Language cuts: more gloomy news

More gloomy language news. First, from the BBC: Three of the BBC language services are going off air later, as a result of cuts to the World Service budget. The BBC Serbian and Latin American services end more than 70 years of broadcasting on radio, but the Latin American service continues online. The Portuguese for Africa …

Serendipity and the scents of war

I wrote the other day about scent, as one of my favourite words (serendipity’s another). Scent isn’t a word you’d normally associate with the war in Afghanistan. But it cropped up in a Radio Scotland programme, Black Watch, 3 Scots: A War in Their Own Words, recounting life in the Afghan war zones. The account takes …