the reform was racist because it Germanised both “German” and “force-assimilated” immigrant words, neoliberal because it has created…
Mark Liberman has omitted a major British contribution to redundancy from this spelling reform post. “[About] as much use as …” is found pleasantly unassertive by lovers of warm beer, and it also tongue-trips with a greater joie de vivre. Our maths teacher (who had hair on the palms of his hands) used to tell…
David Bell, the British Chief Inspector of Schools, said last summer that infants increasingly lacked speaking skills because of the “disrupted and dishevelled” lives some were forced to endure. So how come George W’s oracy has declined now he’s no longer a boozer? Mr Bell thinks that the answer to the problem lies in more…