The hash-crazed killer etymology we all know and love is, according to Nouvelle Langue Française (via Langue sauce piquante), a nonsense, invented in 1809 by a dilettante orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy. We should, instead, be looking to the Arabic, assas, guard.
I don’t know whether they’ll be good for anything else, but I do hope there’s a piano lying around somewhere in the Veena Vadini School at Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh.
Apart from reliving medieval massacres, there are various perfectly sensible reasons why one might want to thwack the ground in the spring. Mark Liberman has found a worm grunting festival which makes me wonder whether the underlying purpose might not be to wake up the worms, without whom stuff wouldn’t grow. (Worms are like eyeballs:…
Having a gunwoman riding pillion on the scooter seems a good idea, rather like female coxes in boat racing. One can imagine few worse distractions from one’s enduring preoccupation with road safety than having some big sweaty guy fiddling with his gun behind one’s back.
One would almost suppose from nationalist eulogies that Aragón came from paragon. In fact it is a corruption of paraguas, umbrella, which, placed upside-down, clearly resembles the hydroelectric dams which the region so cherishes. There is a river Paragua in Venezuela, and in the City pressure is growing to rename that stately stream that with…
I do like Bryan Palmer’s WP aggregation plugin, which has replaced the horrible thing I cobbled together, and partly for the following the reason: it takes posts written in furrin and clears out all those dotted and dashed characters that make us straightforward Anglos feel nervous, sticking their Rechtschreibprfung up their posterior end, as it…
Unlike motorcars, bicycles take you through village centres and allow you to park outside at any interesting-looking drinking hole you encounter. Friday afternoon on my way up-country for a weekend engagement I stopped at a village café in the mountains between Montseny and Montserrat, where a nice but weary barmaid was serving brandy to some…