Word of the Day: “Pigovian” (expanded)

[update of a note originally published  4 Dec 2012]

The lead item in this week’s New Yorker introduces (with considerable fanfare) a new word:  Pigovian, as the adjective derived from the name of an otherwise little-celebrated economist, one Pigou, who, many years ago, floated the idea (which had surely been floating of its own accord, for millennia) that if you make a mess, you should maybe chip in to the costs of cleaning it up.   The author of this “Talk” piece, Elizabeth Kolbert, is a frequent writer on climate-change matters, and her proposal is that the general public now embrace the designation of a carbon tax as “Pigovian”, in that it pays back some of the costs of global warming.

Now, it might well be imagined that the suggestion is superfluous, and that the notion already has a name:  nuisance tax.  Yet that phrase has already long been defined in an entirely unrelated sense:  not of a tax on nuisances, (the way a luxury tax is a tax on luxuries), but (apparently -- it is really not a happy coinage) a tax that is considered to be itself a nuisance (in that it is not large enough to qualify as a burden, say).  As Merriam-Webster © defines it:

an excise tax collected in small amounts on a wide range of commodities directly from the consumer

Yet, even did the old phrase nuisance tax mean what, syntagmatically, it ought to mean, there is an argument for using a more distinctive word for a category that is growing in importance, as ever-wider circles of citizens become alert to what economists have long called the tragedy of the commons.   For, once you have a word like Pigovian, entirely unburdened by other associations, you can readily extract it from the phrase Pigovian tax, and use elliptic derivata like “Pigovian considerations” or “counter-Pigovian” (where “counter-nuisance” here wouldn’t work at all, since it means the opposite of what “counter-Pigovian” would mean, i.e. ‘pro-nuisance’).  Such relationships between morphology and semantics are discussed in my book The Semantics of Form in Arabic, and form the core of the chapter “The Stokes Conjecture”.

[Update 23 April 2017]  This just in:  a Pigovian accord:
http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/norway-first-to-ratify-polluter-pays-treaty

So!  Now for the morpho-phonological characteristics of this rather odd-looking word, Pigovian.   The base-form is pronounced pig-OO, yet the adjective comes out pig-OH-vee-an.  Why?

Unlike sturdy old Anglo-Saxon suffixes like -ness, -dom, -hood-, -kin-, or -ly, which allow themselves to be simply tacked-on at the end of a word, leaving all else as is, the Latin-derived -ian is a tyrant, demanding that the stress be moved to the immediately preceding syllable (if it wasn’t already there), and that its vowel (if not tense already) be tensed.  Thus:  Dickens (DIK-enz) vs. Dickensian (dik-ENZ-ee-an), and (with vowel-tensing) Jacob (JAY-kub) vs. Jacobian (ja-KOH-bee an).  (Thus the derivative is pronounced in the mathematical community. An unrelated adjective with a different suffix, Jacobean, relating to history and literature, is pronounced jak-ub-EE-an.)  And as a further impudent exigency, this tyrannical suffix spurns unmediated Anschluss onto a vowel, demanding rather a bridge-consonant -v-:  thus (Bernard) Shaw vs. Shavian (SHAY-vee-an, with both vowel-tensing and inserted bridge).   As well as (in a more roundabout fashion -- this one doesn’t really count) Warsaw vs. Varsovian (rhymes with Nabokovian).  It is thus that our poor unassuming Mr. Pigou (whom I picture rather as Mr. Magoo)) becomes, adjectivally, a roaring shouting syllable-rattling PIGOVIAN.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Note:  Strictly, the derivatum should have been Pigouvian, on the model of Peru :  Peruvian.  The word succumbed to the gravitational attracion of the plethora of words in -ovian (a productive category, given all the Slavic names in -ov/-off).  Further, why burden an already ungainly word with the stressed syllable GOO, as opposed to GO ?  This way, it gets to rhyme with a cool studly word like Jovian.

Cf. this derivatum, re Richard Montegue:   "Montegovian compositionality" (Alice ter Meulen, in

Frederick Newmeyer, ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (1988: CUP), vol. I, p. 441)

Footnote:  Something in our Teutonic blood  disdains such tricks.  Thus, instead of a morphological equivalent of Pigovian tax, German just says Pigou-steuer.  And rather than submit to the indignity of a  *Hemingwavian (hem-ing-WAY-vee-an), we go with a different suffix altogether, once that leaves vowels as they are and requires no bridge-consonant:  Hemingwayesque.    (Still not very dignified, though, as the suffix here hogs the main stress to itself, and tends to make you think of words like grotesque and burlesque.)

