Station bar
“… and he never touched the ball once, not once!”
Albert Jané on Llengua Nacional: “In his well-known work on the prepositions per and per a …, Joan Coromines says that concerning a great number of aspects of the use of these prepositions [Pompeu] Fabra [the inventor of standard Catalan] ‘didn’t legislate’ but ‘did leave behind jurisprudence’.” That’s all very well; I just wish I [...]
Since I’m not going to be able to match this page, let me just ask you why people, when confronted by armed men who tell them to repeat difficult words, don’t take the easy way out: “Eh?! Speak up mate! Nah, sorry, left me hearing aid at home.”
“I think the sherry trade could learn a lot from their cousins in Portugal. But of course that’s only if the sherry trade sees any benefit in visitors to their bodegas. I often wonder if they really do.” It’s the old Spanish paradox of shops whose owners seem prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid selling you anything, unless that something is guaranteed to malfunction at the first opportunity. Experiences recounted last night of finally persuading a well known department store to relinquish a sewing machine which immediately jammed, the replacement literally falling to pieces whilst being bagged. Why?
A double reflection makes up the man who was born on the thirteenth day of the moon, lost his
throne on the thirteenth day of the moon, and fought the battle of Waterloo on the thirteenth day of the moon:

I wonder if Josephine’s astrological babblings didn’t cause Napoleon’s natural military interest in the moon to be unduly romanticised.