April tweets
Just the usual load of nonsense.
Tag: french literature
Organ-grinding tweets for August 2017
The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.
Beyond digesting ducks
Medium-sized data and the street organ’s mannequin.
Two versions of Flann O’Brien’s “The workman’s friend”
With some relevant chunks of Henry Fielding.
Mind over mutter: Céline on the challenges of speech production
Other doctor-novelists; why musicians can’t write.
The true origins of “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”
This deeply resented peripheralising aphorism was coined not by Alexander Dumas but by Dominique Dufour de Pradt or conceivably the Conde do Funchal.
Born, not made
The Spanish, making progress with a backlog of untranslated English snowclones?
Rhyme vs reason
Restif de la Bretonne goes one step beyond Shakespeare and says that poetry is the language of Gods and beasts, and that reason speaks in prose.
Wellington vs Glasgow Rangers’ International Brigadiers, and the origins of “No pasarán” and “No surrender”
Nominations for the noblest British fighter in a Spanish war, and speculative revisions of the history of two idiot idioms.
More tongues
Crocodiles have no tongue; frogs have half, because it’s backwards, attached at the front and free at the back; men have one, the best of all, because with it they speak all languages and imitate every animal, as the philosopher Archidamos said; sea foxes [raposas marinas] have two, as I have said; women have three, because they talk with their mouth and with their fingers and heart, and their tongues are rough and sharp, like those of cats and leopards.