Explanations of bodagger and the like, over at SlangCity.com. Sez AC Kemp, slang operative since 1996, and now at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, “Last summer I even had a diplomat who wanted to learn slang to understand the jokes during cocktails.” (I don’t really understand why Spanish speakers lag so far behind English […]

All the birds here are, of course, flourishing, but better safe than sorry.

The other day I was walking across a field with a very old and pretty conservative farmer when he suddenly started singing The Internationale, which he was made to learn during Communist rule (1936-9). Not to be outdone, I sang a verse of the fascist anthem, Cara al sol, which I learnt in order to […]

Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the […]

Debunking still more the “Franco persecuted Catalan culture” myth, here’s a piece by Catalan dictionarian, Sebastià Oliveras, lamenting the loss of the cultural pluralism enjoyed in the 50s and 60s.

The whole Polisario/Morocco business is heavily politicised in Barcelona (I’m back tomorrow) where the Polisario is seen as a surrogate for Catalan separatism blah blah blah, so let’s hope Hale keeps posting over at Bloggin’ the Maghreb, albeit from North Carolina.

Thanks for the concerned mails. The cooperative gave us the day off, so I’m able to report that, far from being drunk or dead, I am in fact drownded, and that neither in the Jesus Sea, nor in the Odys-sea, but in the rippling Manchegan earthsea, where gypsies wear latex and smell of Eau de […]

Literally everyone I know who has come to Barcelona in the past month has been robbed, most of them within an hour of arriving. With all due respect, no one gives a s**t about a new f***ing statute of autonomy. People would, however, really like some effective policing.

Sez a splog filtering tool (via Technologies du Langage).

In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all […]

It’s cheaper to fill your tank with black truffle oil than with bear attack deterrent, and Hot Hooters Booby Oil is even better value.

I’m not a big fan of Barcelona’s mayor, Joan Clos, but it’s only fair to point out that the tide of anger over anti-social behaviour has less to do with reality than with a PR war that his team is losing. Anyone with the faintest historical awareness of the old town knows that it has […]

It didn’t, but the phrase could have come from Barcelona, where authochthonous prostitutes gradually drift down off the hill as they get older and retire when they hit the murderous African and Ukrainian competition in the port and the old town.

Sez Lucio Vicente López in Recuerdos de viaje (1881). This is apparently in part due to the Normans having invaded without women, thus enabling the maintenance of The Saxon Character. I think he’s wrong: Winchester is suspiciously continental, while Romsey had Ethelflaeda, who sang psalms while skinny-dipping in the Test.

No way I’m doing this: isn’t anyone else embarrassed about still owning physical books?

I rather enjoyed this bang site and was disturbed to find out that “splog” is now generally taken to mean “spam blog” instead of “Spanish blog”, as it does here.

Someone told me the other night that Barcelona is the world capital of mullet. The Danish allegedly call it Bundesliga-hår, but I don’t think there’s an equivalent term in Catalan or Spanish.
(Mollet is a small town near here best known for its police school and its Islamic fundamentalists. None of them are big mulletmen, […]

The incompetent nutters who run Barcelona in the daytime say that the drunks and thieves who run it at night are products of globalisation, leading Jordi Orwell to infer that it’s all Bush’s fault. I’m still blaming Charles III.

Here, here being the middle of nowhere.

Does anyone know where I can find an index of some nature?

I want to live in this.

The isleños (islanders), the Canarian-based dialect speakers based in St Bernard parish near New Orleans, are some of the less-publicised victims of the floods. Their victory against age-old enemies in the interests of yet more Anglo hegemony is commemorated in this 1970s song (more links; Mississippi song project):

Setecientos setentaisiete,
varias familias dejaron las Islas Canarias,
para la […]

I used to know a Dutch cyclist who, as he got older, would take the train for the outward leg and return with the wind, and I was aware that the French army used to teach conscripts to ski by giving them post-season seconds and leaving them up an Alp, but the following approach had […]

Margaret Marks says that the Marxist-Leninists are not giving away balloons in the German elections. I hope this is because they can’t afford them rather than for ideological reasons. While it is true that Jimmy Connolly saw in them the nemesis of the working classes, a progressive balloon vendor appears in one of my favourite […]

“In contrast with Arabic words, the words of [Other Languages] appear lame, maimed, blind, deaf and leprous, and entirely bereft of a natural pattern,” writes Zaid Al-Alaya’a (via Onze Taal), who is clearly up there with Werner Georg Patel in the self-deprecatory humour stakes.
I think (checking would be hard) that there’s a fairly good […]

Where arse turns up regularly in jokes, proverbs and stories, bollocks–cojones–in CORDE’s version of sixteenth century Spain seem to be confined to medical treatises and to a verse novel of quite extraordinary and possibly unsurpassed filth. The anonymous Carajicomedia (1519) consists of the adventures of the noble Diego Fajardo’s one-eyed trouser snake, which is said […]

I blog pseudonymously in a couple of other places in order to be able to write with more freedom. The other day I was about to start a blog about litigious sheep when I suddenly realised that it ain’t what you sue but the way that you suet. So I melted them down and started […]

Swot it sounds like. No Spanish angle to this either, curse it.

Re the Suspended-load Backpack generator: “The biologists came up with the idea after studying how fish move.” Is this some kind of anti-creationist joke?

Check out Jayne over at Pyrenean Notes, who’s plugging the fiesta in Plan, up in the Huescan Pyrenees, and writing about other interesting stuff like mountain walking.

The Dallas Morning News ($$$) has an interesting variation on the “Franco banned the sardana” urban legend: “In fact, during the tightest days of his rule, the Sardana dance was still performed here (but with a different name) …”

El País this morning seems still to be backing the “It wos Bush wot dunnit” hypothesis. This is because they are being paid to do so by the Russians–although they still haven’t managed to get the hammers and sickles up there in the clouds. (Thanks Dave)

Vaguely re this, I was surprised to find that medieval Spanish local legal codes are thick with arse. Fueros sometimes proscribe face-arse contact and are generally quite stern about insertions of any nature, unless of course they form part of fun-for-all, legally sanctioned punishments. By the sixteenth century arsebanditry has become slightly more fun–unless, of […]

Someone who thinks I was born yesterday tells me this word is applied to policemen who shoot street children. (BTW: The Guttersniper has frenemies, an updating of the good/bad cop routine.)

Wondering on a London bus this morning about suicide bombers (why don’t we just get rid of shoelaces–damn fiddly, prone to blow up in one’s face–and acquire slip-ons?), I chanced on the following passage in Menéndez Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos/History of the heterodox (1880; previous post):
During the tyranny of the Spanish king in Barcelona, […]

My baby is in Wikipedia, but I’m not retiring just yet.

In between pints of Summer Lightning I’ve been reading bits of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s account of heresy in Spain, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. Menéndez Pelayo does not allow himself the populist virulence of George Borrow’s anti-Papism, but one does have a delicious sense of scores being settled when he writes re Borrow’s dissemination of […]

yetimology: [n.] The study of those abominable words that are large, wild and probably fictitious. (I hoped it was going to be funnier, but summer’s over.)

Mad Mark assures me that this was up on RTE for 25 minutes. No Spanish connection occurs.

More.