Emily Jane Fox, "Michael Cohen says Trump repeatedly used racist language before his presidency", Vanity Fair 11/2/2018: After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a […]
I recently got a note from the Philadelphia chapter of the Acoustical Society of America, informing me that the November meeting will held at a location identified as the "Naval Surface Warfare Center Philadelphia Division Machinery Silencing Complex". I'm pretty sure that this is the longest English complex nominal that I've encountered so far this […]
Pamela Kyle Crossley wonders: Why, when mi– ma– words for “honey” are so widespread across Eurasia, do English speakers say “honey” instead of some modern form of medhu or meli (except when referring to mead, of course)? Turns out all the Germanic languages left the medhu theme early on, and instead went with variation of […]
2019 is UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. How do we celebrate linguistic diversity and recognise the people who are keeping endangered languages strong? Inspired by the work of Joanna Macy, we have developed a format for storytelling in the original languages. While listeners don't understand the individual words, they get the message: Speech does not consist […]
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"A row over mocking non-standard French accents", The Economist 10/25/2018: It took an outburst that went viral to introduce the French to a new word: glottophobie. […] The episode emerged last week when Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left firebrand, mocked a reporter with an accent from south-west France. “What does that mean?” he snapped, imitating the […]
The subhed of this opinion piece made me do a double take — Bari Weiss, "A Massacre in the Heart of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood: The values that drove Robert Bowers to murder my neighbors are the ones we cherish — and will continue to live by", NYT 10/27/2018. At least, that's how the piece originally […]
I used the expression "take a gander" in something I wrote this morning. Curious about its origin, I found this: "Where Did the Phrase 'Take a Gander' Come From?" (Today I Found Out [9/22/12]) This is an interesting, informative article, from which I learned much, including the PIE root for "goose", and the fact that […]
The Mexican City of… WHAT? 😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/CXmQR4wf3H — Laura Martínez © (@miblogestublog) October 25, 2018
… or more generally, "X Occupied Y", where X is something Jewish, and Y is something governmental. Straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just moments ago, Lou Dobbs guest Chris Farrell (head of Judicial Watch) says Caravan is being funded/directed by the "Soros-occupied State Department". pic.twitter.com/QBSong7uk1 — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October […]
From Elijah Granet: In Trump’s recent remarks on the Squirrel Hill synagogue shooting, he (at ~1:12 in the linked video) refers to the shooting taking place “on the holy day of Sabbath”, pronouncing “Sabbath” in a bizarre way, with the vowels completely off. My best guess—and a few people on Twitter seem to agree— is […]
One more reason for me to love Wikipedia. I just noticed in this article on Chinese honorifics that some example sentences are phonetically annotated with Pinyin. Not only that, it observes properly spaced word division, which must be technically difficult to achieve. Furthermore, the Pinyin annotations are appropriately small, yet clear. I don't know how […]
New York Times, October 26, 2018: