Pheasant playing dead

Dead playing pheasant (gamekeeper’s grave on the N estate in what used to be called Central Southern England before Labour, inspired by Norman Tebbit’s dad’s bicycle, decided to demolish the entire north and rebuild it in Southeast England, which unfortunately turned out to be a tad small for the exercise): Keepers’ memorials like the above…

Wanted: English/French/German->Spanish translator

Rate: percentage of advertising and any other revenues accruing from this site or publication in any other form or medium. So that’s probably about €2 over the next 50 years. Talk to me here.

Linguistic cleansing

El llibreter quotes and comments a couple of marginalia re the Catalan purification project undertaken at the beginning of the last century by Pompeu Fabra and others, with varying degrees of xenophobia, folklorism, medievalism, and sundry other fuckedintheheadisms. I find it curious that furies continue to be focussed on the big brother, Spanish, when the…

Language of love

Localisation – like most developments in publishing – has benefited greatly from the needs of the porn industry. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse,” said Charles V of Spain, without, alas, going into detail. I assume, however, that his Italian will not have been the…