Elian Peltier, "How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time", NYT 12/12/2023: French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest […]
[This is a guest post by Michael Bates. It is about the place in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 and where, a scant five months earlier, on January 25, 2011, Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek was arrested.] Via Google search, I found your post about the etymology of "-ābād" ("Abbott's […]
The name "Tibet" has been outlawed in the PRC. Henceforth, Tibet (the name by which it has been known to the world for centuries) is to be called by its newer Chinese name, Xizang ("West Zang") — even in English. Chinese state media drops ‘Tibet’ for ‘Xizang’ after release of Beijing white paper Use […]
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary entry for folx defines it as a re-spelling of folks "used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized". The etymology is given as "respelling of folks, with x after MX., LATINX". The entry also notes that the first known occurrence was in 1833, without clarifying that older uses (and many recent ones) are examples of […]
Long have we pondered the overwhelming dominance by individuals of Indian heritage over the spelling bees. Do they have some sort of mysterious power or secret for memorizing hundreds of thousands of obscure words? Now we have an answer from one of the masters himself, Dev Shah, a ninth-grader living in Largo, Florida, who won […]
Klaus Nuber, who four years ago sent us this amusing post, "Restaurant logo with a dingus" (5/29/19), has contributed another droll Anekdote. The following article is in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung, "Kannste knicken?"* (11/23/23) — herewith the second anecdote of three from all over the world: *VHM: The meaning of the article title escapes me — […]
From Philip Taylor: The British media were flooded yesterday with reports that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by scientific evidence presented during the Covid-19 pandemic. My understanding of "bamboozle" has always been that deception must be involved, and this is borne out by the OED, but there was clearly no deception in […]
The Google Books ngram plot for "artificial intelligence" offers a graph of AI's culturomics: According to the OED, the first use of the term artificial intelligence was in a 13-page grant application by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, "A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence", written in […]
In "LOL, ROTFL, IJBO" (11/2/23), all the talk of laughter made me think of the epitome of that particular animal behavior, the hyena. Of all creatures on earth, the hyena is one of the most curious. Can you imagine going through life laughing at everything, especially when life is so full of tragedy? Listen: here, […]
If you can't make up your mind what to do about something, then in French you would say "je suis partagé": I'm torn or divided over it. You can't decide what to do about it. You can't make up your mind whether to be pleased or angry with something. But the verb "partager" means "to […]
Not Chinese. Do you understand? This has long been a cabbage of contention, but make no mistake about it: fermented kimchee / kimchi (gimchi 김치 (IPA [kim.tɕʰi]) (lit., "soaked [in their own juices of fermentation] vegetables") is not the same thing as pickled paocai / pao tsai 泡菜 (lit., "soaked [in brine] vegetables"). Kimchee and […]
Recent article in Scientific American: This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality By Anvita Abbi on June 1, 2023 From just a small handful of Andaman Islanders, the last speakers of their languages, […]