Language Log

Until today, I had never heard of "Dry January".  I learned about it this morning from an article in The Harvard Gazette:  "How to think about not drinking:  For starters, treat Dry January as an experiment, not a punishment, addiction specialist says."  

Remember Prohibition (in history; in the United States)?  It didn't work, did it?

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was decidedly a dry town when I moved here half a century ago, but then a different sort of people than Quakers started to move in, until now the borough is decidedly wet.

Annie Joy Williams, "The Last Days of the Southern Drawl", The Atlantic 1/4/2026:

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

On Sundays after church, my family would pile into our crank-window GMC truck and head to Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Can I get me some of them tater wedges?” my father would say into the speaker, while my sisters and I giggled in the back seat. My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow. But his “KFC voice,” as my sisters and I call it, is country. It’s watered-down on work calls and during debates with his West Coast relatives. But it comes out around fellow cattle farmers and old friends from Kentucky, where he grew up.

My mother’s accent isn’t quite as strong. She’s a therapist, and she can hide it when she speaks with her patients and calls in prescriptions. But you can always hear it in her church-pew greetings, and when she says goodnight: “See you in the a.m., Lawd willin’.”

I was always clear on one fact: I wasn’t going to have a southern accent when I grew up. I was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville, where the accents grow stronger with each mile you travel from the city. I watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey: sweet but simpleminded. When I was 15 and my family went to New York for the first time, the bellhop at our hotel laughed when my mom and I spoke; he said he’d never met cowgirls before. That was when I decided: No one was going to know I was from the South from my voice alone.

The first six panels of today's SMBC:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-eighth issue:

“A Study of Dunhuang Manuscript S.2614V, Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld: Revisions and Textual Transmission,” by Ryu Takai.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-sixth issue:

“The Many Voices of Silence: The Diverse Theories of the Ineffable Dao in the Zhuangzi,” by Ming SUN.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-fifth issue:

“How Oppenheimer Mistook Time for Death at Trinity (the A-bomb Test Site) and How the Bhagavad Gītā, Read Properly, Resonates with the Block Universe of Einstein,” by Conal Boyce.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-seventh issue:

“The Baghdad Battery: Experimental Verification of a 2,000-Year-Old Device Capable of Driving Visible and Useful Electrochemical Reactions at over 1.4 Volts,” by Alexander Bazes.

As has often been mentioned on Language Log, Dunhuang is a desert oasis town at the far western end of the Gansu / Hexi Corridor.  This is where the fabled Silk Road splits to head north and south around the vast Tarim Basin (filled with the extremely hot [summer] / cold [winter] / arid) Taklakamakan Desert.  Site of the Mogao Grottoes (hundreds of richly decorated medieval Buddhist caves), one of which (no. 17) housed tens of thousands of manuscripts that were sealed away more than a millennium ago.  Among them were the earliest written Sinitic vernacular narratives that I worked on for the first twenty years of my Sinological and Buddhological career (see the last three items of the "Selected readings" below).

I was planning to write a post on this chain of phenomenal gas stations cum country / convenience stores (gives a new meaning to that expression), so was tickled when jhh beat me to mentioning it in this comment.

Several days ago, i visited one in the outskirts of Dallas.  As per many things Texas, it was BIG.  Outside, it had more than 80 pumps, and inside it had more than 80 cashiers.  The store stretched on and on and on, longer than a football field.  I felt like I was in a Star Wars space ship cantina.  The store-station was equal to ten of our biggest Wawa station-stores, which I treasure.  It had a parking lot that accommodated hundreds of cars.

Many people who don't have the slightest clue about how Chinese characters work have been snookered by the (in)famous Chinese "poem" that has 92 or 94 characters all pronounced "shi" (though in different tones).  It's supposed to be a test of one's accuracy in mastering tones and is said to be intelligible when spoken aloud with the correct tones.  Some people think it proves how profound Chinese characters are.  In actuality, it proves absolutely nothing of value.  Nobody talks like this.

Here it is, with explication and annotation:   "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den".

Unless you have endless amounts of time to waste, I would advise you to do no more than glance at it.

Before last week, I had never heard this expression, but among people who work remotely over the internet, it is fairly common.  For example, if you haven't seen or heard from a colleague for a long time, you might say to him, "Yo, bro, I was wondering whether you quiet quit."

What does it mean?

(ambitransitive, idiomatic) To cease overachieving at one's workplace to focus on one's personal life; to do only what is reasonably or contractually required. [since 2022] 

(Wiktionary)