Language Log

A month ago, we studied the enigma of "Anti-mouth-bowls" (3/1/15).  It was Jan Söhlke who had sent me a photograph of what were labeled "Anti-Mund-Schuessel" ("anti-mouth-bowl").  He mentioned that the same Viennese shop had other bowls with equally mystifying names and promised to go back and take pictures of them.  Jan has now delivered on his promise by sending the following photographs:

Via Jason Schrock on Twitter…

Hey @LanguageLog check it out pic.twitter.com/Hxh1ngD55y

— jason (@jason_schrock) April 2, 2015

Axel Schuessler's daughter is visiting Japan and saw in a store the shirt below:

Yvonne Treis sent in this photograph of a sign at an “America English” language school in Addis Ababa/Ethiopia that she took in May 2009:

Ben Zimmer called my attention to this book cover, via David Adger's Twitter account:

Jeroen van de Weijer sent in the following photograph of a veterinary hospital in Shanghai:

Video for a new Chinese electronic watch, submitted by Stephen Hart:

Jan Söhlke sent in this photograph taken in a shop in Vienna:

Felix Sadeli sent in this list of colossal mistranslations of food names. We've already seen several of these and explained a number of them on Language Log:

• "Puke " (10/8/10)
• "Gourmet Chinese cookshop " (1/27/14) — "Soup for Sluts" (in the comments)
• "Combating the monolithic tree mushroom stem squid " (5/3/10) ("The jew's ear Juice" — also in the comments)

Here I'll just give brief explanations for four of the droller items in Chinese and Japanese on the list.  Perhaps Language Log readers will be inspired to follow suit for some of the remaining items, especially those in other languages.

From Bob Sanders comes this sign at a burger joint in the Melbourne, Australia airport:

Tim Leonard sent in the following photograph of a curious menu item (via Reddit):

From Toni Tan:

Just as some folks have a special knack for being able to unravel "The latest word soup from the Bloomberg headline crew", I'm usually able to make sense out of Chinglish that is inscrutable to most readers.  Here's a humdinger sent in by Matt Trevyaud:

Using method: Ready to slice sandwiches and stuffed, in the middle of two sandwiches into a stuffed, hundreds die in a sandwich press, take off the broken edge and die, a lovely delicious sandwich snack is ready.

It's apparently a real set of directions for a sandwich cutter manufactured in China.  When posted, it usually comes with a photograph of the graying, crumpled paper on which the directions are printed in an undistinguished typeface that looks thoroughly authentic.