Language Log

From George Takei, on Bluesky:

This left me in stitches.

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 10:00 AM

This is a phrase that has been sweeping through China during recent months.  In Chinese it is "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间".  The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" started out in sports to characterize a situation where one side has such a commanding lead that it would be impossible for the other team to catch up.  It's a foregone conclusion who is going to win, so the leading team can do what is called "play out the clock", putting in second- and third-string players to give them experience.  Furthermore, it would be considered unsportsmanlike to pile up the score against the losing team.

The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" was only applied to historical analysis when essayist Hu Wenhui coined the fuller phrase "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间" in a 2023 WeChat post.

Daysia Tolentino, "Trump shares fake photo of Harris with Diddy in now-deleted Truth Social post", NBC News 9/20/2024:

Amid the recent news of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ arrest, former President Donald Trump reposted a doctored image falsely showing Vice President Kamala Harris with Combs with text questioning if she was involved in his alleged “freak offs.”

The image, which Trump reposted to his Truth Social profile, is an edited version of a 2001 photo of Harris with former talk show host Montel Williams, whom she briefly dated, and his daughter Ashley. The edit replaced Montel Williams’ face with a photo of Combs.

This is not the first time the Republican presidential nominee has posted a fake image in an effort to bolster his campaign. Trump has posted several AI-generated images, including some falsely depicting Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing him, and one of Harris speaking to a crowd of communists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.  It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!  So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.  A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms. 

In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.  To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”

Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]

The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract.  Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds.  If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.

Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.

It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate.  Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself.  It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.

We missed it this year, but the New York Times didn't , and posted a link to Laurel MacKenzie's "Pirate Lingo 101":

From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):

I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.

But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.

ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.

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— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Not only is it hard to spell, few people know what it means.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, on my trip to SLC three or four days ago, I fulfilled three of my childhood dreams:  1. float in the Great Salt Lake; 2. hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person; 3. visit the Family Research Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest genealogical library in the world (I remember that when I was a graduate student more than half a century ago, Mormon archivists spent two years filming every Chinese genealogical record in the Harvard-Yenching Library; at that time I did not understand why they would do that, now I do).

I was chatting with some people in the lobby of the motel where I was staying, and  a young man in his early twenties asked me why I wanted to do #3, visit the genealogy research center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he himself was a Mormon).

Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.

J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":

Apparently not. Given this recent tweet, in which Google AI Overview explains that "October 21 is not a Libra, as the Libra zodiac sign is from September 23 to October 22", I thought I'd try for myself. The result had a different format but the same problem:

I departed a total of about 260 miles from my Route 30 / Lincoln Highway running route to come down to Salt Lake City for a few perduring reasons.

1. From the time I was a little boy, I have always wanted to float in the Great Salt Lake.

2. From the time I was in junior high school, I've always wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person.

3. From the time I was in high school, I have always wanted to visit the world's greatest collection of genealogical records, created at great expense and effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:

In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.

Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?

I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?

There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia.  No one could be closer to the center of the turmoil than the gentleman in the middle of the doorway in this photograph: