Language Log

President Trump meets with the Vice Premier of China, Liu He, in the White House:

We haven't written about tattoo fiascos for awhile.  Here's a humdinger on Ariana Grande's left palm, in Japanese:

Sign at the high-end Chinese hotpot chain Haidilao:

There's a new attitude wave in China, and it's called the "Fó xì xiànxiàng 佛系现象", which looks like it means "Buddha system / series / department phenomenon".  Unfortunately, that doesn't really make much sense on its own account, and it certainly doesn't fit with the way the expression "Fó xì 佛系" is employed in current […]

Two images of Chinese takeaway packages in Beijing from Teresa Norman:

The title of a post at MedPage Today echoes the widely negative reaction to obviously blown calls in the recent NFL conference title games — "Is Journal Peer-Review Now Just a Game? Milton Packer wonders if the time has come for instant replay": Many believe that there is something sacred about the process by which […]

How many redundant letters are there in the English Alphabet? What would be the ideal of a perfect alphabet, and how far does the English Alphabet fall short of that ideal? — The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) January 30, 2019 [h/t Stan Carey]

Wikipedia on Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš: Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš (born December 13, 1964) is a Latvian politician[1], current Prime Minister of Latvia and former Member of the European Parliament. Kariņš was born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States to a Latvian American family. In 1996, he finished a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. […] […]

Query from a journalist: I'm working on a piece on superb owls, which become popular around this time of year because of the Superbowl. Do you happen to know if there's a name for this phenomenon of splitting a word in a different-than-intended way to change its meaning? Have you come across other examples of […]

More than a dozen times over the past couple of weeks, someone using the username "Ronaldmew" has been locked out of our site by Wordfence due to repeated attempts to log in as a contributor. Each time, the IP address that the multiple attempts came from is blocked, and then a day or two later […]

From the Washington Post: The study is a corpus analysis performed by Jesse Egbert, a corpus linguist at Northern Arizona University and Clark Cunningham, a law professor who did work in law and linguistics from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s (link, link, link, link), including co-authoring an article with Chuck Fillmore that was what […]

Over the years, we've discussed the fact that "filled pauses" (um and uh in American English) sometimes have communicative force beyond their role in filling compositional silences — see e.g. "And uh — then what?", 1/5/2004, and "Uh", 10/12/2016. There's a nice example in a recent headline at TPM: "Um, Tapes?", 1/21/2019. In the article […]