From the BBC Science & environment section:
This may be an appropriate place to comment on how the Spanish have difficulty in distinguishing between the /b/ and the /v/ sounds. The two letters are pronounced the same in most parts of Spain.
Continue reading “crappy word choice”
I hate it when previously comfortable shoes get rough on the inside and start to rub blisters. But if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post, so I guess there’s a silver lining. Or perhaps a latex or leather one.
ventilative, bibulous and can avoid foot stink and ache.
Personally, I much prefer “ventilative” to the more common “breathable”. After all, air is breathable, which is quite a different quality to that of the materials insoles are made of.
Continue reading “sole-destroying”
I don’t usually just point readers to another article elsewhere, but Michael Erard’s Escaping One’s Own Shadow over on the New York Times opinion pages strikes me as well worth reading and too complex to really do justice to here.
Continue reading “purging the purple”
Looking through the paints at the art shop the other day, I had to check the names closely as the plastic bottles made it hard to tell precisely which colour paint they might hold.
I found a ‘burnt sienna’, but the closest to ‘crimson lake’ was ‘berry wine’, and there was no ‘Prussian blue’ or ‘ochre’. I definitely think my childhood was the richer for having the old names – I don’t think I’d have liked to paint with ‘glazed carrot’ or ‘pumpkin’.
I was a bit taken aback, though, to find both the bottles in the photo labelled as “plaid”.
Having decided that they were actually black and white, I consulted the Scottish Register of Tartans, but still haven’t worked out which clan they might belong to.
I’ve never really understood what the “urgente” refers to in the title of the “Manual de Español Urgente”. If it was a quick guide, surely it would be manual urgente? So, under what circumstances would we be writing “urgent Spanish” and need to check whether we had the details right?
Continue reading “the RAE gets a round tuit”
don't confuse the narrator 