Language Log

That's a literal translation of “sùliào pǔtōnghuà 塑料普通话” ("Plastic Mandarin") or “sùpǔ 塑普” for short.  "Plastic" here means "artificial, inauthentic, fake"; in Changsha Xiang topolect (also known as Hunanese), the first syllable is a homophone for "bad", so the short form also means "bad Mandarin".

Chenzi Xu, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, is from Xiangtan (population nearly 3 million), a prefecture-level city in east-central Hunan province, south-central China. an hour's drive from Changsha  She went to a middle school in Changsha (population over 8 million), capital of Hunan province, so she knows the local language well.

The hometowns of several founding leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Chairman Mao Zedong, President Liu Shaoqi, and Marshal Peng Dehuai, are in Xiangtan's administration, as well as the hometowns of Qing dynasty and republic era painter Qi Baishi, scholar-general Zeng Guofan, and tennis player Peng Shuai.

(source)

Other notables who hail from Xiangtan include the Taiwan politicians Ma Ying-jeou and James Soong, so this is a place whose language habits bear considerable weight nationwide.

In case you hadn't heard:

"Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of ‘woman’ to include trans women"

By Timothy Bella, Washington Post
December 13, 2022

A few paragraphs excerpted from the article:

Here are the ten top places in this year's event:

(source)

*VHM:  Instead of a slash, there should be a comma between ikusa and tatakau, plus three more Japanese-style readings:  ononoku, soyogu, and wananaku.  There should be a slash before ikusa, preceded by the Chinese-style reading sen in front of the slash.

Danielle Abril, "Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.", WaPo 12/12/2022:

When 24-year-old Mary Clare Wall read a message that said her colleague would be “out of pocket,” she and her young co-workers giggled.

As Generation Z workers, Wall and her peers interpreted the phrase to mean that their colleague planned to do something crazy or inappropriate, not that they would be unavailable. But in the same manner, she confused her older colleagues with her regular use of the word ‘slay.’

“I [had to] give an almost definition of the word ‘slay,’” she said. “Now they all text me ‘slay.’ They’re excited they know how to use it.”

Generation Z — defined by Pew Research Center as those born between 1997 and 2012 — is bringing its own style of communication to the workplace. As conversations have increasingly moved online to text-driven environments, Gen Z’s form of messaging is creating a quirky challenge for multigenerational workplaces: the potential for confusing, anxiety-inducing and sometimes comical miscommunication.

I spent last week at the ASA conference in Nashville. The "ASA", as members all call it, is the Acoustical Society of America — but asa.org is "American Students' Assistance", while asa.com is the "American Sailing Association", and Wikipedia offers 75 other options for the ASA initialism.

This is general problem. Another organization that I belong to is the LSA, as the members of the Linguistic Society of America call it — but lsa.org is the "Louisiana Sheriffs' Association", and lsa.com is apparently malware associated with Windows' Local Security Authority, so I won't link to it. The Linguistic Society of America, having been pre-empted by the Louisiana Sheriffs, used to be online at the URL lsadc.org, but is now linguisticsociety.org. Wikipedia offers 48 other options for LSA. They include "Latent Semantic Analysis", which is the earliest of the word-embeddings at the root of the tree whose recent fruits include ChatGPT — which recently evoked some confusion on this blog as to the meaning of the GPT initialism.

There are obviously 26^3 = 17576 three-letter initialisms, and nearly all of them are spoken for, multiple times over.

I started to ponder this problem because, over in the comments section of "The value and validity of translation for learning classical languages" (12/9/22) where we are having an energetic discussion about how to pronounce "www", Philip Taylor averred, "I pronounce it as 'World-wide web' (i.e., three syllables)".

That took me a bit aback.  Made me stop and think.

It must mean that Philip, and most people, I suppose, think they pronounce "world" as though it had one syllable.  Fair enough.  That's what all dictionaries and online resources I've consulted hold:  "world" has only one syllable.

With change of policy and official narrative also came the falling out of favor of the task force in charge of lockdowns, the Chinese people are not one to miss out such an opportunity to make some good old soviet jokes about their previous overlords#TheGreatTranslationMovement pic.twitter.com/0IQnlg3Epb

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动官方推号 (@TGTM_Official) December 9, 2022

Marcus Hayes, "Eagles players, including A.J. Brown, say ‘No thanks’ to Odell Beckham Jr.", The Philadelphia Inquirer 12/8/2022:

The question was simple. A.J. Brown, the Eagles’ $100 million No. 1 receiver, understood all of its ramifications and implications.

Would injured free-agent receiver Odell Beckham Jr., a diva’s diva, fit in with the culture and chemistry that has helped the Eagles start the season 11-1? After all, malcontent running backs LeGarrette Blount and Jay Ajayi, preseason and deadline additions, nested nicely with the Birds during the Super Bowl run in the 2017 season.

“I think OBJ would be … would be OK to be … I mean, why not?” Brown told me.

He adjusted his hoodie. He smiled.

Two years ago, during the middle of lockdown when we had to teach all of our courses via zoom, one student was conspicuously superior to all the other dozen or so students in my first-year Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) class.  She was clearly an innately smart student, but in addition she seemed to possess a special knack for grasping the grammar, structure, and meaning of the texts we read day after day.  When it came to parsing a particularly difficult passage, she was consistently the one who could figure it out fastest and most accurately.  I had no idea to what particular talent or prior training her excellence could be attributed.

I should mention that this student was from China, as were two-thirds of the others.  Only one-third of the class were from other countries.  I should note, parenthetically, that by and large the more languages a student knows well when he or she takes LS/CC, the better she or he tends to perform in my class.  For example, one of the best students in recent years was a Mexican whose native tongue is Spanish and who is advanced in Korean.  I let him pronounce the texts in Korean.

Talented Chinese netizens use this graphic (no idea who drew it though) to illustrate what the state gov has done in past three years to complicate pandemic control mechanism with rounds of empty talks but achieved zero result solving the real problems. Very telling. pic.twitter.com/25X4G4iiWK

— Vivian Wu (@vivianwubeijing) December 8, 2022

Two recent developments seem to point in opposite directions. On one hand, there are R&D cutbacks as voice assistants are seen as failures. On the other hand, there's widespread enthusiasm for the impressive capabilities of ChatGPT, including suggestions that it will take over internet search (Ben Cost, "Rise of the bots: ‘Scary’ AI ChatGPT could eliminate Google within 2 years", NY Post 12/6/2022), destroy writing education (Stephen Marche, "The College Essay is Dead", The Atlantic 12/6/2022), and more.

[Preface:  scores of versions of the Wawa logo here.  Take a look before plunging in to the post.]

Brother Joe told me the good news that Wawa stores are coming to my home state of Ohio!

Wawa's are great!  Anyone who went to Penn would know this because their stores are near the campus and their hoagies / subs, salads, mac and cheese, coffee, snacks of all sorts, etc. are tasty and wholesome.  I could practically live out of Wawa's.

Chinese chuckle when they encounter the word "Wawa".  The first thing they think of is "wáwá 娃娃" ("baby; child; doll") — note the female radicals on the left, but secondarily they might think of "wāwā 哇哇" ("wow wow") — note the mouth radicals, or tertiarily they might think of "wāwā 蛙蛙" ("frog") — note the insect / bug radicals.  The name just somehow sounds funny.  Cf. what we were saying about sound symbolism in "The sound of swearing" (12/7/22).

Usage is split on this one.  Merriam-Webster goes for "hornet's nest", OED prefers "hornets' nest", and many other dictionaries and websites choose one of the four options listed in the title of this post.

To my mind, logically it should be "hornets' nest" because it's a home that belongs (genitive) to a colony of hornets (plural).

My high school sports teams were called "hornets", so I have a long acquaintanceship with this fearsome insect.

On the other hand, we also find "farmers market" and "farmers' market", usually the former, occasionally "farmer's market", but I don't think I've ever seen "farmer market".