In "Life is Meaningless, Say China’s Top Students: A Peking University professor reports that students have full course loads and ‘empty hearts’", Fu Danni (Sixth Tone, 11/23/16) introduces us to a newly minted term: kōngxīn bìng 空心病 ("empty heart disease").
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Lisa Feldman Barrett has an article on "The Varieties of Anger" in last Sunday's NYT. Most of it consists of reflections on pre- and post-election anger in our society. But Barrett has one paragraph in which she makes some rather dubious claims about the number of words for “anger” in several languages:
The Russian language has two distinct concepts within what Americans call “anger” — one that’s directed at a person, called “serditsia,” and another that’s felt for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, known as “zlitsia.” The ancient Greeks distinguished quick bursts of temper from long-lasting wrath. German has three distinct angers, Mandarin has five and biblical Hebrew has seven.
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The reaction to the video of Donald Trump's 2005 discussion with Billy Bush has focused primarily on its rape-culture aspects, including passages like this one:
Trump: I got to use some tictacs just in case I start kissing her
_______you know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful-
_______I just start kissing them
_______it's like a magnet just kiss
_______I don't even wait
_______and when you're a star they let you do it
_______you can do anything
Bush: whatever you want
Trump: grab em by the pussy
Bush: {laughs}
Trump: I can do anything
But I want to focus on one of Trump's phrases that's gotten less attention:
Trump: I moved on her like a bitch
When I first heard that, I thought Trump was using "'like a bitch" as a general-purpose intensifier applied to his own actions. But then I realized that canine similes are one of his favorite ways of dehumanizing others, and so he must have meant this one to apply to Nancy O'Dell, the woman that he "moved on" in this particular case.
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I learned about this phenomenon through this article:
"Why won't 541,000 young Japanese leave the house?" (Emiko Jozuka, CNN, 9/12/16):
According to a Japanese cabinet survey released Wednesday, there are currently 541,000 young Japanese aged between 15 and 39 who lead similarly reclusive lives.
These people are known as hikikomori — a term the Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry uses to define those who haven't left their homes or interacted with others for at least six months.
The term was coined as early as the 1980s, but there is still much debate on how exactly this condition is triggered and how it can be defined.
Somehow or other, I found both the sound and the meaning of this word to be intensely beguiling.
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