Language Log

My rehab roomie has an unusual habit when speaking.  He randomly inserts the syllable "way" in his phrases (seldom finishes a complete sentence) and often repeats it multiple times.  Some examples:

I way

I way way

My wife way

My son way

I want way way way to toilet way.

Bed way

At BMR, the first thing the doctors, nurses, and techs ask patients when they interview them is "Do you feel any pain?"  And they want you to quantify it on a scale of 1-3-5 / small-medium-big.

What is pain?  Physical, mental?

I tend to think of it rather as Sanskrit duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/ दुःख) than as English "pain", because the former is more all encompassing (corporeally, spiritually) than the latter, which I feel is more physical.

"Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’,Hanzi Shells, English Souls: The Europeanization of the Chinese Language", by Jingyu, Old North Whale Review (2/09/26)

Learning Chinese is widely sold as the ultimate linguistic challenge. Students are warned that they must rewire their cognitive faculties entirely to grasp an alien logic. But there is a reality that few textbooks admit: The Chinese language has been Europeanized.

Beneath the intimidating surface of the Chinese Characters (汉字, Hanzi), the operating system has been quietly swapped out. If one strips away the characters and the tones, what remains is not the mysterious, ancient syntax of the Tang Dynasty poets. It is a structure that is shockingly familiar.

[This is a guest post by Michael Broughton.]

I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:

To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).

Throughout my research and teaching career,  I have always emphasized that, when it comes to genuine etymology of Sinitic, what matters are the sounds and meanings of the constituent etyma, going all the way back to the fundamental roots.  The shapes of the glyphs used to write the eyma in question are far less important than the sounds and meanings.  In fact, discussion of the shapes of the glyphs is often more of a distraction than a benefit to understanding what the true etymologies of given etyma are.  We demonstrated that by the sharp disagreements we had over the meanings of the shapes of the ancient glyphs / forms / shapes of such a simple / definite / concise lexeme / morpheme as "woman; female".  That is why the sound nǚ and its attendant meaning "woman; female" are more important for Sinitic etymology than is the the three-stroke character 女, albeit the latter derived from more complicated and difficult to explain / interpret forms.

François Lang sent in the following quandary:

"Against We", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (11/28/25)

Quoting the author:

Wolfgang Behr, "Towards a Conceptual Prehistory of 'Brainwashing' / xinao 洗腦".  (pdf here and here)

In Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguścik and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, eds., Re-Thinking Literary China, Essays in Honor of Andrea Riemenschnitter. [Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l’Extrême Orient; 40] Berlin: DeGruyter-Brill, 2025, pp. 7-66.

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".