Language Log

In "Trump Short-Circuits in New Video as Concerns Grow Over Cognitive Decline", Meidas Touch 10/14/2023, Brett Meiselas presents the apparent mis-use of an idiom as evidence of neurodegeneration:

A new video posted by Donald Trump to his social media account is the latest in a series of clips of the former president that have raised concerns about his rapidly deteriorating cognitive abilities.

In the video, Trump launches into a deranged rant accusing his former Attorney General Bill Barr, Senator Mitt Romney and former Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of conspiring with big donors and two GOP candidates running against him.

Trump says they are disloyal losers with no talent and that they “eat their young” by opposing him and that “Republican Nation” must not listen to them.

"But remember, Republicans eat their young. They really do. They eat their young. Terrible statement. But it's true," Trump said in a dark room where he records his videos. […]

It's possible that Trump's teleprompter said that Republicans "eat their own" and that Trump misread the phrase twice in just a couple seconds […]

But what is extra sad is that Trump's handlers seem to have completely lost control of the criminally indicted, disgraced GOP candidate. They had an opportunity to reshoot this prerecorded video prior to posting it, yet they didn't even bother.

"Hebei official’s shirt logo removed for ‘aesthetic reasons,’ triggering speculation among netizens"

By Global Times (Sep 05, 2023)

Official photos of a city Party chief in North China's Hebei Province, with his shirt's logo removed by editing, have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among Chinese netizens, with some speculating that it was a move to obscure the price of the clothing. 

In an article posted via Nangong city's official WeChat account on Sunday, the official's daily work was released, with one picture of his shirt logo in, followed by another two pictures without shirt logo. Some netizens questioned the reasons why they removed the shirt logo, and some checked the similar coat prices online discovering the high retail price for the item, according to media reports.

From the MIT International Student Office:

Blue moons are best known from the phrase “once in a blue moon,” which means “extremely rarely.” The first recorded use of this idiomatic phrase is in an anti-clerical flyer in 1528, published by William Roy and Jeremy Barlowe. In reference to the clerical corruptions, one said in Old English, “O churche men are wyly foxes […] Yf they say the mone is blewe / We must beleve that it is true / Admittynge their interpretacion.” The context is not one hundred percent clear; but a number of websites interpret this as a reference to priests who required laymen to believe in their statements regardless of how false or ridiculous these were.

A current example would be: “Once in a blue moon I go to a concert, only when there is a singer I really like.”

(source)

The following article is presented in typical New Yorker cartoon style, but I've retyped the text so that it will take up less space, allowing me to expatiate on the origin and meaning of the key phrase in the title.

Pardon My French: A Guide to French Colloquialisms

A visual "guide" to speaking and thinking like a French person

By Zoé Albert, New Yorker (July 14, 2023)

First the colloquial expression in French, then a literal word for word translation, then the idiomatic meaning:

tomber dans les pommes

"to fall in the apples"

to faint

Ben Zimmer spotted this interesting street sign in the New York Times photo essay, "DMs from New York City" (June 26, 2023).

Having just written about "Drainage issues" (6/25/23), with a graphic depiction of what causes the problem with the drainage system in question, I am emboldened finally to answer a question that one of my graduate students has been asking about for several years.  Namely, why do Chinese say "pull poo / shit / excrement" (lāshǐ 拉屎 / lā dàbiàn 拉大便)?  What's the logic of that usage?  How can one pull excrement when one defecates?  Wouldn't it make more sense to say "push" (tuī 推)?  Think about it.  A bowel movement involves peristalsis,

And what do doctors (and husbands) always say to a woman in labor?  "Push", of course.  And the baby comes out from the birth canal.

Here I am in the middle of Missouri, Macon, to be exact (not precisely the geographical center, but not very far from it either, and certainly not near the edges of the state), and I still don't know the origins of this authentic Doggyism:  "Move out of Missouri!"

As I explained in "How to pronounce the surname 'Mair' and other Doggie talk" (2/17/22),

My basketball coach at Dartmouth was a very colorful character known as "Doggie Julian" (1901-1967).  Doggie was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and, in his 66 years of life, held an incredible number of positions as professional athlete and coach (football, basketball, and baseball) at one high school, many colleges, and one professional sports team.  He coached the legendary Bob Cousy (b. 1928) at Holy Cross and with the Boston Celtics.  It's difficult for me to imagine how he could arrange and sign for so many jobs, let alone move to such a large number of locations and coach thousands of games, but he had a steel will and dogged tenacity.

