zompist bboard

There's supposed to be a popular Spanish drink (or perhaps just Catalonian) mixing Coca-Cola with [cheap] wine.

But here's something that will actually interest you: when visiting home and wandering the stacks of my alma mater university library, I came across a nice copy of Skeat's Principles of English etymology (1891), which I'm reading now. I know it's quite out of date, and I've read about most of what h...

As for squatting, I find it impossible to sit on very high toilets (like disabled-accessible toilets) and defecate properly. Something in the position seems to interfere with the working of the necessary muscles. I prefer to have the bowl low. So there is method in Viktor's madness, though I've neve...

Can't you find what it is in Coptic and then use the Middle Egyptian reflexes?

"Drunken" is the adjective, as in the song "What shall we do with the drunken sailor"? Although I imagine it is historically the past participle. Your imaginations are correct :) Forms: Pa. tense drank /dræŋk/ ; pa. pple. drunk /drʌŋk/ . Forms: Pres. stem. OE–ME drinc-, ME– drink- (ME drinnk- Orm.,...

"Drunken" is the adjective, as in the song "What shall we do with the drunken sailor"?

Dostoevsky? I think his name is Dolgopolsky.

I had some horrible dream about behind the scenes in the New York subway where various sorts of gangs and socially undesirable/rebellious people lived amidst all the machinery and filth and live wires and open train tracks.

Or maybe the sight of the burrito guy made them feel peckish and they all hopped in their cars and drove off to Chipotle.

Never heard of it. What are they doing to the English language in Michigan?

How is that a rare meaning?

Sentence b is not grammatical now, if it ever was, so question b is just nonsense. Question a is grammatical but very stilted in an Ollendorffian way. You ask this question now as "The flavour of what is beautiful?"

If I'm not mistaken, it's an example of the subjunctive.

There's even an old-style Teach Yourself Yoruba by E.C. Rowlands published in 1969.

For "Harriet", does Icelandic have a feminine form for "Hinrik"?

I make an attempt to sumarize Greek-related fringe claims here: The Greeks never borrowed letters from the Phoenicians. (it is wrongly considered that an advanced civilization never borrows or learns things from barbarians, so Greeks would never take anything from the Phoenicians) So how do they ac...

I suspect жасмин isn't a good example because it isn't a native word. However, if the stress weren't on the second syllable, you would hear something like [ж a смын]. What he's saying is something more like [жəсмь и н], or to put it in the form used in Russian textbooks [жъсмьин]. (I couldn't manage...

Not only did the Parti Québecois lose the provincial election, but Pauline Maurois lost her seat! Yaaaay!

WeepingElf wrote:Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants to abolish a Russian vowel

Well, that's silly. How on earth are they going to be able to watch the famous Soviet film Кин-дза-дза! then?

bulbaquil wrote:maybe it's a date? August 2? February 8?

Nothing happened on either of those days involving the Cold War in the 80s, but for what it's worth, Elizabeth II became queen on February 8, 1952.

I dreamt I was some boy in Japan, who managed to escape from school, and was walking around. I saw the boarded up store of the Doubleday book store chain, which had gone bankrupt. I saw three McDonald's on my walk, and tried to go to the farthest one, but found it was attached to a weird megaevangel...

Oh, I thought you meant they adopted the word as slang for "penis" rather than as a woman’s name. Too bad for my pun, then.

So a fanny gets put into a fanny when Dutch/French speakers have heterosexual sex with someone from England, or homosexual sex with an American.

As they were preparing for war, were they playing music in the style of No?

Anyway, I dreamt I was training someone in how to be a CIA agent.

"fag" has lost its bite? I've heard it (and used it) appropriated positively, although I still would consider it aggressive if a person were to throw it against, say, me and my boyfriend holding hands. So I guess twenty years from now, no one will get the point of those scenes in Mel Brooks' Silent...