Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Me to my colleague and co-author: “I thought you’d like to know that my arse hurts, and it’s your fault.”
Possibly relevant: he’s also my yoga teacher.
Monday, September 22, 2008
English: I keep my money in a “bank”; A river has “banks”. Not the same.
Dutch: I keep my money in a “bank”; You sit on a “bank” to watch tv (couch). Not the same.
Greek: I (could, if I were in Greece) keep my money in a “τράπεζα”. You eat dinner at the “τραπέζι” (table). Not [...]
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Googled “suppression task”. Looking for this. Found this.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
I’ve got some kind of bizarro mental block going on with “Spain” in Greek. I confuse it with Israel and Japan.
There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to go [...]
Monday, September 15, 2008
I wanted to write a post explaining why I consistently confuse Spain with Israel and Japan in Greek, but for some reason Firefox won’t let me enter lowercase Greek letters. Anywhere. (No more searching youtube for rebetiko songs either, until I figure out what’s going on. Anyone got a clue? Weird thing is, uppercase works [...]
Friday, September 12, 2008
That’s a spoiler for the punchline of this comic strip.
Beth should ditch the jerk, says I.
Monday, September 8, 2008
I just learnt the Dutch verb verstenen, “to fossilise” (used in the context of grammatical fossilisation, so it’s really a close parallel to the English). The lovely thing is that this is nearly compositional meaning: steen is “stone” (so stenen as verb would be “to stone” [don't know if it's actually used that way?]), and [...]
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Another story collection as CC-licensed download. It’s The Ant King and Other Stories, by Benjamin Rosenbaum (it’s been up a month or so, apparently, but I just came upon it now).
I haven’t read any of it yet, but he’s pretty good at snappy first sentences. “Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs.” [...]
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
I can’t vouch for its efficacy (once one cow goes I suspect the others will follow, unless the head man has his fidgeting gestures down), but this Method For Sorting Cows is certainly beautifully written.
Hat tip to Mike, who pointed me at the same site’s pdf facsimile of The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Also [...]