Morphophonology:
Compare and contrast  Babeuf => Babouvisme.

French in particular is pre-attuned to such vocalic ablaut  by the existence, side by side, of  locally-developed place-names, along with gentilés derived more transparently from the original Latin toponym.  As, Loire (from Latin Liger) => Ligérien.  Such transformations may be found even when the etymon is not Latin, as

   Aisne => Axonais
   Rhône => Rhodanien

   Reims (earlier Rheims) => Rémois

and even such acrobatics as

    Saint-Germain-des-Prés => germanopratin

    Seine-Saint-Denis => Séquanodionysien

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian.

There are parallels in Castilian:
   Salamanca => Salmantino

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian, Manchester => Mancusian.

¡Bienvenidos en Uruguay!

Enjoy your stay!  (however brief …)

Terminaba así una saga que comenzó cuando en enero de 2014 llegó totalmente en secreto a Montevideo, Clifford Sloan, un abogado egresado de la Universidad de Harvard, a quien el presidente Barack Obama nombró en 2013 para que se hiciera cargo de la difícil tarea de negociar con países que estuvieran dispuestos a recibir a los cautivos. Y aún antes de la llegada de Sloan, la buena relación entre el presidente José Mujica y el vicepresidente estadounidense Joseph Biden había generado un buen ambiente para que Uruguay hiciera el favor que Estados Unidos estaba pidiendo.  …

-- http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/presos-guantanamo-llegaron-control-medico.html?utm_source=news-elpais&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Presos%20de%20Guant%C3%A1namo%20llegaron%20bien%20y%20est%C3%A1n%20bajo%20control%20m%C3%A9dico&utm_content=08122014&utm_campaign=Resumen%20Matutino\

ShadowMan kind of spooks me, actually

Los recién llegados recibirán un documento de identidad transitorio. Tienen algunas ofertas para trabajar en la construcción y en tareas rurales.

Mujica ha asegurado que llegarán en condición de refugiados y por lo tanto podrían irse de Uruguay al día siguiente de llegar si así lo quisieran. El gobierno no aceptó el pedido de Estados Unidos de limitar la libertad de movimiento de los liberados, dijo el mandatario.

One wonders whether, upon crossing the Rio Grande, they will be asked to state their business, or simply waved on in the interests of Diversity …

~

This evening’s NPR report on the matter  typifies the level to which journalism has sunk.  It was all about feelings and beliefs, not facts.   The station acknowledged that certain (unnamed) persons harbor unspecified “concerns” (using the word one might employ, as regards the shaky health of a pet hamster).  But, by way of countering what much of the audience -- not so dumb as they deem us -- was likely already thinking, the reporter hastened into the breach with an extraordinary gambit:  that she “believes” (her term;  not “has learned” or “knows”, but using a term that can equally well be applied to the Great Pumpkin) that “recidivism” among people jailed for terrorism  has been “actually less than for the general crime population”:  which is like comparing apples to a random medley of oranges, pinapples, and breadfruit.   For certain infractions, the rate of re-offense is no doubt far greater than for, say, assassination:   in the case of jaywalking, probably close to a hundred percent.  (Once having tasted the illicit sweetness of flouting that old Kantian maxim, “Cross at the green -- Not in between”, the perpetrator will jaywalk again and again.)

This is not a matter for beliefs, feelings, or hunches.   It is a matter of public record that a significant number of detainees released from Gitmo, or released/escaped from detention in Afghanistan or Irak, have gone on to leadership positions in Al-Qaeda.   Indeed, one of the best-known of them appended the epithet al-Kûbi (“the Cuban”) to his nom de guerre, in winking reference to his proud status as an alumnus of that flagship campus of Jâmi`at Yûsuf (“Joseph’s University” -- i.e., ‘prison’; an allusion to the Torah story, retold in the Koran).

In the forecast: Scattered apologies, heavy at times

An excellent article in this morning’s Washington Post:

            If this article offends you, I’m sorry

It offers several choice examples of the “non-apology apology”, e.g.

