Language Log

Vito Acosta sent in this photograph of a sign at Tianmu Lake ( Tiānmù hú 天目湖) in Jiangsu:

Wang Tong sent in this photograph of a sign which a friend of hers took during a visit to Japan.  The Chinese translation is quite amusing.

Announcements

1.

"Please be visible to the engineer OR* train will not stop."

*spoken with very heavy emphasis

Is there a choice?

2.

"Your attention please:  trains en route to destination may be late.  Passengers are advised* that times may increase or decrease** at any time."

*the preceding three words are uttered with rising crescendo, with a slight fall at the end

**strong emphasis on each of the preceding three words

This entire announcement is spoken in a seemingly snide, sneering, pompous tone.  No sympathy or apology whatsoever.  (In Japan, the railway administration is thoroughly ashamed when a train is half a minute late.  In Austria, where many of my relatives worked for the railways as much as a century or more ago, one could set your watch by the arrival and departure of the trains.)  I loathe this announcement more than any other — especially when one is made to wait for an hour or more, after which a train may simply be cancelled without explanation.

Sign for a tram stop in Istanbul:

A stylish clothing company comes up with sexy new shoes worthy of an elf or a pixie, and look at their ad:

Photograph taken by Yuanfei Wang in Baihou Town 百侯镇, Tai Po 大埔, Guangdong Province:

Restaurant sign in Mayfair:

Neil Kubler spotted this restaurant sign last week in Xi'an in northwest China:

Thai sign over a sink in a restroom, from Alexander Bukh on Facebook:

From Nora Castle, who came across this restaurant which has just opened in Coventry, England:

From the Facebook page of the Hong Kong poet, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, president of PEN Hong Kong, as reproduced in Andrea Lingenfelter, "At This Moment, Everyone Is a Revolution: The Poems of Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and the Hong Kong Crisis", Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books (8/4/19):

Photograph in the Wall Street Journal, "Hong Kong Protesters Fill Streets in District With History of Violent Clashes:  Police are under pressure to contain weeks of tear-gas-soaked demonstrations against mainland China’s growing influence", by John Lyons and Joyu Wang (8/3/19):

[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane]

Like pretty much everyone else I know, I’ve been following the news out of Hong Kong with a mixture of hope and admiration and absolute dread. I was looking at reports from yesterday’s rally in support of the police when something caught my eye: the sign text in this image:

(Source)