Language Log

Christina Xu has written "A Field Guide to China's Most Indispensible Meme" (Motherboard, 8/1/16).  Her essay includes more than a dozen illustrations, the first of which is this one:

On reddit, under the title "German gift card makers have a precarious grasp of the English language":

The other day I stumbled on a corner of British television previously unknown to me: The Jeremy Kyle Show. We have similar things in the U.S., like Jerry Springer, but Jeremy Kyle seems to have stumbled on a viral idea that our counterparts haven't yet discovered, namely the entertainment value of confessions and arguments in linguistic varieties that the host (and most of the audience) finds hard to understand.

Thus Natalie Corner, "'Scottish Jennifer Aniston' on Jeremy Kyle baffles English viewers who can't understand a word", Daily Record 7/28/2016:

Maintaining the theme of civility in this year's political campaigning, "Billionaire Mark Cuban rips Trump", CNN 7/31/2016:

You know what we call a person like that,
you know, the screamers, the yellers, the people who try to intimidate you?
You know what we call a person like that in Pittsburgh?
A jagoff!
Is there any bigger jagoff in the world than Donald Trump?

A concert entitled "Sounds of Eurasia", held in a church, by a youth orchestra I'd never heard of from somewhere in the -stans region of Central Asia, admission being free and unticketed. It didn't sound too great. But I saw a flyer for it at local shopping center on Saturday, and the event was scheduled for that very evening. I showed the flyer to my friend Carol and we decided (since we could hardly complain about the price) that we would be adventurous and risk it. I wasn't confident; I stressed that in the worst-case scenario we might be in for a a slow and painful lesson teaching us only that Central Asian music was a cacophony of strange whiny-sounding horns and out-of-tune one-stringed bowed instruments and was not for us. "Doesn't matter; you can stand almost anything for an hour or so," she said, gamely insisting we should go.

Boy, did we ever misunderestimate. The Youth Chamber Orchestra of TÜRKSOY is stunningly good. It was an amazing evening.

A few linguistic and interactional clues to Donald Trump's motivations, in his politically disastrous back-and-forth with Ghazala and Khizr Khan, can perhaps be found in some examples of his use of the word vicious:

I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2016

Amber Lynn (known as "Amberella") is a Philadelphia street artist whose repertoire includes versions of candy-valentine-heart messages pasted on walls around the city. For the recent political convention, her message was this:

If you think about it, "home made" is pronounced the same way as "homade" would be if it was a word:

And maybe "homade" *is* a word?

Joe Heller's cartoon for 7/29/2016:

Taylor Swift sings "shake, shake", but in Singapore and Malaysia, everybody is saying "shiok, shiok".

Source:  "Where or how did the phrase Shiok or Syiok used in Malaysia & Singapore originate?" (Quora, Feb. 2015)

Rachel Premack, "Watch: This orangutan is uprooting what we previously knew about language", Washington Post 7/28/2016:

At first glance, this video of an orangutan imitating a trainer’s grunts may not seem incredibly significant. But primate researchers say Rocky, the 11-year-old orangutan in the video, could fundamentally alter how we think about spoken language.

“We don’t know exactly how human language emerged, but we do know that great apes have the cognitive ability to understand language,” said Robert Shumaker, executive vice president and zoo director at the Indianapolis Zoo. “We can no longer say that humans are the only species who can learn new vocalization and control [it] using the vocal folds or voice box.”

From David Russinoff:

I wonder if you've done, or are aware of, any research relevant to the following observation. In the articulation of a "d" or "t" followed by a schwa, the tongue may or may not leave the alveolar ridge.  (I just did some cursory research on parts of the mouth and hope I got that right.)  My (highly unscientific) observation over recent years is that, at least in the pronunciation of certain words, such as "student", removal of the tongue is increasingly common.  In fact, this trend is so apparent to me that I find it remarkable that most people don't seem to have noticed it.  I also have an impression that the trend is especially pronounced (unfortunate choice of words) among younger speakers, but my attempt to support this observation by listening to various pronunciations of "Clinton" over the past four nights failed miserably.

Today's strip that did not run in papers. Seems harmless to me, but I guess these are sensitive times. pic.twitter.com/mVse54tmEg

— Stephan Pastis (@stephanpastis) July 28, 2016