Laurence

I have a PC and a laptop. My daughter gave me an I-Pad for Christmas. It does nothing, it seems, that I cannot do easier on my PC. I also have a cell phone full of useless gizmos that I never use except to make calls when no landline is at hand. What am I missing, if anything?

How does one translate these two terms into Ozzie, Kiwi, South African, and Jamaican English, etc.

Num tilburi cabia apenas um passageiro. Conhecia o Brasil algo como o "Hansom cab" de Londres e Nova Iorque para dois passageiros? Havia fiacres de quatro rodas para quatro passageiros, e como esses se chamavam?

Most current national alphabets were standardized by the early printers. Was this the case with Polish, and if not, then from when does the current system date? When was the language itself standardized?

Would Brits be more encouraged by a less American category name? OAP? Pensioners? Victims of Agism?

With the EU in financial and economic free fall the UK's interests lie westward. So forget about adopting Central European Time and think about the annoying gap of an extra hour that opens up twice a year when we change our clocks one week out of sync with North America. Why cannot we conform? My own transatlantic phone calls always get caught out by this stupid difference.

At 83 I have suddently realised that I always choose to go upstairs on a double decker bus, a habit I got into even before I reached my teens. I am not sure why. Maybe it is for the view?

Houve tres veiculos, um ònibus, 20 mortos. Quero saber onde aconteceu.

Often when I have almost finished answering some question on Yahoo, my answer vanishes and I am back at the original question, so I have either to abandon the attempt or start over. Is there some fatal keystroke I am making in error, or what else am I doing awry?

The Phonecians gave their letters names which were taken over, with slight modification by the Greeks and Hebrews, but the Romans replaced them with simplified names based on their sounds, A, BE, CE, DE etc. which have been copied by every language using the Roman alphabet. J, Y and Z were different as they were added later. But H and X have names differing from one language to another. What did the Romans call them?

I am aware only of "Merry England," "La Belle France," "Holy Russia." Can anyone tell me of others?

This is an abusive term for not really saying what one thinks. The "animous" ending clearly indicates a state of mind, but I have only heard the whole word, never seen it written and cannot find it in my dictionaries in any imaginable spelling. My spell checker is no help.

I accidentally perpetrated this mistranslation and was wondering how many in the community would spot what is a fairly frequent error in translating from Germanic into Romance languages. Also, do you remember actually being taught in school to avoid this specific type of solecism?..

"If you are aware of all the circumstances, you will forgive everything." I have found attributions to "a New Testament (female) saint," "Madame de Stael," "Spinoza," and "French oral tradition." But I need an exact citation.

Since it is advantageous for a right handed person to ride his horse on the left hand side of the highway, the left hand rule of the road was almost universal until the Jacobins in France in the 1790s decided to impose the maritime rule of passing port to port on land transport for the mere sake of uniformity. Bonaparte, Hitler, Mussolini and Chang Kai Check imposed the French rule on the places they ruled or conquered. But why ever should czarist Russia have adopted a French idea?

The Czech province of Bohemia is probably the most Germanised part of Eastern Europe with the most disciplined, conformist, easily governed population, notorious as the chief recruitment ground for the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, satirised by Kafka, and yet Bohemian is an international term for someone with a disorganised, "arty", free-love life style. How come?

Acredito que se trate dum sindicato paulista dos anos 1970 ou 1980

As I can find nothing via Google, I suspect it is offensive, in which case I only need the general sense not spelling out any profanity.