Colin Davies suggests that people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss political independence until they have achieved domestic independence by moving out of their parents’ home. Since most street terrorist live off and with their mums (as do most people under 30), this seems quite sensible to me, although I’m not sure how easy it would [...]

It’s not just texts in furrin languages that I sing without hearing the meaning. For some reason, from when we learnt it as kids as a function of some education director’s dawning multicultural flushblush to now, I’ve always sung “My heart is down,/my head is turning around,/I had to leave a little girl in Kingston [...]

I’ve always billed using my national fiscal number, but now I’ve got some loon telling me that I can’t do that anymore cross-border and that I need a European fiscal number. It would be nice if someone had told us. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we’ll get to vote on anyway.

The voice of moderate Basque nationalism, as applauded by Mallorcan socialists.

Completely off-topic but delightful, this is from The Joviall Crew, or the Devill turn’d Ranter: being a character of the roaring Ranters of these Times, represented in a Comedie. Containing a true discovery of the cursed conversations, prodigious pranks, monstrous meetings, private performances, rude revellings, garrulous greetings, impious and incorrigible deportements of a sect (lately [...]

Walton Burgess’ Five Hundred Mistake [sic] of Daily Occurrence in Speaking Pronouncing and Writing the English Language (1873) sounds interesting

Experiment and experience both come from the Latin experiri. In Spanish experiencia can be used as a synonym for experimento–I think this is particularly true of the pre-C20th language–and something tells me I’ve read nineteenth century English in which the same applies. Experiential evidence is, however, in short supply. Regrettably, this is often the case [...]

Cat in Rabat has a hilarious post re continuing attempts by beards in Morocco and elsewhere to make us dress up silly and prevent us from inspecting each others’ fatwans and stuff.

In reporting the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz, Lola Galán puts in overtime to come up with a curious translation of the German School Association’s most famous pick-me-up slogan, “Arbeit macht frei”: “El trabajo nos hace libres”, “Work makes us free”, which carries a rather different load to the more literal and linguistically perfectly acceptable “El [...]

El Figaro “in private” with someone called Zhang Ziyi: “At what moment were you most happy? I cherish every day that passes. Each day offers something new, something different. I’m very happy at the moment.” It gets worse before it gets over.

Doosra, the other one, will without doubt join the many other South Asian terms gracing English dictionaries if the sublime Murali hangs in there for a while. The only sub-continental word I can think of in standard Spanish and Catalan dictionaries is the Tamil-derived curry. Tandoori and henna are prime candidates for addition. Hindú comes [...]

Next we’ll be told Arnold Otegi is a secret member of the Ávila PP.

Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian:
A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, [...]

In the communal hallway two Moroccans are hard at work extracting objects of value from a rucksack–they’ve got a mobile, cash, documents. I go into the flat, phone the generic emergency number, 112, and clock-watch.
00:50
A woman picks up and says hallo like she just woke up.
–Hello, I say, there are two thieves in our hallway [...]

A couple of days back, Mr O sent me a list of URLs, none of which is quite as radical as it may first appear to a number of you:
http://www.cummingfirst.com
http://www.expertsexchange.com
http://www.penisland.org
http://www.scatissue.com
http://www.childsexpress.com
http://www.teacherstalk.co.uk
http://www.budget.co.ck
http://www.therapistfinder.com
I commented that they were seriously undervalued, rather as http://burger.com would be if used to promote civic values.
It turns out that http://burger.com belongs to, and deals [...]

From John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals: Including Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper, and Tin Mines; With a Large Number of Interesting Experiments Relating to Alchemy and the Chemistry of the Fifty Metallic Elements (The Author reserves the right of translation) (London, 1861), chapter entitled The Tricks of the Alchemists:
Another simple [...]

Velutino is skinhead hog’s back hairy, but I’m struggling with velutina impalpable. Is it some kind of folk medicine?

It seems that the subnormal baboons who pass for constitutional lawyers in Spain’s regions have smuggled an article into the new Andalusian regional statute declaring knowledge of flamenco the exclusive right of the autonomous community. Although the declaration does have the potential advantage of ending embarrassing arguments about whether flamenco is gypsy or Moorish heritage, [...]

This is re Margaret’s post re Stewart Lee’s. The first references I know to the stereotype are not British but are to be found in the early German romantics. They note (1), as does Lee, the various expressive possibilities afforded by various languages; (2) the failure of German writers to exploit these former to the [...]

At one point in Marcel Carné’s 1939 realist drama (and Mussolini Cup nominee), Le jour se lève, François, the factory sand-blaster (Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. no. 379, 1925: “probably the most dangerous of all the mineral-dust hazards”), enters a variety hall where Françoise, his beloved, is preparing to make eyes [...]