Apparently the UPN, the PP’s brand in Navarre, is doing deals with the PSOE, feeling itself fagocitado by the PP. Phagocytosis is the incorporation by a cell of solid particles, which it may then store or break down. A brief glance at CREA suggests that in Spanish the nouns fagocitosis, fagocito etc are almost exclusively…
Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker. By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.
To the extent that I ever was English, I hereby relinquish all claim. I was talking to an Ecuadorian the other day who, having observed the relative position of his country and Spain in the atlas, said he was a native of the Low Countries, los Países Bajos. Ecuador, Holland, anything but England.
I was sitting peacefully on a bench yesterday when an Italian architect came and sat beside me. (I knew he was a architect, because all the Italians here are architects. I don’t know why.) He asked me where the nearest supermarket was, but I knew this was just what chessplayers refer to as the Berlin…
The Guardian lists a bunch of furrin terms used in football, including panna, used in Holland to refer to the nutmeg and, apparently, especially in Surinamese Dutch. It would be interesting to know where it came from. The only remotely related word I can find in SIL’s brilliant Suriname languages site is the Carib pena,…
I can understand a guy stealing a coach, particularly if there’s nothing better in the vicinity, but why then go into a bar and steal 19 sarnies and 19 cans of beer? Was there a football team waiting for him somewhere or was he going to consume the lot himself?
Abdul Bari Jahani told IWPR, “This is in fact not a poem, but a list of tribes.” The old Yugoslav one worked on the same basis, with each republic having a section of its own anthem included, which is why it took hours to play at football matches.
‘“They were good kids coming back from a football game. Their criminal record was almost completely clean,” said Kolan, a black 22-year-old who was part of a foursome, all of North African origin, scuffing their feet in the estate entrance.‘
When I went back to live in Ingerland a few years ago, it took a month before I felt I knew what was going on in meetings where people used new expressions like “the dog’s bollocks” and “a load of arse”. This time I’m preparing my trip and today I discovered that England spin bowler…