Search Results
October 22, 2020 @ 9:21 pm
· Filed under Lost in translation
From a correspondent in the Washington DC area who doesn't go out much and wanted to enjoy a haircut at home without wearing a mask: On the factory packaging for a new electric hair clipper that was just delivered by Amazon to an address in Virginia: SECURITY INTELLIGENT LIFE TREND OF THE CHOICE […]
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October 5, 2020 @ 7:42 am
· Filed under Etymology, Language and literature
I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):
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September 28, 2020 @ 12:58 pm
· Filed under Grammar, Language and archeology, Language and art, Orthography
The hapless condition of headlessness may be a physical phenomenon, but it may also be a grammatical or orthographic category in linguistics, and we have dealt with both kinds on Language Log, e.g.: "More vitriolic rhetoric from KCNA" (10/8/17) "Headlessness in North Korean propaganda" (10/30/17) "Decapitated Democracy, Headless Liberty" (9/7/10) Now, what shall we make […]
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September 19, 2020 @ 8:39 am
· Filed under Language and politics, Psychology of language
An interesting malapropism:
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September 18, 2020 @ 8:16 pm
· Filed under Language and advertising, Names, Translation
Announced only yesterday, Alibaba has a new robot delivery vehicle for the last mile:
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September 4, 2020 @ 7:50 am
· Filed under Colloquial, Dialects, Language and food
I assigned this book to my class on the Silk Road: The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction, by James A. Millward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) I noticed that it bore the following dedication, one of the most peculiar and eye-catching I've ever encountered: For Herrgottsbescheisserle and all their cousins It looked German, but […]
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August 26, 2020 @ 6:29 am
· Filed under Words words words
Bruce Finley, "Wildfire haze, record heat and pollution combine to make Denver air quality dangerous for all", Denver Post 8/25/2020: Colorado public health officials issued a special “multiple pollutants” alert through at least 4 p.m. Tuesday. Health authorities focused most urgently on the harm from inhaling tiny “particulates” spreading in the smoke from burning forests […]
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August 23, 2020 @ 1:21 pm
· Filed under Historical linguistics, Phonetics and phonology, Reconstructions
"What 'Ancient' Chinese Sounded Like – and how we know" (YouTube 7:56) Source
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August 4, 2020 @ 12:25 pm
· Filed under Etymology, Toponymy, Translation
There's a Reddit page with this title: "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English". Feast your eyes: (source)
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August 3, 2020 @ 11:23 am
· Filed under Etymology, Language and animals, Language and history, Names
The title and the following observations come from Rebecca Hamilton: I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: on Foot to Constantinople, as I convalesce from COVID-19 (I've had a hard time of it), and I stumbled upon an aside he made about the French "hongre," meaning "gelding," as does the […]
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July 29, 2020 @ 12:17 pm
· Filed under Language and biology, Language and politics, Translation
Jim Unger sent me this mystifying note (7/25/20): The other day, my wife called my attention to the fact that the ‘organ theory of the emperor’ (Tennō kikan setsu), for which Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) was prosecuted in the 1930s, is written 天皇機関説. This is odd since ‘organ’ in the medical sense (the apparent source of […]
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July 25, 2020 @ 5:44 am
· Filed under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and animals
In reacting to the fierce denunciation of Xi Jinping by Cai Xia (see bibliographical note at the bottom of this post), Conal Boyce mused: Mind-boggling material. I had to do a double-take on the passage you show that contains both chǔn and jiāhuo (蠢家伙 ["stupid guy / fellow"]). And sure enough, in the video, she […]
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July 19, 2020 @ 4:38 am
· Filed under Words words words
I recently learned a new word: nurdles. These are plastic resin pellets, typically 1-5 mm in size, created as an intermediate stage in plastics production. Losses in production and transportation apparently make them a major contribution to marine pollution. I learned this word from reading about two environmental activists in Louisiana who have been charged […]
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