Language Log

Or maybe it was a genius move — the coverage hasn't quantified the effect on brand recognition and sales.  Jelisa Castrodate, "Mountain Dew Mistakenly Tells All of Scotland to Masturbate for 'Epic Thrills'", Vice 8/29/2018:

Not terribly long ago, The Scotsman newspaper printed a helpful list of 15 words that have alternate meanings in Scotland. It pointed out that pudding has nothing to do with a Jell-O mix but is often a sausage made from pigs’ blood, that messages means grocery shopping, and that if you mince something, you’ve pretty much effed it up.

Unfortunately, the paper failed to include chug on the list, which is why Mountain Dew UK is being dragged across Scottish Twitter for inadvertently telling everyone that they’re chronic masturbators.

On Monday, Mountain Dew UK tweeted a .gif of a visibly sweating twentysomething downing a bottle of neon yellow soda. (He’s tanning it, if you want to dust off another piece of Scottish vocab.) “Epic Thrills Start with a Chug,” it says—which is why everyone from Elgin to Dumfries started giggling to themselves.

I was recently a week late submitting a report to an administrative department of a French university, and experienced a moment of panic when I saw that the response began "J'accuse …"

But it turns out that in "J'accuse bonne réception ce jour de votre rapport", the French verb accuser can just mean something like "register" or "acknowledge".

Image on reddit:

From Tanner Greer:

I was playing around on The Communist Youth League's Bilibili channel the other day when I came across this video. You'll notice it is an attempt to appropriate an interview with Trump's chief of staff to legitimize Party narratives. Some of things the Party says are fair game, I suppose, but a lot of them revolve around… very creative translations. This is my favorite:

In this article, we have the following peculiar menu items:

餐蛋治 Meal egg rule

腿蛋治 Leg treatment

奶油多 Cream more

華田 Hua Tian

新界油菜 Rape in the New Territories

净面 Wash the face

加底 With the bottom

From Jerome Chiu:

(Source)

Further brilliant discoveries of Chinglish by Harry Asche, who several weeks ago sent us the dashboard prayer wheel featured in "Spiritual high tech" (7/14/18):

I.

From Geoff Wade:

Photo taken by Bathrobe at a Teppanyaki restaurant (currently undergoing renovation) in Qinhuangdao (a coastal port city in northeastern Hebei province):

Paul Midler submits this one from South China:

A fresh take on linguistic globalization:

https://youtu.be/8fvv_XrFUrk

Photograph of a packet of seeds purchased by Dara Connolly's wife in a Daiso 100-yen shop in Japan:

Photograph accompanying Jun Mai, "Why Beijing isn’t Marxist enough for China’s radical millennials:  President Xi Jinping may have called for a recommitment to Karl Marx’s ideology, but excuse some young Marxists if they are a little sceptical", SCMP (5/24/18):