"Multi-hyphenate spaces"
Alex Bauman sent in this real-estate ad from Singapore:
For the fully hyper-hyphenated experience, click here…
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"Don't blindly save yourself"
The following photo is from Guanghzhou and was taken recently by David Lobina's partner who’s there now.
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LLMs can't reason?
…though they often do a credible job of faking it. An interesting (preprint) paper by Konstantine Arkoudas, "GPT-4 Can't Reason", brings the receipts.
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Eyeworm
No, I'm not talking about the eye parasite called Loa loa (a filarial nematode), which is also called eyeworm. I'm talking about an image that gets stuck in your brain the same way an earworm (also called brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome) gets stuck in your head. We've talked about earworms a lot on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a few examples), but I don't think we've ever mentioned eyeworms before.
No, come to think of it, I did use the word "eyeworm" once before (here), but that was in reference to the ubiquitous subtitles of Chinese films, even those intended for Chinese audiences, which — upon first glance — may strike one as unnecessary excrescences crawling around in the viewer's field of vision, except for the reasons I listed in the cited post, which lead Chinese audiences to prefer or even need them to understand the films they are watching.
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Autodidact
[This is a guest post by Don Keyser in response to "Sinitic semiliteracy" (6/5/23)]
This one takes me back. In the late 1980s, I served my second assignment at our embassy in Tokyo. The chief of the American Citizens Services unit in the Consular Section, a white lady in her early 50s, asked my assistance. Confirming that I was a Chinese-language officer who read Chinese, she asked if I would read something sent her by one of the Americans incarcerated at Fuchū Prison she saw monthly in fulfillment of her consular responsibilities. The prisoner was an African American male in his early 30s.
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Sergeant Dickason's Blend
Over brunch the other day, a question came up that I've wondered about in the past: Who was the "Major Dickason" of Major Dickason's Blend?
Skipping my imaginary histories, here's the real story.
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Something for nothing
The following is a Facebook advertisement for how people from Hong Kong can readily gain permanent residency in Canada. Check out the unusual Sinoglyph inside the red bubble.
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Skunk stunk
Two nights ago, it was raining heavily, with lightning and thunder every so often. As I was peering out into the blackness of my backyard, all of a sudden, a bright light flashed on. At first I thought it was lightning, but then I realized that someone or something had set off the light. It didn't take long for me to spot a gleaming, coal black skunk crawling around through the brush.
Most striking were the narrow, white stripe on its forehead and along the length of its nose and the two broad swaths of white fur along its back. It was so beautiful, all soaked in the rain, that I wanted to go out and get a closer look (make friends with it, so to speak), but my companion said, "No way!"
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Just sayin'
The third verse of Ben Sidran's song Can We Talk (track 5 on the 2013 album Don't Cry For No Hipster) repeats the couplet "I'm not sayin'; I'm just sayin'":
This reminded me of a LLOG Post of Yore: "Just sayin'", 1/11/2012, which tried to answer a question about the meaning and origins of that phrase.
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Whose note?
A 7/29/2023 article by Elaine Mendonça in the online periodical The Best Stocks ("Anticipating Positive Results: Brookfield Renewable Partners to Release Q2 Earnings Data") starts like this:
July 28, 2023 – Brookfield Renewable Partners (NYSE:BEP) (TSE:BEP), a leading utilities provider, is set to announce its second-quarter earnings on Friday, August 4th.
And after a few more paragraphs of similar information, it ends like this:
With the upcoming release of Brookfield Renewable Partners’ earnings data, investors are eagerly awaiting the results. The solid performance and positive expectations set by analysts, along with the company’s dividend policy, indicate that Brookfield Renewable Partners is positioned for success in the second quarter of 2023. As investors tune in to the conference call, they will be seeking valuable insights into the company’s growth strategies, financial outlook, and overall market trends that may impact its future performance.
NB- The references to “perplexity” and “bustiness” were not utilized as they do not align with a formal writing style.
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