Nepenthe

Cito Ferreira Fernandes, jornalista do DN, em crónica publicada na revista de domingo, creio, e deixo aqui outra crónica deliciosa deste senhor: Eu sei, não é caso para pôr a bandeira nacional à janela. Mas é uma pequena boa notícia: a Casa Branca vai mesmo ter uma mascote portuguesa. Mas isso não é mau? Género: "Você é donde? Ah, português! Como o poodle dos Obama…" Justamente, é coisa para assumir: " Poodle , coisa nenhuma: cão-d'água português!" É uma raça com muitos acentos (til, agudo, circunflexo) e há que a proclamar nossa com orgulho. O cão de Malia e Sasha é óptimo - na carruagem de comboio Interail com a rapariga polaca, no jantar com os sogros estrangeiros do filho, no intervalo da assinatura do contrato com o empresário chinês… - para animar a conversa sobre um bom assunto: nós. É verdade, sou português como o cão dos Obama. Um cão nada maricas e nada bruto, trabalhador. Sabe que ele já andava nas caravelas? Não se demore nas caravelas, fisgue- -se ...

TLS : Or, to quote Jonathon Green, the man Martin Amis once dubbed “Mr Slang”, it is “the language that says ‘no’. No to piety, to religion, to ideology and all its permutations, to honour, nobility, patriotism and their kindred infantilisms. It is forever Falstaff, never the Prince”. It is all those words we wouldn’t utter in a job interview or in front of a maiden aunt. And it is an endless source of pleasure, which explains why dictionaries of slang are so appealing. In common with music and clothing, slang is subject to the vagaries of fashion. It puzzles us most when old or very recent, and, while antique slang can be satisfactorily covered in a printed volume, fire-new words cannot be. Anyone genuinely interested in getting to grips with the latest usage will today begin his or her search on the internet, and a dictionary of slang, although it may help a reader of Charles Dickens or Georgette Heyer, is a cabinet of curiosities and will tend to double up as a bathroom book or an ...

Stephen Halliwell GREEK LAUGHTER A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity In the third century BC, when Roman ambassadors were negotiating with the Greek city of Tarentum, an ill-judged laugh put paid to any hope of peace. Ancient writers disagree about the exact cause of the mirth, but they agree that Greek laughter was the final straw in driving the Romans to war. One account points the finger at the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius. It was so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement. The historian Dio Cassius, by contrast, laid the blame on the Romans’ national dress. “So far from receiving them decently”, he wrote, “the Tarentines laughed at the Roman toga among other things. It was the city garb, which we use in the Forum. And the envoys had put this on, whether to make a suitably dignified impression or out of fear – thinking that it would make the Tarentines respect them. But in fact g...

There is a lost book by Dickens, one that recorded some of the most remarkable encounters of his life. Within it, he catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more. The money – substantial sums, for this was “high-end philanthropy” – came from the immensely wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, but the initial scheme and much of its everyday direction was Dickens’s alone, his most important and most characteristic charitable venture. Jenny Hartley’s excellent new book tells this extraordinary story with compassion, common sense and a lively awareness of the unruly, self-dramatizing energies (both Dickens’s and the women’s) at play within and beyond the home’s four walls. He was the greatest novelist of the age, Burdett-Coutts its richest he...

To the tune of You're So Vain: A long time ago in a galaxy close, close to us. War! The Windows empire is crumbling under the attacks of the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Tux. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere! OSWars Linux t-shirt

Chocolate & Zucchini gives us "Casser du sucre sur le dos de quelqu'un." It means, literally, "breaking sugar on someone's back," or engaging in malicious gossip about someone. In other words: backbiting , which, come to think of it, is slightly food-related too, in a cannibalistic sort of way. For example : "Dès qu'il sortait, ses collègues se mettaient à casser du sucre sur son dos." ("The minute he was out the door, his coworkers would start breaking sugar on his back.") According to these sources , this idiom appeared in the late 19th century, and may derive from the older expressions "sucrer quelqu'un" , which meant mistreating someone, and " se sucrer de quelqu'un ," which meant taking someone for a fool. Sugar was then a symbol of wealth; why it was linked to such negative notions, however, is unclear. Em português, Cortar na Casaca, Cortar na Pele :)

Gulbenkian exhibit: A evolução de Darwin De 12/02/2009 a 24/05/2009 Das 10h00 às 18h00 Terça a Domingo Galeria de Exposições Temporárias da Sede Em colaboração com o Museu de História Natural de Nova Iorque Entrada: 4€ Blog supporting this exhibit: All about him:

Early this week I was in a supermarket stocking up on light bulbs, which I seldom replace until they all fail and I have to find my way out of my office by feeling the furniture, swearing all the way. But I wouldn't swear if children were present. Perhaps I should. Swear words are only words and a case can be made for children hearing as early as possible the language of the world they will grow up in. I wonder, though, if that case is very good. The young mother who was checking out in the next aisle to mine seemed to have no doubts on the matter. She was no harridan. In fact she looked like a fashion model. But she had a trolley piled high with stuff, her two attendant children were behaving like children, and she told them off in roughly the following terms. "Stop something about or I'll something leave you at home next time." The word "something" was delivered several times with tremendous forc...

Like poetry and pornography, slang is easier to recognize than to define. Most of it is disapproved of by someone, but obscenity alone doesn't qualify. It isn't slang, for example, to refer to manure with a four-letter word. But if you put the article "the" in front of that four-letter word and equate the president-elect of the United States to it, then slang it is, and very complimentary. Further complicating matters, a great deal of slang is completely inoffensive. Journalists call the first sentence of an article the lede, the last the kicker, the motive for reading it the hook and the paragraph that encapsulates its argument the nut graf--terms that might puzzle an outsider but won't scandalize anyone. One comes a little closer to a definition of slang by thinking about context. Dirty words suggest that the audience is no better than the speaker, and vice versa. Slang, on the other hand, usually suggests that speaker and audience share membership in a group...

Savour the moment: Rajah, a colour lithograph by Henri Meunier, 1897 We Brits have a way of feeling guilty about our pleasures, as if there were something morally dubious, or beyond the merely vulgar, in the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the constitution of our more overtly fun‑loving American cousins. This is not an issue addressed by Paul Martin in his extensive survey of the pros and cons of pleasure, and its bittersweet role in all our lives. Mercifully, however, he does seem to conclude that pleasure-seeking is, on balance, a good thing, for all the efforts of religious and (often) socio-political forces to persuade us otherwise. But pleasure is also, as he insists from the outset, “a slippery beast”. Plato argued that it was “the greatest incentive to evil”, Aristotle the opposite, and so it has confusingly continued ever since, via the likes of Nero and Casanova to Schopenhauer, Freud and beyond. For Martin, a behavio...

A startled hippopotamus dashes from his hiding place, Shire River, Liwonde National Park, Malawi The week in wildlife, The Guardian

Cosmetic surgery is now so popular that even young, healthy, attractive women are choosing to be “enhanced.” In a quest for insight into this $13 billion industry, the author—a five-foot-nine, 120-pound 27-year-old—went undercover, asking three plastic surgeons what they’d do to her nose, her breasts, and her, uh, “banana rolls.” The answers were as different as the doctors themselves. Vanity Fair

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