A lengthy, important article by Michael Erard recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine: "How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets: Do the volunteers behind Unicode, whose mission is to bring all human languages into the digital sphere, have enough bandwidth to deal with emojis too?" (10/18/17) The […]
Advertisement recently spotted by Guy Freeman in the Central, Hong Kong MTR (subway) station:
Yep, just like that. This expression is very common on the Chinese internet, messaging, chatting, etc. now, but — for those of us who are not in the know — what does it mean? I'll just give one hint: nǐ 你 means "you".
I must admit to having enjoyed the series of savage similes about quality of computer program code presented in three xkcd comic strips. They show a female character, known to aficionados as Ponytail, reluctantly agreeing to take a critical look at some code that the male character Cueball has written. Almost at first sight, she […]
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Christopher Alderton saw this flyer on his way to work a few days ago:
In a comment to this post, "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17), liuyao remarked, Interesting that 愛 to mean (romantic) love might be a modern invention. A search in Dream of the Red Chamber (which is regarded as Beijing Mandarin in 18th century) reveals that all instances of it are in fact "to like" […]
The following ghastly photographs of a rat that was caught stealing from a convenience store in Heyuan, Guangdong province have gone viral on Chinese social media. =============================================== WARNING: viewer discretion advised. The photographs following the page break may be upsetting to some readers. ===============================================
From an anonymous reader, who spotted this photograph on Instagram, where it was posted by nanorie, who has given her permission to repost it:
The Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word Of The Year is post-truth, which they define as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". Here's their graph of its recent rise in frequency over the past seven months:
According to a press release sent out earlier today, Today Oxford Dictionaries announces the emoji, commonly known as “Face with Tears of Joy,” as its “Word” of the Year for 2015. They explain that This year Oxford University Press partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of […]
For the culture that has everything: Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji. Each of the book's approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by a Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones."