Over at Spicks & Specks, Greg Pringle has a virtuoso post on "The Bell Miner: How orthography and ornithology catalysed a new folk etymology" (8/9/15). It's about an Australian honeyeating bird — Manorina melanophrys — that used to be called the Bellbird, but was renamed Bell Miner through association with the South Asian bird called […]
It's a bit of a mystery how and why "outsiders" (wàidìrén 外地人) are referred to by Shanghainese as "hard disks / drives" (yìngpán 硬盘). Intrigued, I asked around, and here are some of the replies I received.
From AB, MD (CPT, MC, USA): I have an odd inquiry that I'm hoping you'll oblige. My question is about the preferred pronunciation of apoptosis. I believe the scientist who originally described this phenomenon asked a linguist to invoke an image of an Autumn tree shedding a leaf. We are now in an intense debate […]
Jackie and Mimi, Toni Tan's daughters, spotted two interesting products at the Asian supermarket near their home.
Spending a couple of months in Paris frequently exposes me to the wonders of semantic drift. Many of the new French words that I'm learning turn out to be unexpected figurative senses of words that I already knew — though sometimes I need to look them up to realize that I knew them, because the figurative usage is non-obvious. […]
The exoticization of Chinese, yet again This time it's the alleged, essential aqueousness of governance: "The Water Book by Alok Jha review – this remarkable substance", by Rose George (5/14/15). The first sentence: "The Chinese symbol for 'political order' is made from the characters for river and dyke." What a lame, wrongheaded way to begin […]
And NPR commemorates the event: Mark Memmott, "'Eggcorns': The Gaffes That Spread Like Wildflowers", Weekend Edition 5/30/2015. Here's the LLOG post where the term was first suggested: "Egg corns: Folk Etymology, Malapropism, Mondegreen, ???", 9/23/2003. There are quite a few eggcorn-related posts in LLOG Classic and New LLOG as well. And anyone interested in the topic […]
"Arirang" (Hangul: 아리랑) is arguably the most famous Korean folk song. Indeed, "Arirang" is so well-known that it is often considered to be Korea's unofficial national anthem. Yet no one is sure when the song arose nor what the title means.
This is a quiz. It's a short, pop quiz, but the post is going to be very long. 1. In what language is the title of this post written? 2. What does the title mean?
When I was a student at Dartmouth (1961-1965), from around mid-December to mid-March, we had roughly three feet of snow on the ground much of the time, but then came the big melt, and we called it the "schlump" season. The paths across campus were so muddy that the buildings and grounds crew placed "duck […]
Felix Sadeli sent in this list of colossal mistranslations of food names. We've already seen several of these and explained a number of them on Language Log: "Puke " (10/8/10) "Gourmet Chinese cookshop " (1/27/14) — "Soup for Sluts" (in the comments) "Combating the monolithic tree mushroom stem squid " (5/3/10) ("The jew's ear Juice" — […]