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The greatest poets have written lines memorable even in translation. Here is one I read for the first time ever today

I remembered it instantly (even though I got it wrong) after reading it here. And I was drawn there by a reference in Primo Levi's book The periodic table. Specifically the chapter on Nickel.

Levi himself was a poet, and a good one: as well as much else. But he doesn't come near "Death will come.." in my eyes, and the young translator of this captured an eternal voice.

Keep your toenails carefully filed. Then you won't lose them.

Entering the cathedral of Kraców, you can't help noticing, that high on the left-hand side, are huge bones, bound by rusty chains.

These, in legend, are the remains of the local dragon, Smok Wawelski (pictured below). The exact details vary a bit, but a long time ago this dragon lived in a cave lower down on the rock than the modern cathedral (and still accessible to visitors).

The dragon terrorized and ravaged the land thereabout, because dragons do ("fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, dragons gotta terrorize and ravage"). However, as happens often with  mega-fauna, open conflict with the interests of humans led to it being slain.

"Smok Wawelski" sounds like the dragon's personal name (usually not mentioned in dragon-lore). But Smok is just old Polish for dragon or snake (like "worm" in Anglo-Saxon), and the second part comes from the location, Wawel being the rock on which the cathedral was founded, post-dragon. So this was just the Wawel dragon.

"Smok" might be the origin — and it's controversial — of the word schmuch (and many variant spellings), which means "a contemptible person", according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The origin is the Yiddish word for penis (I never knew that before!), and it's a taboo word in that language. The possible connection is with snake. The OED records the slang term "trouser snake" to mean, well, penis.

Many scholars don't agree with this derivation. No-one will never know the etymology for sure: unless there is a continuous documentary record of a word's use we can never be certain where it came from: and in fact the origin of a word can follow two or more parallel strands. Given the taboo associations it's even more hard to trace.

The bones?

Coffins in the crypt hold those of Jagiellonian kings. Bones on the wall belonged to Pleistocene whales.

And I wonder where the name "Smaug" came from.

Credit: wikimedia

dear mater and pater

a Physics teecher put me in a nasty box, it was HOORIBLE with know air holes I didnt no if i was alive or ded

Yours sincerly Felix

(With apols to Nigel Molesworth)

At least

This

Kiss 

Exists

I've often thought like this before; just be kind, what matters more?

The young laugh. The old know.

Does a rainbow exist? It's a beautiful thought.

At any rate, don't go digging there.

Question - What would you call the chariot of the Sun?

Answer - An awesome cart.

After reading a number of 'jokes' or 'mottoes' that people have had the effrontery to insert in crackers and pass off as humour, I propose to set up a joke factory with stricter quality control. The start-up already has a number of visionary backers.

The investors and I hope in time to completely automate the process but for now we've had to rely on humans to craft our jokes. The first joke has just been delivered. Remember you read it here first.

Question: What do you call an angry worm that goes "Hey nonny no"?

Answer: A mad wriggle singer.

A mondegreen is where a phrase is misheard and interpreted as something which sounds more or less the same, but is actually quite different from what was actually said.

For example, a speaker might say "What's that toy left on the chair?" and a listener think they said "What's that toilet on the chair?" This is a real example that occurred today, I haven't made it up.

This kind of linguistic error was first called a mondegreen by Sylvia Wright, who wrote that as a child she heard the first verse of a Scots ballad as

Only later did she realize that there was no lady Modegreen. The Earl was the sole victim, and they laid him on the green.

Well-know mondegreens include

One that a friend told me was the "Potato clock". Whatever is a potato clock? Well, "We need to get a potato clock". Better set the alarm then!

Mondegreens have attracted the attention of psychologists. In The Language Instinct Steve Pinker pointed out that the interesting fact that what the listener hears is often considerably less likely than the intended version. My examples of the toilet on the chair and the potato clock certainly have this property. Pinker interprets this as evidence that we hear what our auditory systems tells us (even though it's an unlikely meaning), not necessarily what makes sense in the context.

I wondered if I could systematically generate some mondegreens and hit upon the idea of reading verse to my dictation software. The latter must try to match sounds to stored words, using some kind of "goodness of fit rule, and I'm pretty sure it will also take into account what words are the most likely ones to follow a given word. I don't think it has a model of the world though, so what it recognizes should fit together plausibly as a word sequence, but might not mean the same as what I actually said.

And sure enough it came up with some modegreens. Here are a couple that amused me. See if you can spot the originals!

"Good thing which this last looked out."

"A poor player structure in French is out upon the stage."

– Someone called Pam was giving away cake with cherries in

– Genoa?

– No, she was a stranger