"Within one year or more" ???

From Frederick Newmeyer:

I recently had to cancel a flight with Delta Airlines and was directed to their webpage that discusses what to do to get a refund. I found the following bizarre instruction:

Please retain the ticket/document number(s) below as they have become an eCredit and the remaining value can be used to rebook a flight within one year or more from the original purchase date.

What on earth does ‘within one year or more’ mean? Taken literally, it means that I could rebook a flight five years from now, but they can’t possibly mean that. All attempts to get an explanation from Delta have failed. Can anybody explain what ‘within one year or more’ might mean?

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Doing a literature

Today's Dinosaur Comics:

Mouseover title: “this has TREMENDOUS implications for my two original characters, Anna Phora and E. P. Strophe”

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The beauty of open access

Just published is a volume edited by David Holm, Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia (De Gruyter), in their Studies in Manuscript Cultures series.
Now available open access at the De Gruyter website.
The book has chapters on Hokkien, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Yao, Zhuang, and other Tai-speakers who use Chinese-based vernacular scripts.
Previously announced on Language Log here.

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PUA

This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

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Pitfalls of machine translation

[This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor]

I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.

[VHM:  Don't trouble yourself by trying to read the fine print of the schedule itself.  Just pay attention to the note about the pickup location at the bottom of the schedule, which is enlarged below the fold.]

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Freemium worship

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Old, new, and mixed Cantonese colloquialisms

I dislike calling non-Standard Mandarin Sinitic language expressions "slang" (almost as much as I am dismayed when people call Sinitic topolects dialects — we've been through that countless times).  Others may differ, but in my idiolect, "slang" is pejorative, and I distinguish "slang" from "argot; jargon; lingo; etc.", which — for me — denote particularization of occupation, not crudeness or cursing, although they may sometimes be associated with lower social levels.

slang

1756, meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", origin unknown. Possibly derived from a North Germanic source, related to Norwegian Nynorsk slengenamn (nickname), slengja kjeften (to abuse verbally, literally to sling one's jaw), related to Icelandic slengja (to sling, throw, hurl), Old Norse slyngva (to sling). Not believed to be connected with language or lingo.

(Wiktionary)

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AIs on Rs in "strawberry"

The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they're using AI for anything

[image or embed]

— Chris PG | PapaGlitch (@papaglitch.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 5:20 AM

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Kinds of science

Today's xkcd — "The Three Kinds of Scientific Research":

Mouseover title: "The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'"

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Stop throwing eggs and get to work

It's a card game with a strange name.  "Throwing eggs"  is a shedding-type card game in which the players (2 pairs of 2 partners) try to get rid of all their cards before their opponents.

The characters in Guandan (掼蛋) literally mean "Throwing Eggs". The second character is a homophone of the character 弹, meaning bomb, which is also suggested as an origin for the game's name. An alternative name for the game is Huai'an Running Fast (淮安跑得快), referencing the city where the game originated.

(Wikipedia)

I've overheard card players in the West refer to decisive card plays as "throwing a bomb", so the name makes sense after all, if you think of "dan" metaphorically.

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More on gendered badass

Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024:

I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever been publicly competent at anything. It’s been worked to death and rendered meaningless. Everyone from Courtney Love to Martha Stewart to Rosa Parks has been described as one and, at this point, it’s so overused that to call a woman this is a form of dada performance art. 

In short: We simply have to stop using the word “badass” to describe any/every woman on earth who has entered the cultural dialogue for something other than a federal crime. And, I’m not a language cop but just know that if you use “badass” and think it conveys anything at all, you simply must think again.

What was once patronizing and gendered is now maddeningly vague and borderline inscrutable. It’s a collection of AI-generated slay queen, #girlboss memes gathered into a single word. 

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The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia

Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales:  Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane….  By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:

"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)

Rob McElhenney's attempts to learn Welsh provided a highlight of television show Welcome to Wrexham.

But if things had been different, the language may not have been so alien to him – and he might have spoken it in school or even at home.

It was the intention of settlers in parts of his native Philadelphia for the government and people to use Welsh.

However, the attempts in 1681 did not prove as successful as those later in Patagonia, Argentina.

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"Badass"

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