The title and the following observations come from Rebecca Hamilton: I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: on Foot to Constantinople, as I convalesce from COVID-19 (I've had a hard time of it), and I stumbled upon an aside he made about the French "hongre," meaning "gelding," as does the […]
Tonight we're rewatching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in honor of Ennio Morricone, the composer of its iconic score, who died today. Deediedeedledee nwah nwah nwaaaaahhh And I've just had a thought about the title that turns on the quite different interpretations of the-Adj constructions in English and Italian, which I mainly know about from […]
A favorite expression of Dōngběi rén 東北人 ("Northeasterners") is zhóu. It means "mulish". The adjective zhóu describes a person who is stubborn, but not in an obnoxious, offensive way, rather in a cute, amiable, charming, or naive manner. Despite its relatively high frequency in Northeastern speech, there is no known Sinograph / Chinese character that […]
Jack Shafer, "Week 86: FBI’s Blockbuster Probe of Trump’s Loyalty Revealed", Politico 1/12/2018: Thanks to a redaction error made in a legal filing by convicted felon Paul Manafort’s lawyers, we learned that special counsel Mueller believes that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort lied about passing, in spring 2016, political polling data to two Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs he had […]
An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. With this post, I begin […]
This is one of the important stories that I haven't had time to blog about over the past couple of months. Let's start with some of the more tasteful jokes, nicely presented using the rhetorical device of praeteritio — Constance Grady, "How an author trademarking the word “cocky” turned the romance novel industry inside out", […]
In the recent decision enjoining the suspension of DACA (but giving the government a 90-day mulligan), the court referred to the people who are affected by DACA’s suspension as “undocumented aliens” rather than “illegal aliens,” and it dropped a footnote explaining why it made that choice: Some courts, including the Supreme Court, have referred to […]
At the conclusion of "Barking roosters and crowing dogs" (2/18/18), I promised a more philologically oriented post to celebrate the advent of the lunar year of the dog. This is it. Concurrently, it is part of this long running series on Old Sinitic and Indo-European comparative reconstructions: “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16) […]
A few days ago, I posted a post consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a Language Log post (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet by Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor, quote-tweeting* an earlier tweet by […]
Victor Mair published a post yesterday under the title "Google is scary good", and reader Philip Taylor commented: "Scary good" reads very oddly to me; would not "scarily" be more customary in such a context ? The answer is that there are quite a few adjectives (or, perhaps one should say, adverbs homophonous with their related […]
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I recently saw a list of revisions suggested by the editor of a scientific journal, which combined technical issues with a number of points of English usage, including these two: Please try to avoid the word ‘impact,’ unless it is part of a proper name. It is now over-used (its ‘impact’ is diminished), and doesn’t communicate […]
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] I know you've written a lot about character amnesia in the greater Sinosphere. But I think I witnessed the related, but significantly different, phenomenon of (grammatical) particle amnesia (or perhaps, "drift") during a recent trip to Hawaii. As you know, Hawaii has a large nikkei* population. This […]
Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016: Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses […]