Language Log

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

From Claudia Rosett:

I have a question about a phrase that China’s foreign ministry attributed to Xi in his call with Biden last week:

In English:  “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”

That phrase, in English translation, is exactly the same as threats Chinese officials issued against Hong Kong during the protests in 2019.

I am wondering if this is a standard threat in Chinese — much as it is a proverb in the West — or something that for effect in English they have swiped from us.

I’m not sure it’s of any great importance which way that goes, but in the cataloguing of PRC threats made in English, it stands out as memorable, a phrase the press latches onto. Perhaps because it is so familiar to us.

If you have any insights on this, I’d be grateful.

Someone asked me recently about (sources for exploring) the history of idioms like "low-hanging fruit" in business jargon. Unable to suggest any truly suitable data sources, I did a few of the obvious things.

From the Facebook page of a friend:

Lately I've been encountering this expression quite a bit on the Chinese internet:

dǎ liǎn 打脸

It seems transparently to mean "slap face", but my Chinese students and friends all characterize it as jargon and netizen slang, and they say that it has only been gaining currency within the last two-three years.

Here I rank "dǎ liǎn 打脸" numerically against other terms for "slap" that I've been acquainted with since I started learning Chinese more than half a century ago.

dǎ liǎn 打脸 ("slap face") 48,700,000 ghits — that was yesterday's tally; this morning it is 59,500,000

dǎ ěrguāng 打耳光 ("box [someone's] ear") 3,420,000 ghits

dǎ yī bāzhang 打一巴掌 ("strike with the palm") 2,300,000 ghits

dǎ zuǐbā 打嘴巴 ("smack on the mouth") 975,000