In a piece here Amina Talhimet observes that in order to make it in southern Europe, it is no longer enough for African emigrants to be odd-job men. That’s true to a certain extent, but sometimes the skills that enable the boat people to earn a living here are obtained on the road. There’s a…
Why’s there no Spanish expression for silly season / big gooseberry time / komkommertijd (nl: cucumber time) / Sauregurkenzeit (de: gherkin time) / morte-saison (fr: dead season) / nyhetstorka (sv: news drought) etc? Do the Spanish press and their readers really think important stuff is getting published in August (or the rest of the year,…
Martin Sewell > TheDamnBlog. Panic was once engendered in a stoned drummer in a stuck lift by mentioning to him that the lift brand was named for someone who died (singing Higher and higher, no doubt) when his plane fell out of the sky. (This has nothing to do with Spain, where there are no…
It’s a funny old world in which the celebration of states’ primary ethnic identity passes without comment while people are falling over themselves to ban poor old Chief Illiniwek.
Here’s one: blah (n.) “idle, meaningless talk,” 1918, probably echoic; the adj. meaning “bland, dull” is from 1919, perhaps infl. by Fr. blasé “bored, indifferent.” The blahs “depression” is first attested 1969. And here’s another: Blah as an actual word originated in the U.S. as an imitation of the sound of meaningless talk. In 1918…
More evidence that our /l/ and /r/ may constitute a single phoneme for Spanish speakers: At Starbucks they always write your name on the cup so that the coffee machine operative can say “Have a nice day, [your name]!” When I give the name “Trevor” it often gets converted into “Trébol”, so this evening I…