Language Log

Listening to the news on the radio during my drive into the city this morning, I heard the weather reporter say this, "Looking out the window, I saw my neighbor sweeping rakes".

Senator Ted Cruz making an impassioned speech at a Senate hearing on Tuesday about reaching a “bipartisan agreement” on crime:

“How about we all come together and say, ‘let’s stop murders?’

“How about we all come together and say ‘let’s stop rape?’

“How about we all come together and say ‘let’s stop attacking pedophiles’.” 

(Independent [10/1/25]; videos here and here)

This sequence has been extensively meme-ified:

Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese.  At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant.  Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that.

Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, I thought I should begin by investigating the etymology of the word, as is my bent.  So I pulled out my trusty 1960 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, my lexical vade mecum.  Here's what it had (has — I still keep it on my desk):

[After L. von Sacher-Masoch (1835-1895), Austrian novelist, who described it.]  Med. Abnormal sexual passion characterized by pleasure in being abused by one's associate; hence any pleasure in being abused or dominated.

My recollection is that, at the time, I couldn't readily find an English-Chinese dictionary that had the term "masochism" in it, so I may have made up this rendering for it myself, although I'm not absolutely certain that I did so:

zìnüèdài kuáng 自虐待狂 ("madness of self abuse") (129 ghits)

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the most common translation of "masochism" in Chinese today is this:

shòunüèkuáng 受虐狂 ("madness of enduring / accepting / receiving abuse") (13,700.000 ghits)

It seems that nobody attempted to render "masochism" in such a way that it would reflect the fact that it derived from a person's surname.

Trump’s favorite verbal tic is now 1,000 pages of legislation
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Monica Hesse, WP (5/29/25)

Everybody has what I call a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 (lit., "oral zen", i.e., "favorite expression", kind of like a mantra).  Mine, in Nepali, is "bāphre bāph!"; Pinkie Wu's, in Cantonese, is "wah!"; a Harvard historian I know loves to say "precisely!"; and so forth and so on.  President Trump's is "beautiful".

I seldom dream, but last night a line got stuck in my brain:  "dub it up", repeated over and over, with a crisp reggae beat.  I couldn't figure it out, and was annoyed that I didn't know what it meant.

I don't think that I had ever heard it before in my waking life.

The first thing I did after washing up in the morning was google it.  Turns out there was a record called "Let's dub it up" by a male British artist named Dee Sharp (b. 1956 in London; to be distinguished from the more famous American female singer Dee Dee Sharp [b. Philadelphia 1945]).  I listened to the Dee Sharp song here (Fashion records 1980), and was astonished to find that it had the same melody and beat as the repeated line in my dream, so I must have heard it at some time in my life, whether I was aware of it or not.

When I first encountered the Chinese expression "pua" several years ago, I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it, so I asked my students.  I wrote it on the board and pronounced it according to English phonology.  They laughed and told me they thought I was saying "pǔwa 普哇", whereas they pronounce it as an English letter acronym:  P-U-A.

You can hear it for yourself here.

@phuongviviyam

might start using PUA in English too #greenscreen #chinese #chineselanguage #chineselanguagelearning #gaslight #gaslighting

♬ original sound – viviyam

It's a subject that won't go away.

When I was in high school, I concocted an embarrassingly sophomoric signature:

I wrote that iteration of my youthful signature on the front flyleaf of my beloved Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1960), which, from that year till today has been one of my most precious possessions.

When I went away to college in 1961 and ever since, I adopted a signature that was the exact antithesis of that early one:  

It was / is mechanical and measured, with no flourishes whatsoever.

Most people I know have one of three basic types of signatures:

1. extravagant, fast, illegible — these are usually "important" people who have to sign their signature scores of times each week; doctors; lawyers; executives; entertainers….

2. beautiful, well-composed, flowing, legible — my sisters, most women

3. crotched, cramped, crooked, angular, unesthetic, slow — my brothers and me, engineers, scientists, who write with what I call "chicken scratches"

[This is a guest post by Christopher Paris (website).]

I just wanted to thank you for your 2009 essay on the misinterpretation of “wēijī” as meaning both opportunity and crisis.

This controversy takes on dramatic new importance as the misinterpretation has been used to justify the invention of a school of thought that “risk is positive.” When challenged with English language dictionaries dating back to the 1700s, showing risk as typically meaning a potential threat or harm, the proponents of “positive risk” run to the wēijī trope. They say, “the Chinese came up with this 3000 years ago, so English dictionaries don’t matter.”

One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction.  Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter.  They simply are fated / predestined to be together.  They have an undeniable affinity for each other.

I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).  The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.).  Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.

Japan Subculture Research Center.  A guide to the Japanese underworld, Japanese pop-culture, yakuza and everything dark under the sun.  Telepathy (以心伝心) and Other Coincidences (奇遇)
By jakeadelstein (Jul 10, 2024)

A generous helping of creepiness from Japan.  Here goes:

I was writing to a former intern at Japan Subculture Research Center, Fresca, and asked her to send me her thesis to read—just as she mailed me. I think I was two seconds ahead of her. It was a remarkable coincidence or maybe telepathy. Which got me interested in the many words for the complementary subjects in Japanese. So for your entertainment—here you are.

Lately I've been seeing greater use of this kind of sentence structure:  "He is an awesome hero — not".  And (mis)negation has always been a favorite topic for discussion on Language Log.  Consequently, I'm calling to your attention two recent publications on "not".

"'Not' in the Brain and Behavior." Cas W. Coopmans, Anna Mai, Andrea E. Martin, PLOS Biology 22, no. 5 (May 31, 2024): e3002656.

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656.

Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world.

…

Lord knows we've encountered many bizarre translations and explanations of the much maligned Mandarin term, weiji (see "Selected readings") below, but this is one of the weirdest crosslingual definitions that has ever come to my attention:

Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis.  The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity."    Suicide is a permanent solution, and eliminates other options.  So if you're hurting so much that you are willing to pass the pain on to those who care, perhaps you could use this dangerous opportunity to try some other options first.

(Source:  Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure:  A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), ch. 5, p. 178)