Silly me: I thought you were meant to paint fascist graffiti on fascist memorials. There must be some branding issue. (The definition I use is roughly the same as the American Heritage one: statist + nationalist + anticonstitutionalist.)
Franco Alemán points out that Google (correctly) translates “Fidel Castro” as “Fidel I castrate”. No less sensationally, it turns out that “Fidel” is actually a French acronym for “Fichier informatique départemental pour études locales”, “Departmental computing file for local studies”.
Do head-to-heads on Spanish words and you’ll find that the page count at Google Print averages around 30% more than the word count over at CORDE. The content and search functionality are different, but it’s another nail in the coffin of the Real Academia Española.
I don’t know if Arabella inspired the younger generation the way her grandfather did the older, but the first modern mention I’ve seen is the following, from El País of 10/11/1976: Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, has joined the London squatters and occupied the second floor of an abandoned house to open a restaurant,…
The failure on the part of Romance lexicographers to include common words and meanings (eg bragueta = codpiece) in their bibles forms a formidable obstacle for those who would better understand their societies. Stanley Brandes published a really cool book 25 years ago–ie before the advent of easily searchable corpses–called Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and…
Meteoclimatic.com is a brilliant site which provides real-time data from amateur weather stations across Spain and its various dangly bits. I particularly like the historic feature (hit Estaciones then a province, and you’ll see a calendar below the fold; navigate back in time using the arrows on the right). Compare it with the miserable crap…
This ties into Hugo Chávez’ use of the race card in the runup to Halloween (“Halloween is a gringo custom, [and] the use of terror is particularly typical of gringo culture. Terrorism, creating fear among other peoples, creating fear among one’s own people”) and, slightly less convincingly, into the codpiece post. I guess people never…
As a sideline (no mainline yet) I write musical arrangements, principally for big band and for choir. Problem: piracy. Tonight trade war looms with China (I’ll probably have a curry instead): a reliable source tells me that a Shanghai choir is using my version of ET Mensah’s Tea samba.