Bush and Blair are not at all welcome in Spain at the moment, so guess who is: Marbella anxiously awaits the antidote to Jult [you try saying July with half a gram up your nose] which was slow month tourist-wise, with not too many famous faces around either. Now the town is getting ready for…
No prize to the first person to figure out why Yves Rocher (France) might not be particularly thrilled that the following product of theirs was being sold in the Carrer Ferran Yves Rocher franchise: This is a gross over-simplification. There’s an interesting pharma-oriented summary here, and here‘s an article by a lawyer from a local…
Nick Lloyd is posting literary references to the miserable state of the costa. I believe that we should learn to accept that it is destined to be repeatedly laid waste by entrepreneurs: Everyone … could see with their own eyes the desolation of the Spanish, French, and Italian coasts, thanks to the pertinacious infestation of…
Says Marwan Issam from his computer games stall in a centre of Sunni terrorism: We have things now we didn’t have before, like the internet, mobile phones and satellite television but the quality is not as good as we expected. And we still don’t have enough electricity. Damn, sounds like Iraq’s caught up with Spain.
Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example, Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English. What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich…
The Observer informs us that a new language class being tested by Thomson in Spain could help holidaymakers untie their tongues. Spanish (Out There!) lessons were given to travellers in Tenerife last month. A group of over-50s took five two-hour lessons over the course of their holiday, then put what they’d learnt into practice with…
GhanaWeb, one of the world’s leading portals, reports that Kofi Azogba, Samuel Auyah, Sovey Awyah, alias stone, George Boateng and GK Dzamesi all executive members of the Pig Breeders Association of Pig Farm … [believe that] an agent of the MP [for Ayawaso Central] must have planted a dynamite or an explosive material in the…
There’s a mini-discussion over at Transblawg re the first use of the term “mobbing” in an institutional context. Matt Bulow says that a Swede coined this usage, although the author he quotes, Heinz Leymann, says he borrowed it from another Swede, Heinemann, who used it in education and had it from Konrad “Gooseman” Lorenz. In…
Here’s a brief list of words and phrases used by Spanish-speaking sexists to praise men to the skies and to remind women that their place is in the gutter. I haven’t yet encountered a language so permeated by hate that I couldn’t contemplate using it (with the possible exception of VB), but Ludwig Kabanow is…