“I regret very much that the efforts on health care were badly misunderstood, taken out of context and used politically against the administration,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities,” Reagan said to the nation in March 1987. “As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.” It’s an I’m-sorry-my-subordinates-are-so-terrible apology.

It's about time!

We ourselves, on this site, have perfected the groveling apology to a fine art.  Choice examples here:

Apology to Mitt “the Twit” Romney

Apology to that bumbling wazzock François Hollande

Apology to that human(oid) haemorrhoid Donald Trump

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

This just in!   Setting the stage for a “mass apology”, held in a stadium on international television, chanted in unison by thousands of penitent breast-beating Mexicans:

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — FIFA has opened disciplinary proceedings against the Mexico team for what it has called the “improper conduct of spectators” at the World Cup.

Mexican fans taunted the opposing goalkeepers in Mexico’s 1-0 victory over Cameroon last Friday and in Tuesday’s 0-0 tie with Brazil with a traditional cheer that ends by shouting a word widely regarded as a derogatory term used against gays.

Mexicans have taken to social media and television to defend the chant.

“Why do they want to take away this cheer that identifies us, that is lovely, that is euphoric, and that is in no way homophobic?” asked Martha Figueroa, a host on ¡Nuestro Día!, a morning television show on the network Cadena Tres.

 Homophobic slurs are nothing new to soccer stadiums around the world. During the tournament’s opening ceremony, Brazilian fans directed a chant — usually reserved for opposing players and referees — against their own president, Dilma Rousseff, in an episode that caused much hand-wringing around the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/sports/worldcup/fifa-looking-into-possible-use-of-gay-slur-by-mexican-fans.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

“Nuestra culpa -- nuestra culpa!  Nuestra máxima culpa!”

  

The New York Times being too genteel to print the actual word and let us judge for ourselves, here is the original in Spanish:

[ !! Trigger warning !!    

The following paragraph contains words in some sort of strange foreign kind of language.  Some of the letters even have these pointy little thingies on them, of unknown function.  Shield your children. ]

La costumbre (extendida en México) de gritar 'puto' ['maricón'] al portero del equipo rival cada vez que este saca de puerta podría acarrear a su federación de fútbol una sanción económica que, en caso de recurrencia, podría traducirse incluso en una penalización deportiva.

http://www.juareznewstv.com/deportes/2077-la-fifa-amenaza-a-mexico-por-los-cantos-homofobos-de-su-hinchada

And a similar incident in Portuguese:

e insultos de “viado” (“maricón” en portugués) por parte de muchos .

[Latest update!]  This site has just been obliged, owing to a consent decree with the World Mathematical Authority,  to issue yet another humiliating retraction:

            Disregard everything bad I ever said about topos theory

[Update 24 September 2014]  In Ferguson, Missouri, everyone has been walking on eggshells so as not to offend the already offended.   Here, a man responding to an accusation of X, states that X is false -- but “apologizes” anyway.

Authorities said the cause of the blaze is under investigation. Steven Rosenthal, the Ferguson fire chief, said the burning candles usually surrounding the memorial may have started the fire. But residents said that they smelled gasoline and some believed that the fire had to have been set on purpose.

Tom Jackson said in a statement Tuesday that the first police officer who responded tried to put out the fire but was unsuccessful.

“To anyone who believes we didn’t do everything in our power to put this fire out I want to apologize and let you know that was not the case,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/24/a-day-of-unrest-in-ferguson-ends-with-protesters-and-police-facing-off/?tid=hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e

Here, apologize no longer means ‘to express repentent regret for something bad one has done’, since the man in question had done nothing wrong to begin with.  Rather, it means ‘to grovel for reasons of political correctness; to genuflect in the direction of a victims’ lobby’.

[Update 25 September 2014]  Hmm, not enough;  grovel a little lower, please.

Ferguson, Missouri, Police Chief Thomas Jackson apologized Thursday to the parents of Michael Brown, as well as to any peaceful protesters who feel he didn't do "enough to protect their constitutional right to protest".

Here, by the way, is a glimpse of the exercise of that constitutional right:

While many peaceful protesters took to the street Tuesday night, violent elements within the demonstration stoked chaos, attacking police with guns, rocks and bottles, and vandalizing and looting businesses, Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson said. One person threw a Molotov cocktail at a parking structure, and there was an attempt to set a gasoline fire at a custard shop, he said.

