Language Log

This is apparently from X in February of 2023, though it can now be found elsewhere:

So is ass an intensifier in "super mario level ass geological formation", or has it just been bleached into a formative for turning a phrase into a modifier?

"Some idioms and terms pertaining to Japan's favorite grain", by Yuko Tamura, The Japan Times (9/25/24)

Rice is an essential part of the Japanese diet, so naturally it's also a part of the language. In fact, the word for "meal," ご飯 (gohan), also means "cooked rice." Before it's cooked, however, you'll see it referred to as 米 (kome). Below are a few terms and idioms that either use the kanji for rice or refer to it in some form.

• 朝飯前 (Asameshi mae): No sweat, a piece of cake. Something that can be done before breakfast. Ex., それくらい朝飯前だよ (Sore kurai asameshi mae da yo, That’s no trouble at all).
• 日常茶飯事 (Nichijō sahanji): Common, everyday things such as drinking tea or eating food that are a part of daily life. Ex., 彼の遅刻は日常茶飯事だ (Kare no chikoku wa nichijō sahanji da, His being late is a usual thing).

Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.

J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":

From Bored Panda (8/5/24).  For people who love food and the culinary arts, this issue of Bored Panda, which has fifty parts, is almost like a bible.

Shannon McDonagh, "'What the Hell Is This?': Crocodile-Like Fossil Rewrites Triassic History", Newsweek 7/11/2024:

The groundbreaking discovery of the Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis reveals the presence of waterside crocodile-like creatures around the globe during the Middle Triassic.

Broadly known as pseudosuchian archosaurs—four-legged, carnivorous beings with an armadillo-like coating—these creatures are now known to have existed coastally between 247.2 million and 237 million years ago.

Oh wow this is an AMAZINGLY FASCINATING find! The 'Chinese characters' seem intractable, but are just phonetically written Mandarin syllables (initial, nucleus, coda):
c(e) 策+ e 額 + (e)ng 鞥 = ceng
Next to it a Manchu transcription: ᡮᡝ᠋᠊ᠩ

I wonder where it comes from? https://t.co/p2T42WANGD pic.twitter.com/z9V2DO5SaC

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) June 4, 2024

I've been scarce here for a while, due to moving (for a year, while the Quadrangle is reconstructed) and dealing with some overdue professional obligations. Time will continue to be tight for me, and it'll be a couple weeks before I have time for a Breakfast Experiment™ but I'll try to find time for a series of interesting short posts, starting with this one.

English nouns ending in -ics come in several morphosyntactic flavors, some of which act like plurals while others act like singulars.

Frequent commenter AntC sent email about a transitive use of cooperate, used by Karen Friedman Agnifilo in an interview with Michael Popok about Walt Nauta's role in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case:

And so it makes sense why
uh they would want to cooperate him
and i- it also makes sense why they would reach out before indictment
and give him that opportunity.

I've often wondered why we use such seemingly random, yet colorful, terms to describe a state of drunkenness.  The list of words for drunkenness goes on and on and on:

stoned; tipsy; bashed; befuddled; buzzed; crocked; flushed; flying; fuddled; glazed; high; inebriate; inebriated; laced; lit; muddled; plastered; potted; sloshed; stewed; tanked; totaled; wasted; boozed up; feeling no pain; groggy; juiced; liquored up; seeing double; three sheets to the wind; tight; under the influence; under-the-table

(source)

And there are so many others, such as pickled and soused and bombed and high as a kite, which make immediate and obvious sense — to an English speaker.

Lately, I've been seeing official illuminated signs by the roadside that say "BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING", which I take to be directed at people who are high on drugs or the response of law enforcement officers to people who are obviously in an alcoholic stupor and say to the police, "I'm fine, just a little bit buzzed."

From C.B., an exchange in S.F.:

This week I heard an unusual usage from a random stranger on the street.

I was questioning whether a stairway in the adjacent block – which was not visible from where I was without climbing a steep hill first – had been repaired and could once again be used for through access. They replied that it had been, "But it's overgrowin'."

I couldn't tell whether they were using the word "overgrowing" where I would have expected "overgrown" or whether they were pronouncing "overgrown" with syllabic "n".

Continuing our series on dragons, this note and illustration come from Juha Janhunen, the Finnish linguist:

Happy Blue Dragon Year to everybody! Below is the official flag (1889-1912) of the Manchu Empire (in the west misleadingly known as "China"), which happens to have a blue dragon on it. Manchu muduri 'dragon' still seems to lack an external etymology. Any suggestions?

(See at the very bottom of this post for a possible connection to "otter".)

Today is the Lunar New Year's Day, and it's the Year of the Dragon / /lʊŋ³⁵/ . As such, a kerfuffle is stirring in China and the English-speaking world regarding the English translation of lóng ⿓ / 龙 / 竜 (J), which is usually "dragon".

I will begin with the pronunciation of the word.  In MSM, it is lóng (Hanyu Pinyin), lung2 (Wade-Giles), lúng (Yale), long (Gwoyeu Romatzyh [the configuration of GR tonal spelling for this syllable indicates second tone), лун (Palladius).  They all represent the same MSM syllable.  I will not list the scores of other topolectal pronunciations for Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, Hokkien, Xiamen / Amoy, Sichuan, etc., etc. and their dialects and subdialects.

A.A. wrote:

In the recent Christmas movie "Jingle Smells", a character says "[if I had experienced what you did] I would have crawlen into a bottle too". Is this usage of the form crawlen grammatical in English? Perhaps a dialect thing? Because to my ear it sounds valid, but others have said that to them it sounds like a mistake.