Language Log

"Australian man claiming language mix-up jailed over Tokyo break-in", By Himari Semans, The Japan Times (10/18/24)

The behavior of the defendant was so peculiar that, even if he was not intending to rob or injure the old man into whose house he broke, he deserves the 240 days detention plus 490 days for a total of two years jail time to which he was sentenced today.

The report repeatedly mentioned that the defendant smelled "gasoline".  I wonder if what he was really trying to say was that he smelled "gas".

"gasu ガス" ("gas")

"gasorin ガソリン" ("gasoline")

As I explained here in February of this year:

One time on an expedition around the western part of the Taklamakan Desert in the center of Asia more than a decade ago, the Chinese driver played Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" scores of times.  He had other discs, but he only played that song, and he played it over and over and over again.  I liked it the first 10-15 times I heard it, but after that it started to drive me insane, and finally I had to tell him to stop. He was not happy.  Then, a few hours later or the next day, he would launch the Lady Gaga "Poker Face" litany all over again.

(slightly modified)

There was one phrase that Lady Gaga repeated more than a dozen times (actually twenty), and I had no idea what she was saying.  I listened as hard as I could, but the best I could make out was "Keereezmy, keereezmy", though sometimes I thought it was "Kill his mind, kill his mind". 

Since that time, I've probably heard the same song another thirty or forty times, and the line in question still sounds like "Keereezmy, keereezmy" or "Kill his mind, kill his mind".

ICYMI: Heather Schwedel, "The Story Behind “Let’s Go Brandon,” the Secretly Vulgar Chant Suddenly Beloved by Republicans", Slate 10/22/2021:

On Thursday, Rep. Bill Posey, a Republican from Florida, ended a speech on the House floor with a curious exclamation: “Let’s go, Brandon!”

Let’s go who now?

Posey had been railing against President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill: “They want you to help put America back where you found it and leave it the hell alone,” he said right before the Brandon cheer, which he accompanied with a desultory fist pump.

The expression coming from a sitting member of Congress caused a bit of a stir online. Why? Who’s this Brandon character and what does he have to do with building back, or not building back, America? The simple answer is that he’s a race car driver—but it’s a long story, and who Brandon is actually matters less than what the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon!” means. It’s a euphemism—and its direct translation is “Fuck Joe Biden.”

"Ren & Stimpy's Vacuum", a Facebook video:

President Trump meets with the Vice Premier of China, Liu He, in the White House:

Just got off the phone with my 2nd-grader granddaughter, Samira.  She was in her dad's truck out on some errand with him.  She had a new cell phone and was excited to talk to me on it.

Her dad got out to pick up some things he had left behind at a store.  Thereupon Samira started to tell me about her grand plan to do housework for the neighbors so that she could save up enough money to buy a "marmay tay".

"What is a 'marmay tay', honey?" I asked

She tried to explain, but no matter what she said, I just couldn't grasp what a "marmay tay" was.

Finally, my son got back to the truck.

"Tom, what is this 'marmay tay' that Samira wants to buy?"

In his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, President Trump received contradictory instructions about where to look.

Pres. Trump and Japanese PM Abe meet, shake hands in the Oval Office https://t.co/rG1oCqyhkf pic.twitter.com/njJ13Qi3s1

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 10, 2017

I am at UC Davis to participate in a Global Tea Initiative.  The first event yesterday morning was to go to a tea tasting presided over by Master Wing-Chi Ip.  A taxi came to our hotel to drive us over to a building bearing the name of Robert Mondavi (1913-2008), a giant in the California wine industry.  It turns out that there are two buildings on campus bearing his name, a mammoth Center for the Performing Arts and an Institute for Wine and Food Science.