A link from Michael Glazer, with the note "Bats have been getting a bad name recently epidemiologically, so it’s nice to hear them mentioned in a positive way": "Nathan Ruiz, "Young bats offer hope…", WaPo 7/27/2021. Well, OK, the full headline makes the real context clear: "Young bats offer hope as Orioles fall to Marlins". […]
All the talk of moseying and ambling propelled me into a customary mode of mind. Those who have taken classes with me know that, though I may start at a certain point in my lectures, it is difficult to predict how we will get to our intended destination, though we are certain to pass through […]
This is both one of my favorite words and one of my most enjoyable modes. Although I am normally very active and highly goal oriented, and walk almost as rapidly as a Singaporean (fastest in the world), occasionally I simply want to unwind a bit, especially when I'm with a like-minded friend, and just stroll […]
It is not my intention to stir up a firestorm, but I have for decades suspected that the names "Ashkenazi" and "Scythian" are related. Now, after having sat on this for years and letting it gnaw away at my inwyt for far too long, I've decided to seek the collected expertise of the Language Log […]
Jake Eberts, "Why Do Analysts Keep Talking Nonsense About Chinese Words?", Foreign Policy 7/6/2021: Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually […]
[This is a guest post by Tom Mazanec] I recently became curious about the origins of the Cantonese word king1 gai2 傾偈 ("to chat"). Though I've never formally studied Cantonese, I'm picking up bits of it from my wife and in-laws, who moved to the U.S. from Guangzhou about 30 years ago and use Cantonese […]
A week or so ago, we looked at the phenomenon of "lying flat" (see under "Selected readings" below). Karen Yang writes from China: Hahahahha, tang ping ["lying flat"] was kind of a hot topic last month, for about one week. Maybe it’s because the College Entrance Exam was on-going, people tended to talk about life […]
The following article is so revelatory, at least for me, that I wish I could copy it entirely. Since that's not what we do at Language Log, I will just quote the opening portion (probably less than a quarter of the total essay), while pointing to a few additional highlights, and encourage others who are […]
As part of my run through the Western Regions (Xīyù 西域) of Pennsylvania, I wrote to Ed Shaughnessy asking him which town he was from, since I knew he came from somewhere around Pittsburgh, and it might be nice to be aware of where he grew up if I happened to run through that town. […]
A jumble of soccer talk and Confucian piety, with a splash of CCP ideology Week in China has an interesting article about a football flap that occurred recently in China: "Lost in translation: Cannavaro gets Confucian" (May 14, 2021; WiC 540) The story is quite convoluted and complicated, so we need to start with the […]
From my 10th grade high school world history class in 1959, I was intrigued by the evocative, mysterious Mamluks. I was impressed by their achievements in statecraft, art, architecture, and many other fields. Thus Mamluk is a word that is very well known in English, even to a rural highschooler in Osnaburg Township of Stark […]
Today the MIT Sloan Executive Education program sent me an email with the subject line "The Spirit of Hacking at MIT": While the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, the hacker ethic has always been celebrated at MIT. Referring to a difficult, complex, and creative campus prank, hacking at MIT is everything from transforming […]
From Doonesbury 5/2/2021: Linguists have paid a lot of attention over the years to wanna-contraction, starting with George Lakoff's 1970 paper "Global rules" — see these lecture notes for a discussion, if you're interested. But gotta-contraction has gotten a lot less attention — 7 Google scholar hits vs. 658. The reason for this difference is simple: […]