Why would the managers of a local outlet of an Italian restaurant chain think it's a good idea to have, in addition to the cheesy Italian and pseudo-Italian music (Rosemary Clooney's "Mambo Italiano"; anything by Dean Martin) that plays in the restaurant proper, Italian language lessons piped into the restrooms ( Read more... )

Saw a customized Michigan license plate ("vanity plate") on a black Chevy Trailblazer the other day that made me do a double take.

The plate read: "S2GOTS."

As in the Italian slang word "stugots," natch ( Read more... )

I've been reading Shantaram, the whopping (936 pages in the St. Martin's Griffin trade paperback edition [ISBN: 0-312-33053-7]) debut novel by Gregory David Roberts, the Australian ex-felon whose life serves as the template for the main character: a junkie bank robber who escaped from Oz's toughest prison in broad daylight and managed to flee to ( Read more... )

Having now progressed to rereading Raymond Chandler novels that I'd previously only read once, I've stumbled across a Briticism that escaped my notice the first time around.

Towards the end of The High Window (1942), Philip Marlowe says:

"It was three o'clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side ( Read more... )

Looks like the plague of willful ignorance as regards the correct pronunciation of the "j" in Spanish words has seeped westwards across the Atlantic into Canada.

Apparently the BBC's announcers have persisted in pronouncing the word "junta" with a hard "j" instead of an aspirated "h" -- pronouncing it as "JUNT [rhyming with "punt"]-ah" instead ( Read more... )

Spotted on mycroftca's LJ.

Your Slanguage Profile


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I've no doubt that I'm overlooking the blindingly obvious (d'accord: hence the adverb "blindingly"...), but I thought I'd state my confusion any way:

1. Why is Seneca's Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii translated into English as "The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius" if pumpkins are a New World fruit (that's most usually treated as a vegetable; ( Read more... )

I'm reading the third book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, H.M.S. Surprise (1973; and since the novel's title is the name of a ship, technically it shouldn't be italicized, hein?); the series consists of 20-odd books set during the Napoleonic Wars featuring Capt. Jack ("Lucky Jack") Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe in the movie Master ( Read more... )

Yes, yes, it's meme time -- again.

Spotted on mycroftca, agentelrond, and sonoffletch.

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North

You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you ( Read more... )

I've been listening to a nifty series on BBC Radio 4 that started last Monday (26 September): the latest (and, supposedly, the last) installment of This Sceptered Isle: Empire. It's the third unit in a trilogy of British history, the first two of which were concerned with the British Isles from the age of the Roman Empire (Bran Mak Morn!) to the ( Read more... )