Today the MIT Sloan Executive Education program sent me an email with the subject line "The Spirit of Hacking at MIT": While the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, the hacker ethic has always been celebrated at MIT. Referring to a difficult, complex, and creative campus prank, hacking at MIT is everything from transforming […]
Dave Itzkoff, "Elon Musk Hosts a Mother’s Day Episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’", NYT 5/9/2012 ("The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, 'I’m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.'"): Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, appeared in several “S.N.L.” sketches this weekend, playing […]
Subtitle: Virtuous / disgusting behavior / character There's a common Mandarin put down that is much favored by Peking shopgirls: Qiáo nǐ nà dé xìng ("Just look at that virtuous / disgusting behavior of yours!") Readers will notice that I did not provide characters, since in truth there is a real problem knowing which character […]
From Doonesbury 5/2/2021: Linguists have paid a lot of attention over the years to wanna-contraction, starting with George Lakoff's 1970 paper "Global rules" — see these lecture notes for a discussion, if you're interested. But gotta-contraction has gotten a lot less attention — 7 Google scholar hits vs. 658. The reason for this difference is simple: […]
A headline from today's BBC News: "Knife crime: St John Ambulance to teach teens to help stab victims."
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] The issue of profane language in Japanese has been discussed on LL at some length and with sundry examples, at least one of which I provided myself (shitshow). Nevertheless, while recognizing the risk of flogging a dead or moribund steed, I was sufficiently taken aback by a […]
This post is a follow-up to "Nordic amorous room" (5/5/21). In the comments to that post, cliff arroyo remarked: I feel like a dope for being the one who has to ask, but…. "Childrens parent-child room" What? He was referring to another part of the sign on which "Nordic amorous room" appears, which you can […]
@JDMayger May 4: Any Nordics in China want to explain what’s going on here? @brandhane ? pic.twitter.com/xlaRJtyfxk — James Mayger (@JDMayger) May 4, 2021
[This is a guest post by S. Robert Ramsey] "Korean kimchi originally came from China." –Or so China’s online encyclopedia Baidu Baike declared in its article on kimchi. Koreans were outraged. What gall for Chinese to lay claim to their national dish! Adding to the furor, China’s English-language newspaper Global Times reported last year that […]
[This is a guest post by Mark Metcalf, who makes no claim to having any language proficiency with New Testament Greek.] Since you're an überlinguist, thought I'd forward some thoughts on a recent translation of the Gospels by Sarah Ruden. Wasn't sure if you're interested in New Testament translations, but her introduction is inspiring. […]
The name of my favorite pastry shop in Philadelphia's Chinatown is Bǎobǐng diàn 飽餅店 (English name "Mayflower Bakery & Cafe"). They serve all sorts of Chinese pastries, cakes, buns, turnovers, etc. Their egg tarts (dàntà 蛋撻) are divine, and you can get everything at scandalously reduced prices late in the afternoon. Nearly all of the […]
Google Fi screens my calls, so that my phone doesn't even ring unless the caller is in my contacts, or passes some kind of quasi-Turing Test. This is a Good Thing, since I get half a dozen spam calls a day, often at inconvenient times. As a result, robocalls generally end up as voicemail, which […]
It's been so long since I posted that my to-blog list is on the verge of self-awareness, as prefigured in this SMBC comic: