Language Log

Christian Horn writes:

Oreo cookies are famous and widely known.

I never attached the name "Oreo" to single piecesof the cookie, but once you start this is possible:

Until today, I had never heard of "Dry January".  I learned about it this morning from an article in The Harvard Gazette:  "How to think about not drinking:  For starters, treat Dry January as an experiment, not a punishment, addiction specialist says."  

Remember Prohibition (in history; in the United States)?  It didn't work, did it?

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was decidedly a dry town when I moved here half a century ago, but then a different sort of people than Quakers started to move in, until now the borough is decidedly wet.

I was planning to write a post on this chain of phenomenal gas stations cum country / convenience stores (gives a new meaning to that expression), so was tickled when jhh beat me to mentioning it in this comment.

Several days ago, i visited one in the outskirts of Dallas.  As per many things Texas, it was BIG.  Outside, it had more than 80 pumps, and inside it had more than 80 cashiers.  The store stretched on and on and on, longer than a football field.  I felt like I was in a Star Wars space ship cantina.  The store-station was equal to ten of our biggest Wawa station-stores, which I treasure.  It had a parking lot that accommodated hundreds of cars.

From Xinyi Ye:

I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)

Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.

This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.:  not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):

1. dòufù 豆付 (lit., "bean pay") for dòufu 豆腐 ("tofu; bean curd")

2. jiāndàn 煎旦 ("fried dawn") for jiāndàn 煎蛋 ("fried egg")

From surya:

I took this at the Grand Street Skewer Cart in Manhattan.

From Dan Fagin, "We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies. It’s a Revelation.", NYT :

For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America […]

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. […]

Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

Charles Belov saw this sign on Clement Street (aka New Chinatown) in San Francisco:

Photograph taken at the Ningbo airport: those items are not allowed to be taken into the city of Ningbo.

zìyuàn fàngqì wùpǐn tóuqì xiāng

自愿放弃物品投弃箱

"disposal bin for items voluntarily discarded"

[This is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall]

Analysis of Google search data for 2025 reveals the most searched for slang words in America.

We have had so many posts dedicated to Popeye's favorite vegetable (see "Selected readings" below), but we haven't yet done justice to one of my favorite spinach dishes: spanakopita.

Spanakopita (/ˌspænəˈkɒpɪtə, ˌspɑː-, –ˈkoʊ-/; Greek: σπανακόπιτα, from σπανάκι spanáki 'spinach', and πίτα píta 'pie') is a Greek savory spinach pie. It often also contains cheese, typically feta, and may then be called spanakotiropita (Greek: σπανακοτυρόπιτα "spinach-cheese pie"), especially in northern Greece.^{[citation needed]} In southern Greece, the term spanakopita is also common for the versions with cheese. 

("Savory spinach pie") 

(Since we have previously had lively discussions on subjects related to today's topic, I will publish this essay as is, but with the admonition that it is for advanced Siniticists, though naturally all Language Log readers are welcome to partake.)

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

I was (routinely) digging into the etymology of Taioanese U-LÓNG, which, like UDON, comes from Japanese うどん, and it turns out that うどん is cognate to WONTON, Cantonese 雲吞 (of c.), & Mandarin 馄饨.

The 廣韻 has 餛飩; so does Cikoski, with the gloss K[IND OF] DUMPLING. So the word is pretty ancient. 集韻 has it written 䐊肫, apparently. Using that as a search term, I found an article on your blog, but the commenters were generally unaware that 餛飩 had this alternate form in the medieval book language. (Of c., the person that wrote 䐊肫湯 may not have known either.)

Since I wrote The True History of Tea (2009; now available in a number of foreign languages and coming out in pb on 1/27/26), I've been a tea aficianado and connoisseur, so I was stunned when five days ago I learned of the existence of two types that are completely new to me.

The first is called Adeni tea, and I was privileged to taste it at Haraz Coffee House that recently opened next to Penn.  It is run by Yemenis, who really know their coffee and serve mouth-watering pastries, many of which I had never encountered before.

I already had a good impression of Yemeni food purveyors when I stopped at a Country Market by the side of Old Route 30 in Svensen WA run by a mother and her son, though I didn't have any hot, freshly brewed tea that time.