This is how you sell the locals the idea that the whole pedestrian precinct is about to be relaid.

You can climb up the scaffolding and look at plans (with the sun behind you).

You can buy the cuddly mole for 5 euros in the happy shops about to have all their custom disrupted.

Before this, you planned such a stunning new design with unusual stones that none of the bidders on the project were capable of presenting a correct tender in good time. After that, you decided to have simpler stones.

LATER NOTE: This picture was taken in the City of London in December 2004 and is in response to Paul’s comment (click to enlarge):

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log, with the assistance of Chris Waigl of Diacritiques, examines a mysterious translation.

A discourse (I suppose) on comments, consisting of 738 thereof, e.g.:

Comment by Brian C.B. —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:51 pm
Egregious mspelling.

Comment by Eric Scharf —
April 7, 2006 @ 10:11 pm
Off-topic, self-promoting link.

Comment by Kevin B. O\’Reilly —
April 7, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
Nazi analogy employed; Godwin’s law invoked.
Thread over!

Comment by Jim Henley —
April 7, 2006 @ 11:21 pm
I would have gotten away with it too . . .

Comment by Barry —
April 8, 2006 @ 12:23 am
(incomplete)
6a – Boast about comenter’s education and IQ – mispelled, of course.

Comment by PhillipJ. Birmingham —
April 8, 2006 @ 12:27 am
Non-sequitur fart joke.

(Via Anggarrgoon)

Liquidated damages are a sum fixed in advance by the parties to a contract as the amount to be paid in the event of a breach. They are recoverable provided that the sum fixed was a fair pre-estimate of the likely consequences of a breach, but not if they were imposed as a penalty.
(Oxford Law Dictionary)

The German equivalent is Vertragsstrafe. We sometimes hesitate to translate Vertragsstrafe into English as contractual penalty, because the word penalty is used to refer to the kind of agreed damages that are extortionate. But liquidated damages is not a term easily understood.

On liquidated damages and penalties, there is an article at Consilio.

But Cheshire, Fifoot & Furmston (1996 edition) says that the term used does not matter so much as the intention of the parties:

bq. The fact that the parties may have used the expression ‘penalty’ or ‘liquidated damages’ does not conclude the matter, and the court must still decide whether the sum fixed is a genuine forecast of the probable loss.

I see Furmston was at Brizzle.

At Language Log, David Beaver considers a point that sometimes arises in legal texts:

bq. a noun phrase, say dead rapper, can be interpreted at a completely different time from the main verb.

His example is a headline, Dead rapper fired first shot.

bq. The firing event apparently took place around 4:30AM on Tuesday at the CCC club in Detroit, while dead rapper first described Proof only afterwards, maybe not long before he was pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital. While we’re at it, first shot also only became an apt description sometime after the shot was fired.

(The rapper’s name was Proof).

This has struck me in connection with references to the defendant in court, referring to occasions before the proceedings and with deceased testators referring to things they did while they were still alive and before they wrote a will.

Judith Tonhauser, a German who originally studied computational linguistics at Stuttgart. is writing a Ph.D. on this subject at Stanford University.

The Independent writes that the English language will soon have its 1-millionth word.

bq. * Spanish linguists say there are 225,000 words in contemporary use.
* The largest edition of the Duden German-German dictionary contains about 200,000 words
* The Russian language has just reached the 125,000 mark.
* French has 100,000 words, one-sixth of the figure used in the UK.But the Academié Française, the body that defines the language, recognises 25,525.

I don’t know how big the vocabulary of German is supposed to be. I know the Duden doesn’t include words from specialist jargons.

(Via Onze Taal and langwich sandwich)