Two officers were injured, one of whom was struck by a rock below the eye.

There have, of course, been no apologies for this behavior, from Ferguson blacks, BLM, or their MSM codependents.  The apologies run only one way.

(The guilty officer has apologized for interfering with the constitutionally protected free trajectory of the rock.)

[Update 25 September 2014]  Good lord, now this:

Cameron to Apologize for Saying Queen ‘Purred’

David Cameron, the British prime minister, disclosed Queen Elizabeth II’s reaction to the result of the Scotland vote.

Look -- It’s not as though he said she “meowed”.

Rx:  No world leader should ever publically say anything.   Let your thoughts be known only through spokespeople, who can always be reprimanded and sacrificed.

Orthoëpy of the Day: “regulatory”

The adjective regulatory is a ho-hum word, which we Americans pronounce REG-yu-la-tor-ee, with the stress-pattern of the underlying verb, REG-yu-late.

But in England, it is often pronounced reg-yu-LAY-tor-ee, with stress on the third syllable, and a long vowel.   This strikes an American oddly, the first time you hear it, until you consider that it simply matches the pattern of the related noun, which both sides of the Atlantic pronounce as reg-yu-LAY-shun.

Well, you say tomahto, I say tomayto, right?   Not quite.

For such interplay of stress-patterns, which in English is characteristic only of Latinate loanwords, comes with its own internal logic.  Thus consider: 

    => How do you pronounce classificatory ? <=

An Englishman has no trouble with this:  klass-i-fi-KAY-tor-ee.   Whereas an American would have to resort to KLASS-i-fik-a-tor-ee, with no fewer than five unstressed syllables trailing limply along after the nucleus.   It sounds like a coffee-mug  falling downstairs.

In the case of classificatory,  British English exhibits a crisp double-dactyl;  American, a stress followed by a quinquisyllablic mumble.   But in the case of involuntarily, the roles are reversed:  American has six distinct syllables, either as a double-dactyl or a triple iamb ( in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee,  in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee, whereas British (as I just now heard the word pronounced by a master reader, Mr. Frederik Davidson), can have just four rather mooshed one:  in-VOL-un-tr’ly.

Cf. further, re “conflation of repeated sequences (haplology)”:

To judge from British habits of articulating words like temporary, veterinary,  there exist both hesitation and slurring  in attempts to pronounce both [r-initial] syllables;  then, in order to avoid this, speakers settle for /tεmpǝri, vεtɪnrɪ /,

-- M. L. Samuels, Linguistic Evolution, with special reference to English (1972), p. 17

Many Americans (self included) slur these otherwise, dropping not an r, but the schwa:  TEMP-rar-y, VET-rin-ar-y.

An example in which the (or a) British pronunciation is more boneless than the American:  qualitatively.   Americans have a secondary accent on the third syllable, so that the whole is almost a triple troche.   In the pronunciation used by professional reader Ralph Cosham, reading CSL's Letters to Malcolm, it began like the American version  with chief stress on the first syllable, but then petered out into a succession of unaccented schwas, like air going out of a tire.

For further pronunciation fun, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/pronunciation

~

A word about stress and vowel-tensing.

I have long fretted over the lack of convenient pronunciation for the very useful word classificatory.  There exists, to be sure, a rough synonym, easily pronounceable by a babe in arms:  taxonomic;  but this word, in the context of Chomskyan linguistics, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of barf. 

Having heard somewhere (Prof. Ch. Fillmore, probably) that the Brits pronounce this word with penultimate stress, I somehow fell into pronouncing it in my mind as klass-i-fi-KAT-or-ee, with a short stressed vowel.  An error, with no basis in pattern.

Now things begin to get interesting.

The other night, I dreamt that a certain young man’s job prospects were

            “cheb-i-CHEE-vi-an”

The pronunciation, with a tensed stressed vowel, is the predictable result of adding the suffix -ian to the name Chebichev (CHEB-i-chev).   The idea, within the dream, was that his job prospects (respresentative of those of millennials generally) were uncertain, like the shapes in a famous painting by an artist of that name.  

Even at the time, that struck me as an unusual word.  Upon waking, I seized upon the dream as a counter-example to Freud’s assertion that the words we hear in dreams, we have heard before, or are a blend of several such.  Whereas here, the word is apparently not blended with anything, but rather has been subjected to a phonological rule, with rare results.

