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 […]
I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):
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 […]
Announced only yesterday, Alibaba has a new robot delivery vehicle for the last mile:
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 […]
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 […]
"What 'Ancient' Chinese Sounded Like – and how we know" (YouTube 7:56) Source
There's a Reddit page with this title: "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English". Feast your eyes: (source)
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]