Luis d’Antin van Rooten in Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames:
Chacun Gille
Houer ne taupe de hile
Tôt-fait, j’appelle au boiteur
Chaque fêle dans un broc est-ce crosne?
Un Gille qu’aime tant berline à fetard.
Annotations (under Spoof Spelling.

It had to come (seen @ Eye of the Goof). Blogging depresses me roughly to the same extent and for the same reasons that opening my mouth does, but its pros still outweigh its cons, not least because it has helped me over the past couple of years to learn to read and write Spanish [...]

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 [...]

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 in Andalusian Caló [...]

In line with Popbitch’s punderful headline, “Does my bomb look big in this?”, the irrepressible Bina Shah has concluded that the only sensible riposte to the disasters afflicting us is to go shopping. She also compares the US to a giant cockroach. I think it’s less Kafka than kompliment, and that she’d have joined the [...]

Nice little example of the reverse of the h/j swap that you get in some southern dialects (eg “Tengo jambre”), as spotted in Hartza’s comment here:

Apparently FollowTheBaldie.com is in the 1st edition of Frommer’s Barcelona guide. If it’s not a right old slagging, then I probably owe someone a drink, collection here. I may be in other guides for all I know, but as a guide I feel slightly guilty reading the things.

Pere at Saragatona has photographed a building with two texts carved on its front, the first of which reads,
CHARITY ENNOBLES
LABOUR DIGNIFIES
Graffiti in Barcelona’s Sans/Sants district expresses a different point of view:
Labour doesn’t dignify, fire does
I can’t remember which (piss-)artist it was who said that if Madrid’s Prado museum were burning down, he would save the [...]

Silmarillion’s got a post over at Après moi, la déluge about tinkers and Jenisch and … quinquis. Here the following perfectly reasonable explanation of “kinky” is given:
Kink, nautical term, from Du. kink “twist in a rope” (also found in Fr. and Swed.), probably related to O.N. kika “to bend at the knee” (see kick). Figurative [...]

If the sentence “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever” does actually mean a cessation of drug dealing, beatings and other criminal activity, then the IRA have scored today’s big news. However there are still plenty of bad people in the world. Pedalling along this afternoon, on my way to see hear fellow-biker [...]

Spelling pronunciation–rendering in sound a word’s spelling–is for obvious reasons a creature of literate societies (see posts by The Tensor and Bill Poser). Spain was until recently generally illiterate (unrelated stat: only 1 in 3 Spanish had cotton underwear in the 30s), and pronunciation spelling predominates. I referred a while back to some old examples [...]

The nationalist mayor of Guecho in the Basque Country, Iñaki Zarraoa, wants to introduce badges for Basque speakers, he says to enable them to figure whether their conversation partner is capable of speaking with them in Basque. This would be somewhat less disturbing if an estimated 200,000 people hadn’t been driven into exile in the [...]

Here’s some good news, and here’s some comment. Texas Holdem, etc etc…

This has got to be a world first. (Update: Oops, just remembered this one. Maybe they only get things right in countries where the police service is depoliticised.)

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 guiri [...]

As prices soar, Ayesha Christie’s got a handy 10-point cultural history of olive oil. Things are tough here: the first blackberries were dessicated horrors, deciduous trees are losing their leaves like it’s November, and Boo Peep has had all her sheep carted off to the knacker’s since there’s nothing left for them to eat. One [...]

Of course it is the fault of those damn Muslims:
The Marchenero is one of the oldest pouter breeds, and it is a breed that was developed in Spain in a period of time covering almost on thousand years.
In order to understand the beginnings or ancient history, a brief history lesson is in order. During the [...]

On the bus this afternoon I had some French girls in front, as it unfortunately were not, and an old Andalusian couple (I think they were from Córdoba) behind. At a certain moment someone in both groups said they were looking for something, the French using chercher and the Andalusians using buscar, or rather bujcar, [...]

Whisking wife and whim, I notice that Karim has discovered the oldest and most disgraceful marketing trick in the book. Interestingly, one of his ads is for Godloves-you.com. I don’t think I want God to love me if he can’t afford two hyphens.

Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined [...]

