Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Those Funny Spanish 5; The Corruption Cavalcade; & Strangled English.

Those Funny Spanish 5. Nearing the end now:-
  • They are very fond of the expression 'More or less'. Which says something.
  • They mostly live in flats
  • They are said to have the highest first, second and third home-ownership rates in Europe.
  • They seem to place a lot of importance on whether someone is guapo/guapa(good looking) or feo/fea(not good looking). Or whether they're dressed properly.
  • They don't worry if the entire world hears their phone conversations.
  • They like to dress up and are hardly ever as scruffy as, say, the British aristocracy.
  • They despise anyone who is pencil-shy(tacaño) and males will fight to pay the bill at the bar, or even in a restaurant.
  • They worry a lot about what others say about them.
  • They seem to have a single word - mentira - for anything from a mistake, a white lie, a fib through to a vast lie on a Hitlerian scale.
  • They can get married at 16, recently raised from 14.
  • They can legally have sex at 16, recently raised from 13.
  • They enjoy a walk with family members of an evening - El paseo.
  • They delight in making new Spanish words from English gerunds - el parking; el lifting; el jogging; el spinning, for example.
  • They call a dinner jacket un smoking. Or sometimes un esmoquín.
  • They still have haberdashers, seamstresses and ironmongers.
  • They have wonderful medieval quarters in many of their cities (especially Pontevedra).
  • They have magnificent churches dating from the 10th century onwards. And even some (restored) synagogues.
  • They have, in Córdoba, a Grand Mosque that's one of the buildings to see before your die.
  • For their holidays, they go mainly to France, Italy and the UK.
  • When they live in a house, their dogs tend to stay outside. And bark a lot.
  • Those who live in flats have some of the smallest, ugliest dogs in creation.

The Corruption Cavalcade
  • The PP party Chairman of Valencia's provincial government stands accused of taking commissions in cash. Although the party has 'let him go', he himself has refused to resign and has challenged the judicial system to prove he's committed any offence. Unfortunately for him, there appear to be some recordings of him counting some of his loot during phone chat with the donors.
  • The star (alleged) crook of the moment is one Rodrigo Rato, a very senior member of the PP party who was once head of the IMF. After that, he was head of Spain's fused bank operation, Bankía, which he ran into the ground. A month ago he was charged with fraud, concealment of assets and money laundering. Unusually, he's 'temporarily' resigned from the PP party. Well, it is an election year. Should he ever come to trial, expect it to rumble on for years, while the Stutue of Limitations works its magic. 

Finally . . . Most of us are familiar with football-player-English and its bizarre past tense. Of which this is as bad an example as you can get:- "He's run down the wing" instead of "He ran down the wing". But I've just heard something even more monstrous: "We've give the ball away too much." What next, I wonder. "We will have give the ball away too much"?

No comments: