Language Log

A sign warning against uncivilized behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region (Bloomberg):

During the last few days, there has been a huge furor over this sentence spoken publicly by the Mayor of Kaohsiung City, Han Kuo-yu (Daniel Han):

"Mǎlìyà yīxiàzi zuò wǒmen Yīngwén lǎoshī 瑪莉亞一下子做我們英文老師" ("Maria suddenly becomes our English teacher")

Newspaper articles describing the incident, which is now being referred to as the "'Mǎlìyà' shìjiàn「瑪麗亞」事件" ("'Maria' Affair"), may be found here (in Chinese, with video clip) and here (in English).

Mayor Han is notorious for his errant, flippant manner of speaking, but this instance — which he later claimed was a "joke" — quickly came back to haunt him.  To understand why this is so, we need to take into account a number of factors.

Today in Doonesbury:

Jared Dubin, "The NBA’s Other Offensive Revolution: Never Turning The Ball Over", FiveThirtyEight 3/14/2018 [emphasis added]:

We’re in a golden age for NBA offense. Teams are scoring 110.1 points per 100 possessions during the 2018-19 season, according to Basketball-Reference.com — a full 1.3 points per 100 possessions more than the previous high of 108.8, which was set two years ago.

This is largely — and rightly — credited to the boom in 3-point attempts. […]

But while the genesis of the other offensive changes can be neatly traced, the decline in turnovers is a bit more puzzling. […]

Regardless of why, the impact of turnovers cannot be undersold. […] You can’t score if you don’t have the ball.

Rachel Frazin, "Trump: I told Republicans to vote for 'transparency' in releasing Mueller report", The Hill 3/16/2019   [warning — annoying autoplay video clip]:

President Trump said Saturday that he told Republican leadership to vote in favor of releasing special counsel Robert Mueller's highly anticipated report, saying that transparency "makes us all look good." […]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, blocked the resolution in the Senate later Thursday, after it passed the House.

Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, objected to the resolution after Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) refused to add a provision to the measure asking the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel to investigate DOJ misconduct in the probe of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's email use and the Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications.

Schumer accused Graham of using a "pre-text" to block the resolution.

JoAnna Klein, "Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins", NYT 3/14/2019:

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots.

Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? Probably not, suggests a study published Thursday in Science.

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGTxWCLIQNM

Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email".

Yes, I know that I should unsubscribe — but this is harder to do than you might think, since they have registered me under a number of different email addresses, and add new ones when I tell them to unsubscribe the old ones. Anyhow, academia.edu seems recently to have achieved a level of transcendent fakery that almost makes me glad that that they're still spamming me.

Zeyao Wu found this picture on Weibo:

Thomas Lumley called my attention to the neologism and bilingual pun "whaumau", now a Twitter hashtag:

The only reason why I'm bothered about having very limited wifi access here… can't stream Matatini 😭 #WHAUMAU pic.twitter.com/X2yYL6Uji1

— Josephine (@soseesays) February 21, 2019

Tong Wang told me that she just learned a new word.  It's "up主“, a term borrowed from Japanese into Chinese, and refers to those who upload audio, video, or other resources to share on certain websites.

In this expression, zhǔ / nushi 主 means "master; lord; host; owner", etc. (it has many other meanings in other realms of discourse, e.g., "Allah; Lord; advocate; main; primary; principal", etc.)

News from the laboratories of democracy — Anna Staver, "Computers zip through 2,000-page bill after Senate Republican forces its reading", Denver Post 3/11/2019:

All work in the Colorado Senate came to halt Monday morning thanks to a procedural maneuver invoked by a ranking Republican.

Committee hearings, floor debates and votes were all delayed as House Bill 1172 — a 2,000-page bill revising Title 12 of the Colorado Revised Statutes — was read in its entirety.

“I’m just following the rules,” Sen. John Cooke, R-Greeley, said with a smile when asked about his request to read the whole bill. “We keep saying we want things slowed down, and this is the only thing we have in our arsenal.”

What Cooke wanted to slow down was the hearings and votes on the death penalty and oil and gas bills. He said he talked with Democratic leadership last week about delaying the oil and gas hearing but that he was dismissed.

Some estimated it would take 60 hours for a human to read the bill, but Monday afternoon Democrats used a maneuver of their own to cut that time drastically: After a Senate staffer read for three hours, they brought in five computers to read the bill simultaneously at a speed far faster than humans can understand.

I have a colleague at Penn who teaches medieval Arabic cultural history; his name is Paul Cobb.  He used to teach at the University of Chicago.

I have a friend at the University of Chicago who teaches medieval Chinese cultural history; his name is Paul Copp.  He received his PhD from nearby Princeton, which starts with a "P".

Boy, do I ever get them confused!

I mentioned this to Diana Shuheng Zhang, and she replied as follows: