Language Log

Sign on the elevator doors of a Taipei department store:

What do a baker, a shepherd, and a drummer have in common? You can add an orchestra conductor, Harry Potter, and a drill sergeant. Hint: this is in French.

The diabolo, sometimes called a Chinese yo-yo, is a two-headed top controlled by a string manipulated by two sticks, one attached to each end.  It is popular among jugglers. Diabolo, commonly misspelled as diablo, was formerly also known as "the devil on two sticks" (Juggling Wiki). In this post, I am concerned primarily with language […]

Although Google now has "about 27,700 results" for seacuterie, this word doesn't seem to have made it into any of the standard dictionaries yet. But already in 2017, Fine Dining Lovers announced ("Seacuterie, When Salami Rhymes with 'Sea-lami'") that "today’s latest craze is 'seacuterie'", and went on to survey the gastronomical metaphors involved at greater […]

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, has been big in the media recently, from the first-ever Spanish cover of Time Magazine, to headlining Coachella — against the background of literally millions of pages featuring his fashion choices and his sayings. According to a 2019 All Things Considered piece ("How Bad Bunny Skipped Categories […]

新时代祥瑞层出不穷 pic.twitter.com/bVm5Vn4XC4 — 方舟子 (@fangshimin) April 9, 2023

Our previous post was on "Hallucinations: In Xanadu did LLMs vainly fancify" (4/3/23).  If you were wondering where such an evocative, exotic name came from, it has a direct lineage back to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) of China where it was called Shàngdū 上都 ("Upper Capital") in Mandarin, ultimately from early Mandarin ʂaŋ` tū.  […]

Around 60% of the people living in the San Gabriel area are Asians, and the largest proportion among them are Chinese.  To attract the business of the local population, attorney Scott Warmuth decided to put up Chinese billboards in Monterey Park about a decade ago.  How it happened is described in this article: "Column: Racial […]

A recent linguistic message from Dinosaur Comics:

It's a bad month in general:  dark, dreary, drizzly, dank, and damp.  Soon one's thoughts are flitting* about as though one had taken wings, like Eros or Cupid. In Chinese mythology, there is a deity called Yǔrén 羽人 ("Feathered Man").  It has an ambiguous origin — first appears in Shānhǎi jīng 山海經 (Classic of the […]

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

From the Twitter account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin: 先把外资都赶跑、吓跑了，再死皮赖脸地请回来？ pic.twitter.com/FepFOsJnpY — 方舟子 (@fangshimin) February 20, 2023

Big news from China yesterday: "2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China" Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / YahooThu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST What a gift to humanity! All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function […]