A new entry for the examples in the dictionary:
When agents from La Sûreté de l’Etat, Belgium’s intelligence service,
Actually, a double
broke into the Brussels home of a former Italian MEP this summer they could scarcely believe what they found: €700,000 (£610,00) in cash, most of it in crisp new €50 notes.
€500 notes exist for a reason.
So, reading elsewhere I find this:
for people who are dyslectic
And I’m about to comment there that well, you know, non-native English speaker (her native is something akin to Grikath’s Cloggie I think) and isn’t that just a giggle that it should be that word misspelt.
Before I do I think, well, let’s just check.
dyslexic
/dɪsˈlɛksɪk/adjective
adjective: dyslectic
relating to or affected by dyslexia.
“dyslexic children perform well in oral tests”noun
noun: dyslectic
a person who has dyslexia.
“dyslexics can have difficulty writing by hand”
Ah.
Not for the first time I find that non-native speakers know the language better than a native speaker. Presumably on the grounds that they actually have to work at it rather than just absorbing it by osmosis over the decades…..
This One Love armband.
Yes, obviously, we all get the point.
And yet within one subset of one sector of the LGBTQetc communities there’s the obvious point that sexuality is pretty much defined by not limiting those physical expressions of love to the one. Monkeypox wouldn’t be the problem it is if this were different.
Just amuses.
Any linguists or Yiddish experts out there? I would like some help settling a dispute with my wife, please. Early on in our relationship, she introduced me to a brilliant new word: beshwiggled. Ever put on a jacket over a bunch of layers and everything feels crumpled and you’re all hot and bothered? You’re beshwiggled. Ever tossed and turned at night and your bedsheets feel tangled and uncomfortable? Beshwiggled. Evocative with a satisfying mouthfeel: I reckon Lewis Carroll would have had a good chortle at the word. It sounds like something he might have conjured up in Jabberwocky.
Carroll didn’t invent it though. According to my Jewish-American wife, beshwiggled is a Yiddish word. Curious about the etymology, I spent a while Googling different spellings of beshwiggled (geshwhiggled, b’swiggled) and consulting online Yiddish dictionaries, but couldn’t find any information. I think your family made it up, I finally informed her. “No,” she insisted. “It’s a real word!” I don’t want to be a schmuck, but I’m not sure it is.
You’ve just discovered how language works. Each and every family – heck, any social grouping – has its own neologisms. Sometimes those take off and infect an entire language grouping. Mostly they don’t. Even those that do tend to do so on a regional basis. Which is how we get accents and dialects and over time those develop into new languages. There are centralising forces too – mass media being an obvious one. Print was an earlier example. Most European languages got nailed down to a single one of those regional variants with the publication of the first vernacular Bible (for some reason I know that there was considerable argument over which version of Slovak should be used).
Give it a couple of millennia and we’ve got Latin breaking up into Romanian, Spanish, Portugee and so on. Or the varied Italians. Yes, other influences too, but absolutely part of it is just families and groupings inventing a word and it takes off among a wider group but not all Romance language speakers. We have another example in the Bantu languages, again over a couple of millennia. Or, of course. Old Germanic into German and Scandi and the influence upon English (which is an oddity, being a blend across two major groups) or the varied forms of Slavic.
At some point some Lombard started using birra instead of cervisia and it spread, but not to the similarly Latin speaking Spanish or Portugee. Same with tavola instead of mensa.
That’s just how it all works. Languages are naturally fissiparous precisely because families always do invent their own new words.
….is it a propeller? Or a rotor?
being injured by helicopter propeller
And does the linguistic difference matter? In fact, is there one? The thing is “propeller” there just looks wrong…..
*Greta Thunberg makes surprise appearance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2022*
Saturday 25 June, 5.15pm
Announced 11am, Sat 25 June
So it’s not a surprise then, is it?
A spokesman for Ryanair added: “We require passengers travelling to the UK to fill out a simple questionnaire issued in Afrikaans. If they are unable to complete this questionnaire, they will be refused travel and issued with a full refund.”
If they’re flying on a South African passport that is.
Afrikaan is spoken by about 13pc of South Africa’s population, alongside the country’s 11 other official languages.
Not, actually, a very good test.
Actually, OK so what are the first two? English and Zulu? Anyone know?
even Owen Jones, The Guardian’s enfant fastidieux
Google tells me this means “fastidious child” but I’m sure that it has a nastier meaning than that. Prissy child?
Known for his diatribes against immigration and Islam, the TV polemist
About Zemmour. The bit I didn’t know being that you can say “polemist”. Yes, obviously, polemic, and polemicist. I didn’t know that polemist was a synonym for that second.
Not the most interesting thing to learn on a Sunday morning but still…..
Hebrew – and Arabic maybe? – read right to left, not left to right.
OK, it’s only a convention after all. And yes, I have noted a bloke reading a Hebrew language book “back to front”, so it’s not just on the one page.
OK, only a convention.
So, what happens with numbers. Is it 001 $ for a Benjamin? 100 $? Umm, what? 5141.3 for Pi?
One of my old favourites:
Spaniards easily understand the Asturias vernacular, but official recognition may further fracture Spain linguistically
In the tiny village of Martimporra (population 16), nestling among the lush green hills and valleys typical of Asturias, Orfelina Suárez, 58, runs a household goods shop.
“If I was only allowed to speak Spanish I’d struggle with some vocabulary because I’m used to speaking Asturian,” she says.
“Without Asturian, life around here would be impossible. It’s not about geography, it’s more of an emotional terrain. You can’t underestimate the importance of a language that you speak and live and feel.”
Martimporra is in Bimenes, a district where the Asturian language has officially enjoyed equal status with Spanish since 1998. Now the regional government proposes to extend this language parity throughout Asturias.
What, exactly, is a language? Sure, linguists have their definitions but they all boil down to, in the end, they know one when they see one.
For, from here in this very south west corner of Europe, you could go off walking, at donkey sorta pace, and not wholly note that the language had changed until you got to Slovenia. Or the Rhine.
Yes, OK, with modern nation states and national educational systems, printing and all, that’s not really true any more. But it’s still sorta and vaguely so. You could do about the same starting at Bratislava and going either north and or east. These “languages” change word and a construction a time, village by village – even family by family. Portuguese to Galician to Asturian to Catalan (Castillian is that exception, state power imposed that) to Balearic to Sardinian to certain of the southern Italians – Pozzuoli comes to mind. The seas and islands are less of a defining boundary than you might think, ports making them more permeable to language than mountain ranges and gorges in many cases.
It’s even true that there’s still not, really, an Italian language in the sense that it’s something spoken at home by all who live in Italy. There’s Florentine which is that national and public language and the reason so many Italians speak it so badly is that it’s a second language to them too.
When is a language a language? The end points are clear, but that’s just a Sorites, isn’t it?
that feeling of having to pee is a common one for people with vaginas during sex.
I’m sure we had a more compact description of women than that at one point…..
Just for those confused, Darkie and Darkey are different words with different meanings and different social connotations.
Traditional phrases sent to the knacker’s yard as most under-50s no longer use them
Like science, languages advance one death at a time…..
“It would seem that many of the phrases which were once commonplace in Britain are seldom used nowadays.”
Err yes:
Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe
I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe,’
Quod the Marchant, ‘and so doon oother mo
That wedded been.
There is a comment from one of you about – I think – a son. Who has a little stand up routine:
“Trousered” has become the latest latest synonym for “drunk” to be added to the dictionary, thanks to the verbal invention of Billy Connolly
The Oxford English Dictionary has added the adjective to its official website, with the definition given as “slang (chiefly British and Irish English). Drunk, intoxicated”.
Scottish comedian Connolly is credited with introducing the term for intoxication to the wider public, and the dictionary entry cites a quote of his from a 1977 newspaper interview in which he states that he can “get totally trousered along with the best of them”.
The point of which is that near anything can be a euphemism for drunk in English. I seem to recall “Got tractored” and “Totally lawnmowered” as part of it. But you can see how it works – entirely run over, lampposted and so on.
Everyone would actually understand which is what language is supposed to be about. It might fail when there’s already another meaning ascribed – say “wholly nutted” – but the principle stands.
Of course the distaff side is notg ignored here. Just about any plural can be used – baps, puppies, etc etc.
The latest target is the happy-go-lucky phrase “no worries”, which has been banned by a leading American university. In the excruciatingly literal world of the woke, saying “no worries” is regarded as – wait for it, no word of a lie – an insensitive negation of the listener’s feelings.
Don’t you want the one Army, the one military, to speak the one language?
The Ministry of Defence has appointed its first ‘Welsh Language Champion’ in bid to see more soldiers use the language.
The MoD has created the role to encourage the speaking of Welsh in the forces in a bid to strengthen engagement with rural communities across Wales.
Air Commodore Adrian Williams, the RAF’s most senior officer in Wales, has been appointed with the aim of helping the Armed Forces work bilingually when needed.
Yes, I get the point about it being easier to recruit in certain areas if a certain language is used/allowable. But on the other hand all pilots everywhere have to speak English don;t they, the working language of aviation?
“ultracrepidarian” or “cacafuego” (one who loves to pass comment on subjects they know nothing about and a blustering braggart – literally a “fire-shitter” – respectively).
That ultracrepidarian cacafuego, the P³,
Andrew Bailey’s reluctance to raise rates is getting more incredulous by the day
Can you say it that way?
I – or you – can be incredulous about something, but can the thing itself be? It’s umm, “amazing to believe” or even “impossible to believe” so it needs someone to be doing the not believing, doesn’t it?
This is how kids do it, isn’t it?
Burble, burble, broble, brother!
Right? Just sounds until they work out which are actually words?
Among the most successful songs that he has co-written in his career are “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Then He Kissed Me”,
Takes some longer than others perhaps?