In Turkey, outspoken newspaper columnist Önder Aytaç has received a 10-month jail sentence over an errant "k" on Twitter.
Here is how the situation is explained in Zeynep Tufekci's widely cited Medium post:
Meet “k”, the character that got newspaper columnist and academic Önder Aytaç a 10 month jail sentence in Turkey. Aytaç is a columnist for a newspaper affiliated with the Gulenist movement, followers of Fettulah Gulen, the self-exiled cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and was once the AKP government’s closest ally, but now is among its bitterest enemies. The fight between the former allies surfaced over the closing of “private schools,” or “dershaneler,” which the Gulen movement operates in dozens of countries around the world, including the United States. These dershaneler are crucial to the movement as they are the source of both recruits and money. The Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdogan, announced in late 2013 that he would be shutting them down.
During the bitter fight, Onder Aytaç tweeted this:
http://t.co/zYBEmYiD =>> KAPAT BE USTAAAAAAMMMMMMK :) => yorumkariniz da yazinin altina lutfen
Ambiguity exists in all languages, especially if an author is not careful to forestall it. On the other hand, writers and poets sometimes intentionally court it for literary effect, in which case there are at least Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Two literary attributes that are perhaps more salient in Mandarin than in many other languages are ambiguity and rhyme, the former because Chinese words are not strongly marked grammatically (e.g., hóng 紅 ["red"] can be an adjective, noun, or verb [dōngfāng hóng 東方紅 {"the east IS RED"}]) and the latter because of the huge number of homophones in the language.
Currently, a set of seven sentences has been circulating on the internet. They are preceded by a notation which states that a high level test for foreign students of Chinese in 2013 included the following sentences, each of which the students had to explain in two different ways. Before listing and translating the sentences, I should mention that it is not immediately obvious that each of the sentences can be interpreted in two different ways. To a certain degree, I would compare the effect of reading these sentences to that of looking at optical illusions; sometimes you have to look a very long time before you can see both versions of the illustration, and sometimes you never see more than one version, no matter how hard you look.
I've been reading way too much Victor Mair. In the restaurant of my hotel in London I just saw an English girl wearing a T-shirt on which it said this:
One of the random things I happened to notice yesterday, in a list of people who passed away in 2011, was the name of Leonard Stern, co-creator of Mad Libs. (Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky marked the game's 50th anniversary here on Language Log.) For those who've never seen it, Mad Libs is a word game in which one player prompts a second player for a list of words — give me a noun; ok, now an adjective; ok, now another noun, etc. — where the kinds of words needed are determined by labeled blanks that are situated in a little story that only the first player can see. In the second step of the game, the two players read the story together with the words inserted in their proper positions. The very first Mad Libs gave the following as an example:
"_____________! he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible
exclamation adverb
______ and drove off with his __________ wife."
noun adjective
Thinking about Mad Libs last night after a bedtime conversation with my six year old, I've concluded that someone really needs to design a linguistics course entirely around Mad Libs.
On my blog, here, some commentary on Geoff Pullum's recent posting on life's twists and turns, putting a name (sentential overlap portmanteaus) to the phenomena he talked about, and giving an updated inventory of postings on phrasal overlap portmanteaus.
That's the title of a post (October 13, 2011) on "Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience," a fascinating website hosted by Shaun Usher. It refers to this letter sent to the British Embassy in Calabar, Nigeria in 1929 by a disgruntled employee named Asuquo Okon Inyang who had been fired, apparently for slacking off on the job:
Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture. One of my favorite spoken-word performances by Scott-Heron appeared on the 1978 compilation, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron: " The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)." It's full of linguistic play, including an explanation of "old-fashioned ghetto code" used to mask phone conversations from snooping authorities.
The code involved infixation of "ee-iz" [i:ɪz] between the onset and nucleus of stressed syllables. So-called "[IZ]-infixation" would later become popular in rap music (particularly as used by Snoop Dogg), though OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower has found examples back to a 1972 glossary on New York drug slang. There was also a predecessor in the talk of carnival workers (carnies), with the word carn(e)y represented in the code as kizarney. (See Joshua Viau's "Introducing English [IZ]-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond" for some background.)
You can hear the whole performance on YouTube here. The relevant part starts at about 6:28:
We've had Gnome Chomsky ("Just say gnome", here), and the puns continue with Gnomeland Security, available in several forms (posters, t-shirts, magnets) from several sources (Northern Sun is where I first saw it). Here's the magnet from Northern Sun:
Other sites offer actual advice about gnomeland security: schemes for protecting your garden gnomes from theft.
In an article entitled "Yuan more pun" on The Economist's "Johnson" blog (Oct 28th 2010), Lane Greene Gideon Lichfield has tracked a long string of bad puns based on the name of the Chinese unit of currency. The Economist's Yuan groaners stretch back several years.
