Tony Lin, "End of the Line for Subway Ad Against Sexual Harassment: One year later, Guangzhou feminist group still hasn’t succeeded in putting up anti-harassment billboards" (Sixth Tone, 4/28/17) is about a group of Chinese women who have — unsuccessfully so far — tried to place a series of public service notices in the Guangzhou […]
Because I like the Chinese term tǔ 土 ("earth; soil; dirt; ground; earthy; rustic; colloquial") so much, I was going to add the substance of the remarks below as a comment to the "Fun bun pun" (4/9/17) post, in which we devoted a lot of attention to one of my favorite expressions, "tǔbāozi 土包子" ("earthy […]
Or maybe, "What is vamping, and how could the Trump administration redo it?" Perhaps because I was very tired, that was my reaction to this story by Nia-Malika Henderson, "April Ryan asked the most important question of the Trump presidency", CNN 3/30/2017: After a contentious — and some said condescending, sexist and racist — back-and-forth with White […]
Even if you don't know any Cantonese but listen carefully to people speaking it, you probably can tell that it has an abundance of particles. For speakers of Mandarin who do not understand Cantonese, the proliferation of particles, especially in utterance final position, is conspicuous. Non-speakers of Cantonese, confronted by all these aa3, ge3, gaa3, […]
I find Japanese pronunciation to be straightforward and easy. But, for some reason, many people murder Japanese words borrowed into English. Take "karaoke", for example. I hear Americans pronouncing it as something like "carry Okie". How did that get started? You can listen to the Japanese pronunciation here. Cf. the UK and US pronunciations here.
In a workshop over the weekend at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, one of the presentations was based on a paper by Dan Kahan et al., "Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test", Journal of Risk Research 2017. The abstract starts this way [emphasis added]: This paper examines a remedy for a defect […]
This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson. The source of “copasetic,” meaning “fine,” has been sought in Yiddish, Hebrew, Creole French, Italian, Chinook, and in a putative assurance from an accomplice of a thief in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago that the house “cop’s on the settee.” But, probably, a novelist coined the word. […]
Adam Wren, "'I'm Still All Trumped Up'", Politico Magazine 2/13/2017: On the first Saturday of Donald Trump’s presidency, as protesters and marchers stormed the nation’s capital and cities around the country, Dick and Jane Ames threw a party. […] “Oh, Trump—I’m still all Trumped up,” Jane, a retired insurance broker, told me, reveling in the memory […]
Here and here are links (South China Morning Post [SCMP] and the Chinese website of a German radio channel) re yesterday’s surprising statement by Judge HE Fan of China’s supreme court calling President Trump a "public enemy of the rule of law". The story is being well covered by the international media (NYT, The Independent, […]
In Appendix C of The True History of Tea, a book that I wrote with Erling Hoh, I showed how all the words for "tea" in the world except two little-known Austro-Asiatic terms can be traced back to Sinitic. The three main types of words for tea (infusion of Camellia sinensis leaves) may be characterized […]
From Bill Thomas via John Rohsenow:
This post intends to take a deep look at the words for "dog" in Japanese, "inu" and "ken", both written with the same kanji (sinogram; Chinese character): 犬. I will begin with some basic phonological and etymological information, then move to an elaboration of the immediate cause for the writing of this post, observations from […]
My son sent me this wonderful, learned post called "The best bits" from the "Old European culture" blog (12/7/2015). It begins: Offal, also called variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by […]