Potentially good news for all those Brits in Spain who are living in houses that were built without proper licences. The Reader (Almería-based English-language paper) tells us: Mayor of Zurgena and 24 more charged in urban corruption case.
An interesting language point from the story is the word prevaricación which although clearly connected to the English “prevarication” is not a direct translation.
Continue reading “crooked houses”
From yesterday’s El Mundo, a clipping with a quotation that annoys me.
Baroness Thyssen has been writing her memoirs and they have been published in the Spanish society magazine ¡Hola!. It seems, though, that she has skipped over some of the facts and incidents that her (unofficial) biographers think relevant.
Her excuse?
Continue reading “putting poetry in your life”
I was out on the verandah talking on the phone when I saw a tiny lizard. “Ooh, ¡qué lindo!, ¡un lagartijo pequeñísimo!” I exclaimed, or something equally inane.
The friend I was speaking to was quick to reply, “But clearly not that small, or you wouldn’t know that it was male!”
He was, of course, making fun of my Spanish and the fact that I’d got the gender wrong.
Continue reading “a lizard’s tale”
A couple of people have suggested I should write a post about wine. Well, perhaps not about wine – I’m no expert and am happy with the vino honesto and no muy peleón that I can get in the local supermarket for 0.99€ a bottle – but about the language that is used to talk about it, particularly on wine labels.
I think it might have been Miles Kington (there’s an archive of his Independent column here) who said that if you were at a loss for words at a wine tasting, just look around the room and describe one of the other people present: big nose, full-bodied, fruity…
Continue reading “a flask of wine”
This snippet caught my eye in yesterday’s Madrid edition of ¡Qué!:
If the agentes de Movilidad are planning to movilizarse, how can that count as a strike?
don't confuse the narrator 