Can you believe that, according to google, nobody’s ever said “maia ex aquila” before? I can’t either. It applies, if I remember correctly, to the fifth chapter in The Two Towers.

Today I learned about the Memrise Prize. As a mostly* happy user of Memrise, I really hope that this bears fruit.

* Many of the wordlists, even ones provided by Memrise, are deficient in numerous ways; the German wordlists lack principle parts of both nouns and verbs, for instance. Also, the iPhone app decides to log me out randomly. In spite of these complaints, I use it enough and get enough value out of it that I should start paying for it.

I wrote this thing almost eight years ago.

Caller: Dice K has this great pitch, you hear about it? It’s called the gyroball. It is like a slurve slider curve but it is faster and it curves so much that it turns around and is caught by the first baseman. I ain’t seen nothing like it.

I still think it’s pretty funny.

It gets good at about the two minute thirty second mark.

This is great.

In Mexico City, a common kind of Italian coffee is spelled “express,” “expres,” “exprés,” “expreso,” “expresso,” and, sometimes, on a really good day, “espresso.” (My impression is that “express” is most common.) Mix in some chocolate and you get “moka.”

What we have here are words taken from Italian, filtered through English (just how well is unarguably debatable) before being used in Spanish. I think this is a strange phenomenon. I would like to know what it’s called.

HT ((L)HT?): Languagehat.

You know, deep in your bones, that any place where anyone has made a comment about “los drink’s” is not a place where you want to go.

Idle thought: what is the Islamic view of Ankhenaten?

(Inspiration: this program.)

As we all say where I grew up, keine Scheiße.