(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

Today I am happy, just because I woke up very early and decided not to stay in bed but get up, finish some reading, play some guitar, and still get out of the house in time to get a paper and have a coffee before work.  Then I had the pleasure of following a girl with the most beautiful bottom I've ever seen all the way across town to the office, a

Comments

[sangarial]

Hey Wal! I love reading your journal, but I think it makes me believe that I am in contact with you, when really I am not at all. You have even inspired me to start my own running log on here - unfortunately all my creative juice gets spent during the day, so it is more functional than anything else, but I may branch out it they introduce an 8-day week, who knows. Stained coffee sounds pretty special btw, nice one.

[muckefuck]

Etymologically, café manchado equals caffè macchiato. (Latin maculatus "stained".) But clearly etymology is a terrible guide to the variations in coffee drinks, as I learned from the divergences between café con leche, caffèllatte, and café au lait.

The deletion of intervocalic /d/ isn't unique to murciano but is found all over southern Spain and, like yeísmo, has been creeping northward with the "andalusation" of Castilian. I've read about some distinctive characteristics of Murcian speech before, but I can no longer remember what they are, just that they're highly disparged since Murcia is the most despised area of origin within Spain.

[wwidsith]

Really? I didn't know the area was quite so hated - just that it's very poor and not very well-known. Interesting. There are a couple of websites about murciano but they're all kind of amateurish. The es.wikipedia article isn't that enlightening either. I was told that there are a lot more Arabic words there than in standard Spanish, but I never seem to hear any (this was my 3rd trip to the area).

I hadn't made the connection with macchiato - d'oh! The phrase cafe manchado exists all over Spain but usually it means a coffee with a little milk in, which I think of as a cafe cortado, or what in France they call a café cassé - like you say, the variety in this area seems out of all proportion!

[muckefuck]

The reference may be a little dated, but in The Spaniards, Hooper notes that a national survey which asked respondents to evaluate the various subnational groups based on criteria such as cleanliness, honesty, industriousness, and the like, put the Murcians in dead last. (I'm assuming it confined itself to provincial identities and didn't include Roma or immigrants, both of which I would've expected to score lower than any "native" group.) Although the huertas of Murcia are somewhat well-regarded, Albacete has been described to me in terms which suggest the Sheffield of Spain.

Murcians might be slightly better regarded in Catalonia where they were prominent in the "second wave" of immigration and mostly assimilated quite well, in contrast to the "xarnegos" who came later from other parts of the South.

[wwidsith]

Great stuff - thanks for the ref. Now I feel kind of protective of 'em!

[wwidsith]

It irritates me too, but I think there's a difference between getting irritated and making the leap that it somehow represents a corruption or degradation of language, which it doesn't. I know someone who says pacifically for specifically too! And I also hear "to all intensive purposes" instead "intents and purposes" a lot, even in scripts where I work..