27.11.17 I had thought that only our "Professores" get titles by carpet-begging. Writing for authoritative papers had seemed to be a differnt story before you read anything like this:

25.11.17 After academics picked out 30 words that have been ‘lost’ from the English language, self-confessed ‘word geek’ Paul Anthony Jones reveals obscure yet delightful terms that also need to be saved from falling into disuse.

Deplorably, "word geeks" can't save words. And every linguist knows that all words are bound to die sooner or later giving place to new ones. The idea is doubtful in terms of the communicative value of those "revived' words that are going to look like embalmed corpses among people alive and kicking!

17.11.17 Lord Byron displayed his Epicureanism in his immortal poem with the lines “Better to hold the sparkling grape,/Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood.”. This attitude to wine seems to be a sure mark of Western culture. However, there are Arab poets who display the same feelings.

15.11.17 For the first time ever, the khamriyyat – ‘wine songs’ – of Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas will be available in English as complete rhymes; animating the works of one of the Islamic world’s most controversial poets. In the words of the poems’ translator, Alex Rowell, Nuwas’s rhapsodies on drinking, partying and fornicating with both sexes are “as edgy and subversive today as they must have been at the time.”

11.11.17

Should the translator make explicit what is implied? The ever-lasting worry of the translator!

7.11.17 To-day sees the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution as it is known to those who were born in the USSR. Irrespective of who you may me treating the event now, IT WAS a revolution in the strictest sense: a change of the historical formation. This change did not deliver on its promises of happiness to everybody. Nor were the promises of happiness met after the unconstitutional dispersal of the USSR in 1991. Gallup poll says that South Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine Lead World in Suffering. Alas, for fond hopes ruined!

1.11.17 There is a hypothesis that the BBC is chronically lacking in translators and severely damaging its reputation because of it: