First it was the British from afar, and now it is the Chinese from the north who are imposing themselves on the people of Hong Kong. In both cases, the imposition has been not merely political and economic, but has had important cultural and linguistic implications. Language-wise, under which master have the Hongkongers (also known […]
Size-wise, Estonia (45,339 sq. km; 17,500 sq. m) is much larger than Philadelphia (369.59 sq. km; 142.7 sq. m), but, in terms of population, Philadelphia (1,603,797) is slightly bigger than Estonia (1,313,796). I have been to Estonia, and was utterly captivated by the wealth of its art and architecture, the depth of its history, the […]
John Leicester, Raf Casert, and Lori Hinnant, "In remembering WWI, world warned of resurging ‘old demons’", Associated Press 11/11/2018 [emphasis added]: As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and dozens of other heads of state and government listened in silence, French President Emmanuel Macron used the occasion, as its host, to sound a powerful and sobering […]
[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane, written on the evening of 3/24/17] At a friend’s dissertation defense this morning, a certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus, explaining the appeal of prosimetric vernacular literature to audiences in late imperial Shandong, noted that “people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.” This cracked the room up, […]
Laura Ellis, "Why Go There? A Linguist Dissects Jim Gray’s ‘Wild-Ass’ Zinger", WFPL 11/1/2016: Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul and his opponent, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray squared off Tuesday night in their only face-to-face debate of the election season. For an hour, they talked about the future of coal, Kentucky’s heroin problem, and more. But […]
We've had some discussion lately about the sports subjunctive/baseball conditional/bare paratactic conditional. I'm going to stay out of any naming controversies, but I do want to pick up on the fact that this construction typically involves using a present tense verb form to describe a future event. Like this: We've also been discussing Keith Chen's […]
Over at the Poetry Foundation's blog, poet D. A. Powell comments about time in Mandarin: DA Powell: Every sentence written in English contains some anxiety about time. I’d love to write a poem that was Time-Free. Is that possible? ME [Rachel Zucker]: Why? Is this particular to English? DA: I don’t think English is necessarily […]
"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is […]
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In the latest xkcd cartoon you can see a graph on which the frequency of intensificatory adverbs (fucking ____ in red, and ____ as shit in blue) accompanying a selection of adjectives, from annoying and pissed down through broadly decreasing frequencies to fungible and peristeronic. (The latter really does exist, and really does mean "of or pertaining to […]
Pakistan is playing England in a series of cricket matches, and on Sunday, August 29, Mike Brearley filed from the famous Lord's cricket ground an unbearably pompous article in The Observer about how things are going. "Cricket is the cruellest game," he began; "It is also, by the same token, the kindest" — I will […]