I will not be posting here till next week, as I am taking a few days off blogging. (Is there a name for that? Comments are disabled though).
LATER NOTE: this is on account of a family 70th birthday and I will also see some fireworks (I mean incidentally, in that you can’t miss them in England on November 5th)

Comments are disabled because I have been getting a very large amount of spam in the last few days. Abnu pointed out that if you limit comment length you can cut out some kinds of spam, but then some comments are long and useful (although maybe 1000 characters is enough). Abnu quotes J-Walk Blog on this.

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If you want to comment, send me an email and I will post the comment.

Various stock figures people the pages of English law: the man on the Clapham omnibus, the reasonable man / person, the officious bystander. There is also (new to me), in patent law, the man skilled in the art, possibly to become the nerd.

IPKAT reported on 28 October (topic continued 3 November) that Sir Robin Jacob introduced the term (nice quotes) and was criticized by Lord Justice Pill:

As to the “man skilled in the art”, he is described by Jacob LJ as a ‘nerd’ (paragraphs 7 and 11) and as “not a complete android” (paragraph 10), which suggests that he is part of the way to being an android. A ‘nerd’ is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Edition 1999) as “a person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious” and an ‘android’, in the same work, as “(in science fiction) a robot with a human appearance”. I hope that those working in this field will not regard “men skilled in the art” as figures from science fiction who lack social skills. Jacob LJ, will think me less than supportive of the development of the language of the law but I do respectfully prefer, for its clarity, Lord Reid’s terminology cited at paragraph 7 of the judgment”.

The IPKAT wonders, as do I, if this is the right definition. Of course, the Concise Oxford no longer has the reputation it once did. A commenter quotes the OED: ‘A person excessively interested in something and finds it hard to get along with people’, and links to the nerd test (500 questions, many only for Americans, which may explain why I’m 81% nerd pure).

bq. Readers of Welsh-language websites will be able to get instant English translations with a new computer programme developed by BBC Wales.

bq. Vocab lets users hold the cursor over a word and get an instant translation without having to leave the site.

bq. Developed by BBC Wales’ New Media department, the programme is available free of charge to Welsh-language websites outside the BBC.

There should be more on Morfablog some time, but I can’t understand what it says (unless it integrates the program).

(BBC News, with thanks to Derek Thornton)

Michael Kadlicz of Juristisches und Sonstiges reports on the sort of problem that sometimes causes translators grief, when there’s an obscure word in the source text: a fellow-lawyer dictated ‘Briefdoppel’ and the typist wrote ‘Fristmoppel’.

I remember trying to help a former student with a long document that looked perfect but contained several instances of the word ‘culmany’. I thought the big OED would do it, but no. It was only when I fished out an ancient U.S. forces translation of the Criminal Code that the word ‘calumny’ emerged. And sometimes, as I have read elsewhere this week, expressions like ‘Klammer zu’ appear in the running text.

Somehow I don’t associate Franz Kafka with Mont Blanc pens (seen in Nürnberg today). The ballpoint is particularly snazzy and they have Kafka’s elegant signature on the end.

Could this be the beginning of a trend? Franz Kafka butter toffees, Franz Kafka cheese spread, Franz Kafka barbecue tongs. Franz Kafka laptop case, Franz Kafka beach ball.