Language Log

I just learned via the mosling mailing list that a Russian team has established a multilingual corpus of toilet graffiti, which in their English language home page they call the Corpus of Latrinalia. I haven't looked at it and know nothing about it – I'm just reporting its existence. They have warnings on the front page that it contains obscenities "as well as racist and other insulting inscriptions", which do not reflect the attitudes or opinions of the corpus gatherers. But I find the project too amusing not to report.

https://linghub.ru/wc_corpus/index_en.html

And it was done with the support of the Russian Science Foundation. Good for them. ("them" – both.) Let's hope they get some good research out of it so that the RSF doesn't regret the decision and react badly to future non-standard proposals!

From Guy Freeman:

These advertisements on a Hong Kong bus (plastered on the back of every seat on the upper deck) use Cantonese so unashamedly, at least in their main type, that I just had to pass them on.  Clearly advertisers still appreciate that written Cantonese is the best way to connect to the Cantonese-speaking masses.

It's a good joke, but probably just an accidental one — "Quiz: What kind of Brexit are you? MPs can’t agree on what form, if any, Brexit should take. Can you do better?", Politico.eu 4/1/2019, as of 14:30 Philadelphia time, is just a few inches of blank space, with no questions, no answers, no links, no way forward…

"Dubstep artist Skrillex could protect against mosquito bites", BBC News 4/1/2019:

The sun is shining on your skin, there's a breeze in your hair and someone has just handed you a coconut with a straw sticking out of it. This is living.

But just as you start to relax you find yourself clawing at your own skin, scratching at the mosquito bites that have developed on your body over the past few days.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

According to a recent scientific study, the way to avoid mosquito bites is to listen to electronic music – specifically dubstep, specifically by US artist Skrillex.

OK, it's April Fool's Day. And BBC Science Reporting is traditionally prone to credulous Weird Science stories, especially about animals ("It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section", 8/26/2006). So this will turn out to be a joke, or maybe click-bait exaggeration of some marginal results about mosquitoes' response to sounds, right?