The romanceconlang list (dedicated to the design of fictional descendants of Latin, spoken presumably by people of other timelines) has lately discussed expressions parallel to “It’s Greek to me” in other languages. So far:

• Danes: Hebrew, Volapük
• Italians: Turkish
• French: Chinese, Hebrew
• Nederlanders: Chinese
• Poles, Swedes: Greek, Chinese

Later: A reader contributes:

My co-worker across the hall is Turkish. She says that, while it is not a common phrase, she thinks Turks use French as their “Greek”. The way she phrased it made me think that it was not really a Turkish idiom, but I thought you might be interested.

More generally, what does each nation use for ‘funny-foreigner-talk’? I’ve seen mock-German so used both in English (“das Komputenmachine ist nicht für fingerpoken und mittengraben”) and in French; when I asked in some newsgroup what language Germans use, one German replied that they use other varieties of German.

Laterer: Another reader (who had not previously so manifested! hi!) reports, “In Modern Hebrew, the idiom is It’s all Chinese.”

Footnote: To discourage spammers, romanceconlang was renamed romconlang in October 2003.

Mail today: 109 items, of which 17 spam – not counting an unknown number that pinned Pobox’s meter and were not relayed to me. I think it is worse lately than it was a few months ago.

Next day: Spam has fads – I just got three ads for Xanax in rapid succession.

On the FFF blog, Bumper Hornberger wrote:

In light of the U.S. government’s profound commitment to democracy in Iraq, how about an immediate up-or-down vote among the Iraqi people on the following proposition: “Should the U.S. government stay or leave?”

All U.S. officials . . . could campaign freely among the Iraqi people, explaining to them why it’s important to keep U.S. military forces in Iraq . . . . They could even demonstrate the virtues of American democracy by telling Iraqi voters what they tell American voters: that if they vote the wrong way, they won’t get any more federal funds.

What could be more democratic than that? In fact, how about having the same vote right here at home?

sequel to a famous image

(Link updated 2023)

I wonder whether this joke has a middle.

Yesterday I was startled to see a bug splat on my car’s windshield; that had not happened in my previous four months as a driver. (Then three more hit in quick succession.)

Barry Gehm:

When we were young, we were told that ‘everybody else is doing it’ was a really stupid reason to do something. Now it’s the standard reason for picking a particular software package.