Tomorrow is already yesterday

Today in Language Log, Bill Poser has a brief entry about the remarkable Hindi words कल and परसों, whose temporal reference depends on the tense of the sentences they appear in. No prizes for guessing that cognates exist in Panjabi as well, where ਕੱਲ kall similarly means "yesterday" in past-tense clauses and "tomorrow" elsewhere. I love the related compound ਅਜਕਲ ajkal (where aj means "today") so much that I already posted about it elsewhere.

I've been meaning to talk about ਪਰਸੋਂ parsoṁ "the day after tomorrow; the day before yesterday" in a longer entry on words of similar meaning in other languages. After surveying several languages of Europe and Asia, I'm beginning to wonder if English isn't something of an odd man out in preferring the circumlocutions "the day after tomorrow" and "the day before yesterday" to more compact (although generally compound) lexemes like German übermorgen/vorgestern or Korean 모레 moley/그저께 kucekkey.

Xhekpot!

Ever wanted to fling nasty curses at someone in a language rough enough to feel really satisfying but too obscure to risk getting caught? Here's your chance!

Your guide to swearing in Albanian.

Choice excerpts:

Të qifsha të bardhët e syve! "Fuck your eye whites!"
Ta qifsha Zotin tënd! "Fuck your God!"
Të qiftë arusha qorre! "May you get fucked by a blind bear!"
T'i piftë sorra mendtë! "May the magpie drink from your brains!
U mbytsh në gjakun tënd! "May you drown in your own blood!"
Të hyftë dreqi nga bytha! "May the devil get inside you through the ass!"

(Handy guide to Albanian pronunciation available here.)

Of course, not all curses will be equally suitable for all targets. In particular, qiju me arusha! "Fuck with the bears!" won't have much sting for many of my readers--probably more-or-less the same group for whom Unë të qij me kollodok! "I'll fuck you with a crankshaft!" is less insult than foreplay.

"I now pronounce you knockout and treetrunk."

Ganked from Beth Loves Bollywood:

After I proved that I totally rock the vowel matras, yesterday my Hindi tutor and I had a discussion about - what else - filmy stars. She told me there are news stories going around that Mr. Bachchan strongly encouraged Aishwarya to marry a tree in order to level out some of the bad news in her horoscope.

This kept me up at night. Honestly.

I have no idea how to express how absolutely ridiculous and insulting I think this is (and illegal, according to some reports) without being disrespectful to a belief system I know very little about and do not share. So instead I'll say this: if Aishwarya had wanted a tall wooden husband, she would have married Arjun Rampal.

(Oooh, snap!)

mollpeartree, is this true??? I don't want to be up all night again too!

Against extreme literal-mindedness, lexicographers have no defence

My childhood Funk and Wagnalls had a brief index of given names with etymological meanings. I was surprised to look up the name of my sister's best friend, Imogene, and find it meant "origin uncertain". What kind of name is that for a girl?

Some years later, I bought an American English-British English/British English-American English dictionary to help me decipher the UK slang on PBS. Under the entry for "bugger-all", I found the definition "absolutely nothing". My reaction was If it means absolutely nothing, then why list it in the dictionary at all?