Here are the ten top places in this year's event:

(source)

*VHM:  Instead of a slash, there should be a comma between ikusa and tatakau, plus three more Japanese-style readings:  ononoku, soyogu, and wananaku.  There should be a slash before ikusa, preceded by the Chinese-style reading sen in front of the slash.

Usage is split on this one.  Merriam-Webster goes for "hornet's nest", OED prefers "hornets' nest", and many other dictionaries and websites choose one of the four options listed in the title of this post.

To my mind, logically it should be "hornets' nest" because it's a home that belongs (genitive) to a colony of hornets (plural).

My high school sports teams were called "hornets", so I have a long acquaintanceship with this fearsome insect.

On the other hand, we also find "farmers market" and "farmers' market", usually the former, occasionally "farmer's market", but I don't think I've ever seen "farmer market".

David Marjanović mentioned Ramzan Kadyrov's verbal tic [dɔːn] (a contraction of the Chechen filler /duj huna/, literally "there is for you"), no matter if he's speaking Chechen or Russian.  That made me wonder what the equivalent would be in other languages?  Something like "ya know" in English?

The common Mandarin word for this type of expression is kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 / 口头禅 ("catchphrase; favorite expression; stock phrase; pet phrase; mantra", where kǒutóu 口頭 ["on the mouth / lips; oral"] is the disyllabic modifier of the head noun).  The three constituent morphemes mean "mouth / oral", "head", and "Zen / Chan (< Skt. dhyāna ["meditation"]), i.e., a meditative mantra (from Sanskrit मन्त्र (mantra, literally “instrument of thought”), from Proto-Indo-Aryan *mántram, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *mántram, from Proto-Indo-European *mén-tro-m, from *men- (“to think”). Doublet of mind) that is always on one's lips.

A synonym for kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 / 口头禅 is kǒupǐ 口癖, a slang neologism ("one's favorite expression; stock phrase; pet phrase", where pǐ 癖 means "craving; disposition; addiction; weakness for; habit"), which is an orthographic borrowing from Japanese kuchiguse 口癖 ("phrase that one uses regularly").

jin defang asked: 

New expression, or at least new to me: soup sandwich.  All that meant to me was an option at Panera, which didn’t fit the context. So I asked the last person who used it, Fred, and this is his reply.  (I also didn’t know what FUBAR meant but that was on google).

Fred's reply to jin defang:

I think it’s a Navy saying, at least that’s where I first heard and used it.

It’s used kind of like FUBAR only it’s an intentional mixed metaphor or non sequitur…like the saying “it ain’t rocket-surgery”.  

Saying it’s a ‘soup-sandwich’ is essentially saying it’s FUBARed.

That's the name of a treasured Language Log reader and contributor (see under "Selected Readings").  When I asked him how to write that in Sinoglyphs, he told me that it is this:

飢腸轆轆 / simpl. 饥肠辘辘

Wanting to get the tones, I typed "jichanglulu" into Google Translate (GT), but forgot to click the space bar to make the conversion to characters with Hanyu Pinyin transcription complete with tones.  When I pressed the speaker button to hear how that sounded, what came out was something like Mandarin with an English accent, but still perfectly intelligible:  "jichanglulu".  It resembled the Mandarin produced by the strangers on the street who read off the Pinyin texts handed to them by my wife, Li-ching Chang.  She was always delighted when she heard them pronouncing Mandarin without ever having studied it.  "Jichanglulu" — see, you can say it too!

Adding the tones, we get jīcháng lùlù.  What does this somewhat odd assortment of sounds signify?

GT says "hungry", more literally, "hungry intestines are rumbling".

ये चाचा ‘Lallantop’ है।

चाचा ने सर पर सोलर प्लेट लगाया है और उससे पंखा जोड़ को कडी धूप में मस्त ठंडी हवा का आनंद ले रहे है। pic.twitter.com/uJe3AZVt7C

— Shubhankar Mishra (@shubhankrmishra) September 20, 2022