The painting in question -- a favorite of my brother’s when he was in high school, a reproduction of which hung on his wall after a family visit to MOMA, where the original is displayed -- is called “Hide and Seek”.  Only, the artist’s name is Chelichev (Tchelitchew), with an l instead of a b.  Chebichev was a mathematician,  with whose work I am only vaguely familiar.

FWIW.

~

Here we are not really concerned with the pronunciation of this or that specific word, nor with the amusing habits of our cousins across the pond (a description that can be used no matter which side of the pond  you yourself happen to hail from), but rather with the phonological economy of a language -- cf. Martinet’s classic L’Economie des changement phonétiques.   That is to say, our perspective is (in happy parallel to the modern tendency of differential geometry) no longer local, but global:  considering a linguistic-units fate  only in tandem with that of its fellows.  The textbook example being the Great Vowel Shift, in which the articulatory trapezoid, the Germanic vowel-whale, rolled slowly over in its sleep.

In the case of an American baffled by classificatory, or an Englishman tripped-up by involuntarily, we see the paradoxical  situation of a speaker left in the lurch by his own language.   Part of the explanation for the possibility of this, is that, to an extent, it is not our own language, not entirely:  a large unruly immigrant population of Graeco-Latin Fremdgut, along with borrowings of a greater or lesser residual flavor of Frenchness, have come to disturb the simply Saxon pattern:  mostly forestress, and transparent structural reasons when not;  vowel-alternations  minor.   There is no native analogue of the insanely contra-semantic and even contramorphological wordstress in psychology, where the least-important, merely-transitional syllable gets the stress (versus the natural psychic, or the less-than-ideal but still defensible psychological).    Even a simple French disyllable like garage  gets us all in a worrit:  Americans pronounce it to rhyme with massage or mirage, Englishmen to rhyme with carriage.   And when it  comes to a word like internecine -- all bets are off.

The fault by no means lies in any pointless, Basque-like complexity of the lending languages:  in Latin and in French, the stress-patterns are as easy as can be.  Yet somehow English managed to ingest these borrowings sideways, or wrong-way-round:  like that classic jest of third-grade playgrounds -- pull a pinch of skin out from either side of your neck; “What’s this?”; (kid says) “I dunno”; (you say) “A moron swallowing a pencil.”

French, by contrast, virtually never suffers so dramatic an orthoëpic quandary;   but then, it pays a larger metrical price, quite lacking the resources to construct something as stunning as “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Pied Beauty”.   To anyone whose blood still thrills  to the rhythms of our helmed and byrnied ancestors, such milksop codswallop  as the alexandrin  is near-beer at best.

~

A couple of further concrete examples.

Just now I happened upon a sentence in M.L. Samuels’ Linguistic Evolution (1972), that read:  “A comparison of three Dravidian languages has shown that simplificatory changes of phonology and grammar take place …”  (p. 108).

Now, the author teaches in Glasgow.  Were he American, or solicitous of American readers, he would have written simplifying or even simplificational -- the latter, though exactly as much a mouthful as simplificatory, is at least instantly clear in pronunciation.

[Update 11 May 2014]  Another example from Mr. Davidson (a.k.a. David Case), again from Bleak House:  "with his confirmatory cough", stressed còn-fir-MAY-tor-ee.

~

It has long been pointed out, that an extremely arcane writing-system like that of Chinese or Japanese, as opposed to a maximally transparent one like that of Spanish, reserves literacy for a kind of scribal priest-caste, and those beholden to it.  Certainly, the English spelling-system, which is rather a mess (though much closer to the Spanish end of the spectrum, than the Mandarin), presents burdens to whose would observe the niceties of orthography (less so to any who are content simply to read):  but all that is not pertinent to the problem noticed here.   Our bafflement at how to pronounce certain words, has little to do with the writing-system, nor with any mandarin impositions of any sort.  The fact is, words like confirmatory and classificatory lie already implicit in the language, for anyone who uses the words confirm/confirmation and classify/classification.   The the problem, how to pronounce these less-familiar derivata, is identical, whether you are analphabetic or an English professor.

