spanish – Page 38 – don't confuse the narrator

plane speaking

I find it very strange – though in some ways, quite comforting – that one of the most popular trees in public gardens and plazas in this part of Spain is what I thought was a London plane. Perhaps even more strange is the fact that the Latin name is Platanus x hispanica. Why should a London plane be “hispanica“? Not to mention the questions arising concerning their relationship to plátanos, which is Spanish for bananas.

tall tales

Esperanza Aguirre, the presidenta of the comunidad de Madrid who described herself as “el verso suelto dentro del poema” has come up with another quotable phrase: “Yo no hablo cuando llevo zapatos planos.” – “I won’t make a statement when I’m wearing flat shoes.”

Most women are familiar with the concept of getting dressed and putting our make-up on before making an important phone call, and I guess this is much the same thing. The problem is the psychological reasoning behind it.
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prevention is better than cure?

This caught my eye en route to the village this morning:

Sociedad de Prevención de Fraternidad — What about igualdad & libertad?

It was on the side of a lorry parked down by the river. Muprespa are some kind of mutua de accidentes, but I don’t think the slogan reads quite the way they want it to.

a number of questions

Or, perhaps, a question of numbers.

A headline in today’s El Mundo says that 4,158 million euros has been lost in the last ten years due to political corruption. Except, it being Spanish, it doesn’t say it quite like that:

Headline: la corrupción política ha sustraído al menos 4.158 millones en 10 años

The Spanish use “million” in the plural after a number, giving phrases like seis millones rather than “six million”. They also use a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma where we use a decimal point.
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