Nathan Vedal wrote to tell me about an interesting mistranslation into Chinese that he recently came across.
Having purchased some not particularly healthy, but quite delicious, instant noodles produced by a Korean company, he was perusing the Chinese instructions, which included the following sentence:
Neal Goldfarb, "The Recess Appointments Clause (Part 1)", LAWnLINGUISTICS 2/19/2013:
The verdict: the Recess Appointments Clause is a lot less clear than the D.C. Circuit makes it out to be, and the court’s reasoning isn’t very good.
Steve Butcher and Maris Beck, "Journalists appeal in bid to protect sources", The Age 2/5/2013:
The grounds of appeal announced on Monday state Justice Sifris erred in not finding Mr Goldberg was wrong in failing to set aside the summonses.
Five negatives. Degree of difficulty: E. Judges' score: 9.6.
Pedantry, Dr. Johnson said in the Rambler, is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. And learning is never so unseasonable as when its display impedes the workaday business of making sense. Take the sentence from The Economist that I ran across when I was writing my word-of-the-year piece for Fresh Air on "big data":
Yet even […]
People — especially Americans — are ignorant. This is something that Everyone Knows, because we read or hear about it from time to time in the mass media. Thus we can listen to Robin Young tell us on NPR's Here and Now that
A new survey conducted by Chicago's McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which has yet […]
It was reported yesterday that Microsoft has released a patch for a recently uncovered flaw in Internet Explorer. Thus Fahmida Rashid, "Microsoft Releases Emergency IE Patch", Security Watch 9/21/2012:
Microsoft has released an out-of-band update fixing at least five vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, including the recently disclosed zero-day vulnerability already being exploited in the wild. [emphasis […]
… at least about the use of "summative that" in certain contexts. Thus one of Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage is "Vague Reference":
Vague reference is a common problem in sentences where “this,” “it,” “which” or other such words don’t refer back to any one specific word or phrase, but a whole situation.
Arnold […]
Tyler Cowen, "I wonder if this is actually true", Marginal Revolution 7/12/2012.
Researchers who have scanned books published over the past 50 years report an increasing use of words and phrases that reflect an ethos of self-absorption and self-satisfaction.
"Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960,” […]
A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line:
This was, of course, the scond in a series, preceded by Erotic Grammar and followed by Erotic Rhetoric…
William Deresiewicz, "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths", NYT 5/12/2012:
THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting […]
The marginally linguistic topic of freedom of linguistic expression occasionally occupies me here on Language Log, as you probably know. And you may be aware that my instincts tend toward the libertarian end of the spectrum, and the defense of the First Amendment. Possibly you are also aware that there really isn't anything I […]
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Crash blossom of the week: "Don't help old, blind council tells parking officers", The Age 2/1/2012.
Mike Paluska, "Investigator: Herman Cain innocent of sexual advances", CBS Atlanta, 11/10/2011:
Private investigator TJ Ward said presidential hopeful Herman Cain was not lying at a news conference on Tuesday in Phoenix.
Cain denied making any sexual actions towards Sharon Bialek and vowed to take a polygraph test if necessary to prove his innocence.
Cain has not taken […]
The best part of Monday's post on the Facebook authorship-authentication controversy ("High-stakes forensic linguistics", 7/25/2011) was the contribution in the comments by Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski. It's interesting to compare the situation they describe — and the frustration that they express about it — with the history of technologies for answering questions […]