Tag: prensa

big kids

Nine years old and 81.5 kilos in weight. That’s nearly 13 stone for those of us who still think in “old money”, and it’s the weight reached by a child con obesidad mórbida in the north of Spain.

It seems the authorities have been aware of problems since 2004 and the parents haven’t been obeying the legal conditions that had been laid down. So, recently, a judge ordered the child to be ingresado en un centro de menores where diet and exercise routines would, presumably, be strictly adhered to.
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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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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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crooked houses

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.
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putting poetry in your life

From yesterday’s El Mundo, a clipping with a quotation that annoys me.

Baroness Thyssen quotation

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?
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