Amando de Miguel notes the commonsensical notion that two people will tend to speak the language that supposes the least combined effort for them (all other things being equal), and proposes naming this law for his correspondent, Candela Zamora. You all know what a candela is, of course.
De Miguel refers in the same piece to [...]

Montse Tura has spoken of an “‘adaptation’ in the interpretation” of the hoary old sectarian anthem, El Cant dels Segadors (The Reapers’ Song), on the regional “let’s hate Spain” day, September 11. kalebeul has learnt that this will not consist, as had been widely rumoured, in the correction of historical errors in the text. Instead, [...]

I tend to take my coffee and chocolate cake in what I have just realised is a social club for the mentally disabled. They are very polite and seem to accept me as one of them. One day last week a woman rushed in and started bellowing into the public telephone. Her lungs had just [...]

Lots of blondes the other night at the showing. Me, I’m easy.

Along the lines of Langwich Sandwich and Tranny, a clunky & limited news aggregator covering this region for until I settle down. That means some of the news stuff will disappear from this page, where it was never greatly loved anyway.

Might destroy the economy, though.

Students at the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (phew, ITC will do) have replaced a picture on the Dish Hotel in Enschede, Holland with a mammoth, 2600-part satellite photo of the west coast of Africa, and I think Enschede aan Zee’s saying Europe will soon be up there.

I’ve been watching a bunch of 40s and 50s Hollywood classics at Méliès. Some trivia:

I’m beginning to suspect that some people come out walking principally for the bizarre drinking opportunities encountered on the way.
This morning we were having coffee, shots and doughnuts in an Andalusian bar in Nou Barris (one of the many variations on the Collserola ridge route) when a ridiculously sleek blue car with XXL wheels [...]

A simple (and, of course, erroneous) explanation of the lack of “Indian” proverbs (Shirley L Arora > Language Hat) in Peninsular Spanish (or Catalan and Galician, for that matter) is provided by a Mexican proverb, which says that the two groups simply didn’t have time to get to know each other: “Si es indio, ya [...]

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful this lunchtime on their hearing and believing that the BBC called Bush House after George W.

From a review by Deborah Cameron of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language:
If the principle of least effort were all there was to language change, we would presumably end up communicating in monosyllabic grunts. The reason this doesn’t happen is that there are countervailing tendencies, among them what Deutscher calls the principle of expressiveness, the [...]

I hadn’t looked hard enough, but it turns out (thanks Karim) that there are a lot of Moroccan bloggers out there, including novelist Sanaa Elaji, MP Khalid El Hariry (no relative of Wilfred the Hairy), and Ayoub, an authentic Blue Man (this craze is not limited to Montana or Kentucky); there’s also the beginnings of [...]

Onze Taal > some inaccessible site: “Mierenneuker [ant-fucker] is the swearword most frequently used against the [Dutch] police.” Here, however, is the case of the man who was fined for calling a traffic warden an ant-fucker, appealed, and won: according to the judge, “ant-fucker” can also be complimentary. The British equivalent of an ant-fucker is [...]

I have decided to categorise posts on the basis of the chapter headings in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. This may take some time, but it seems like a really humanitarian thing to do.

‘”[Shahzad Tanweer] is sound as a pound,” said Azi Mohammed, a close friend. “The idea that he was involved in terrorism or extremism is ridiculous. The idea that he went down to London and exploded a bomb is unbelievable.” Nothing much rhymes with “euro”.

To resolve the sulks and squabbles that generally pass for politics in Spain, Arcadi Espada suggests referring to “[Spanish regional] nationalities” as “euphemistic communities.” (Standard radio debate:
–Forsooth, who will buy Catalan wine if the constitution does not refer to ‘us’ as a nation?!
–Nay sir, the Spanish is the only true nation!)

John Chappell’s got the latest on the anarchist bomb down town this morning. Everyone hated the squatters anyway–squatting has largely become a licence to run tax-free, non-H&S compliant drink & drugs bars that keep the whole neighbourhood awake–but now they’ve killed a dog, and that’s going to finish them. Killing a dog is about the [...]

Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings!
We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves) from [...]

Daisy-chaining the “they’re lying to us” theme, additional evidence that a journalist is much more than a blogger who gets paid not to fact-check.