(It does have a little something to do with the writing-system, however.  In Latin, (Classical) Arabic, and Spanish, you can tell from the spelling  which syllable is stressed: in the former cases, owing to certain simple syllabic rules;  in the last-named case, likewise save for certain exceptions, which however are called-out to the reader by an acute accent over the stressed vowel.)

Thus, only the other day, I put up a post (“Dylan Mystery Album”) which used one of my favorite words [Alert to logophiliacs:]  resipiscence.   Which I have come across in reading, and savored, yet have never heard pronounced.   And so, before publically using it (albeit not orally), I looked up the received pronunciation (fortunately, it turns out, there is only one), and was startled to learn that it differed from what I had always silently said to myself in my mind’s ear:   the approved pronunciation has main stress on the third syllable.

[Update July 2016]  Reading aloud one evening, my wife pronounced indefatigable as in-de-fa-TEEG-a-ble -- quite on the measure of British class-i-fi-CATE-or-ee.   I personally say in-de-FAT-ig-a-ble;  but that is morphosemantically opaque, whereas her version nicely brings out the notional relation to fatigue (with its French-derived oxytone).  Might this be another case where the Brits displace the accent?  But no, according to the dictionaries, no;  she came up with it on her own hook.

Traducción

[Today’s level of machine translation is quite impressive.  But its success on typical materials  gives a false impression of its applicability to more marginal (literary, or SIGINT-cryptic) texts:  the increase in difficulty is non-linear.

An earlier post gave a shout-out to a German-to-English translation team.  I simply do not have time to illustrate their many instances of excellence (though if someone would like to fund such an effort, simply mail me a large package of Swiss Francs).  Herewith a Spanish-to-English case in which, in a letter to friends, I did take the time;  enjoy.]

After a month during which, inspired by an excellent class, I did nothing but Arapaho all the day long, a prospect of unlimited choice opened up, and I found myself reading, for the first time in years, a Spanish novel.  And discovered to my delight  that my Spanish is still entirely intact -- like a back room in which you store all your college mementos, and seldom enter:  but there it is, pristine.

The book in question is La Sombra del Viento, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.  A critical and commercial success, it’s an erudite spooky thriller, and a real page-turner;  I had the sensation, not of reading in Spanish, but of transparently accessing the plot.

Even at that, there were expressions I didn’t get.   And rather than snuffle around in dictionaries, I borrowed a translation.   Every since Gregory Rabasa won a National Book Award for his rendering of Rayuela, standards of Spanish-to-English translation have been very high (Garcia Marquez once said, jokingly or not I do not know, that he preferred Rabasa’s prose to his own).  And this book is no exception, expertly rendered by Lucia Graves. 

In the following instances, with one or two exceptions  I knew the meaning of each individual word, yet the full sense of the whole still eluded me until the linguist unpeeled it.

mis penas de sainete  =>  my melodramatic woes

Alabados sean los ojos!  =>  “Do mine eyes deceive me?”; and, in another chapter,  “Who is this I see before me?” [Note the Arabic cast of this idiom, btw.  More anon, ojalá.]

Yo me apunto a un bombardeo  =>  “I’ll eat anything that’s thrown at me.”

Quite.  =>  Come off it.

Con un médico  va que se mata.  =>  A doctor will do fine.

a medio No-Do  =>  during the newsreel

El argumento le traía al pairo.  =>  As far as he was concerned, the plot was superfluous .

que no le sepa mal  =>  Don’t let that upset you.

una visita al puesto de chucherías del vistíbulo  para reponer existencias.  =>  a visit to the candy stand in the lobby to take on supplies.

Ya será menos.  =>  Aren’t you exaggerating?

Tú calla, desgraciado, a ver si te pego una leche que te mando a La Rioja.  =>  Zip it, bonehead, or I’ll kick you all the way to the Rock of Gibraltar.

Una ha de hacer de tripas  corazón.   =>  You just have to rise above it and get on with things.  [Here the translator could not quite render that colloquial use of una -- like French on only feminine.]

una cupletera en salto de cama  =>  a music-hall siren in a negligee

unas pantorillas helénicas  =>  classically proportioned calves

Yo que vosotros llamaba a la policía.   =>  If I were you, I’d call the police.

Pues mire usted por dónde.  =>  Funny you should say that.

Dile que me diga el qué.  =>  Ask him to let me know what to do about it.

This is masterly.   It rather puts in its place our own dull workmanlike labor…