[An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen.] Before I get into the […]
Nathan Hopson spotted this "Cool Guy" t-shirt on Facebook:
From my hotel bathroom in Miyazaki: This towel makes a lot of bubbles and kinds to your skin. So, you have a pleasant bath time.
Scott Wilson has written an entertaining, and I dare say edifying, article on "W.T.F. Japan: Top 5 strangest kanji ever 【Weird Top Five】", SoraNews24 (10/6/16) — sorry I missed it when it first came out. Wilson refers to the "Top 5 strangest kanji", but he actually treats nearly three times that many. The reason he emphasizes […]
An anonymous correspondent asked: Are these actually related words, or just homonyms? p. 127 of Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom: Male shamans were treated with cautious respect, but they evoked suspicion and even disgust. As one saying put it, “the worst of men become […]
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There's a university in Wales with this name: Evidently "prifysgol" means "university". Etymology From prif- (“chief”) + ysgol (“school”). Noun prifysgol f (plural prifysgolion) university
From Shawn Zhang's Twitter account: Xi Jinping mispronounced the name of Tibetan Epic King Gesar as "King Sager" 习近平把“格萨尔王”说成”萨格尔王”。 pic.twitter.com/okiAEgraRP — Shawn Zhang (@shawnwzhang) March 20, 2018
[This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson.] Though it's generally agreed that "on the fritz" means, more or less, "in an unsatisfactory or defective state or condition" (Oxford English Dictionary), there is no agreement on its etymology. Some currently associate "fritz" with a sound from a malfunctioning electric machine, but the early uses of […]
At the conclusion of "Barking roosters and crowing dogs" (2/18/18), I promised a more philologically oriented post to celebrate the advent of the lunar year of the dog. This is it. Concurrently, it is part of this long running series on Old Sinitic and Indo-European comparative reconstructions: “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16) […]
Is it my imagination, or has there been a drop in GNP (Gross National Peeving) across the Anglophone world? I'm not seeing nearly the volume of "Angry linguistic mobs with torches" that I (think I) did a decade ago. So the recently viral story about this sign on the door of the Continental bar makes […]
From March through July of 2016, we had a long-running series of posts comparing words in Indo-European and in Old Sinitic (OS), See especially the first item in this series, and don't miss the comments to all of the posts: “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16) “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, […]