FRANCE ON HIGH ALERT

Hundreds of pro-free speech teddy bears carried in a plane piloted by Swedes parachuted down on the Belarusian capital of Minsk early Wednesday morning

(Thanks to The Perts)

Comments

[Steve]

The Swedes blanketed an area where Russian is spoken with notes in English?
I don't understand modern life.

[Omniskeptic]

"As far as I can tell, the mission was a complete success ..."

But until the bears report in, we won't know for sure.

[Clankie]

Sadly, more than the Swedes did to help defeat Hitler.

[max]

Steve, when people who speak different languages like Sweedish and White Ruthenian what to communicate they tend to use English. This is often claimed to be due to English speakers not speaking other languages so everyone has to learn English. That is false, English speakers speak every language there is in the world because English breaks into the houses of other languages when the speakers are out to diner and picks up any words which happen to be lying around loose.

This can result in some linguistic shenanigans when combined with languages like Japanese (which also has been known to say "see if you can pry some those nouns up" so often that they had to create the word 'gairaigo', meaning words stolen from other languages). My favorite being the English word "Karaoke" stolen from the Japanese, a word created by combining the word 'kara' (empty) with 'oke' (band, stolen from the English word 'orchestra'. This is particularly galling since English inherited the word 'orchestra' fair-and-square when Latin became a dead language (although a wise person wouldn't inquire too closely about how Latin got the word 'orchestra' from Greek).

[nursecindy]

Judi! Max gave me a headache.

[Omniskeptic]

Latin got "orchestra" from the Greeks on loan at ruinously low interest. How do you think they got in all this financial trouble in the first place?