Angela Merkel – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Organ-grinding tweets for December

Xmas &c.

If any would not work neither should he eat: Walthamstow workhouse.

Dead letters

ABC and Ramón Pérez Maura are taken to task by Peter Harvey Linguist. As usual, he’s absolutely right, but I’d just like to enter a plea in mitigation on one count: “never begin a letter with ‘I'” used to be quite common advice. For example, in Correspondence, credits and traffic: Part I: Business correspondence (1914)…

Artur Mas: only the filthy Spanish are stopping every Catalan owning a farm right now

In a number of posts (see below) I’ve suggested that rather than use cheap, crap human translators customers should consider free, often-not-so-crap machine translation, so it was only a matter of time before someone called my bluff. Tom has sent over a lovely piece from Ara re the use by the Catalan regional government of…

If Merkel complains about how much TV3 costs, ask her about Bavaria

The television arm of Bayerische Rundfunk inflicts roughly the same relative damage on regional GDP as its Catalan cousin.

Binding referendum on the future of Catalonia, hosted by Kalebeul

In response to confusion in the markets re Spain’s constitutional arrangements and the size and distribution of its public debt, kaleBirthday has, remarkably, gained the consent of the Catalan, Spanish and EU administrations to conduct a binding poll on the future of the troubled region. Vote now or forever hold your peace.