Subscribe in seconds and receive Languagehat.com's news feed updates in your inbox, on your phone or even read them from your own news page here on follow.it.
You can select the updates using tags or topics and you can add as many websites to your feed as you like.
And the service is entirely free!
Follow Languagehat.com: Languagehat.com
Is this your feed? Claim it!
Decades ago I got a copy of the old Penguin edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš for $2.95, probably at the Strand (the
Two words from very different reaches of the English wordhoard that I’ve recently encountered:
1) In Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which my wife and I will be reading at night well into 2027, I hit the word barathea, which meant nothing to me (although I had seen it before, since I’ve read Lucky Jim at least twice). The OED (entry from 1933) says:
...
I was reading a Russian post on Facebook when the Latin-alphabet phrase ad acta jumped out at me. Not being familiar with it, I looked for it in my fairly comprehensive Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases (hey, I’m a book guy, what can I say), but it wasn’t there, so I went to the internet like a good 21st-century denizen and found it in
From the misty depths of my youth I remember the expression parler français comme une vache espagnole (literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’), meaning to speak the language badly. It occurred to me to wonder if this is still something persons of Frenchness actually say, and (more importantly) if there are equivalents in other languages; I suspect English is ...
In flipping through my Russian edition of Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary, I occasionally run across words that strike me as odd or intriguing in one way or another, and I thought I’d share a few of them here.
1)