Cooking with pigeons in Spain

Yesterday in town it was remarked on the benefits to allkind that would accrue from exchanging our customary diet of Big Macs for one of roadkill and Fucking pigeon (what’s the Latin?). Celtiberians consulted state that their race does not partake of the pigeon, and Juan Bautista Carrasco’s Mitología universal (1864) suggests that this may…

Barraquismo

Valencia, late C19: Batiste no dudó que aquellas gentes se vengarían. Conocía los procedimientos usuales en la huerta. Para aquella tierra no se había hecho la justicia de la ciudad; el presidio era poca cosa tratándose de satisfacer un resentimiento. ¿Para qué necesitaba un hombre jueces ni Guardia civil, teniendo buen ojo y una escopeta…

Queers and gypsies

April 1939, and the Valencian communist and later Mexican entrepreneur Arturo García Igual (Entre aquella España nuestra … y la peregrina, available in part on GBS) has, as a Stalinist commissar, been sent to the elite camp at Agde, France, where night after night unsuspected talents [took to] an improvised stage: actors, comics, illusionists and…

Sparrows

As Spain disintegrates, Pedro de Miguel suggests that even sparrows are moving into the separate identity business: In Bilbao it’s not just the Bilbainos who are from Bilbao. If you’re not from round here then you really should look out for Bilbao sparrows: fat, glossy and prone to cockiness, they barely make way as you…

Translating Lady Chatterley

The other night at a leather parade (lots of parading, not much leather) I got talking to an English-Catalan literary translator. I rambled on to him a bit about my frustration that so much original and translated fiction set in varied geographical and social milieux reduces common dialects and sociolects to the politically correct standard…

DCVB gives Spanish equivalents not yet accepted by RAE

The Catalan-Valencian-Balearic dictionary helpfully gives Spanish equivalents: RESSALAR v. tr. Tornar salar; salar excessivament; cast. resalar. … that sometimes haven’t yet made it into the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary, either in the standard or the extended meaning–by analogy with “over-salted”, resalado/a is used familiarly for someone who is doubly delightful, gorgeous, and appears as such…

Wanted: 150-year-old palmist

I think I can show that the term guiri is traceable to Semitic roots, and I will do at some stage, but I’d just like to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered: So was the term…