spanish – Page 31 – don't confuse the narrator

noche de san juan

I dreamed of you last night and woke
to moonlight, sheet-tangled feet
cat-twisted and cold.

I drowsed again, through decades, slipped
between cities and crossed continents,
embracing and embraced,
now chasing and now chased,
no pause between the kisses passed
from partner on to partner
down through the yearning years.

I dreamed of you last night
and woke to moonlight.

(St John’s Eve – Midsummer Night – is celebrated across Spain with fire jumping in the street and general festivities. It’s supposed to be a time of powerful magic, and seemed a suitable title for this slightly chaotic dream poem.)

summery

As I’ve said before, not only do Google adapt their logo according to the date, but they do so according to location, too. I find it strange, though, that June 21st should warrant a special logo only on the google.es page – celebrating el inicio del verano – and not on the .com or .co.uk versions. After all, surely summer starts on the same day?
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Sound reasoning

A couple of weeks ago, on the Tantamount Words blog, I wrote about the USA Spelling Bee and commented about how a knowledge of the etymology of a word can help with spelling, particularly in a language like English where many different languages have contributed to the vocabulary.

Often, knowing how a word is pronounced is little help when it comes to writing it, but I personally don’t favour spelling reform as the written form can give us all sorts of clues about word families and relationships.
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duties and impositions

As shown in the photo, there’s a poster taped to the church door in the village.

When I saw it, I thought it must be particularly important or they would have simply put it on the notice board along with the other general announcements.

So I went closer to have a look.

And this is what I found:
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him-her; big-small

“Las formas femeninas suelen ser más grandes.”

Well, that may not be the exact phrase my colleague used, but it was along those lines, and it wasn’t meant to insult women in anyway. We were discussing a translation for the Mexican word cenote and he was trying to explain what it meant. Not a pozo (a well), but a poza. But what was a poza? According to the RAE, it’s a:

Charca o concavidad en que hay agua detenida.

Note that the definition uses the word charca, not charco. Again, two similar forms; so what’s the difference?
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