Anonymous, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", NYT 9/5/2018: Subhed: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at […]
Gabriele de Seta has a serious, scholarly article on "Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms" in First Monday, Volume 23, Number 9 – 3 September 2018. Here's the abstract: The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji […]
Yesterday, before Jacqueline Vaissière's invited talk at Interspeech 2018, the session chair showed this video about the meaning of Indian head nods:
Here on Language Log, we have often encountered the problem of stroke order and total number of strokes used in writing Sinographs (see the section on "Readings" below). In this post, I would like to approach this problem from a discussion of how to write two seemingly simple characters: tū 凸 ("convex; protude; bulge out") […]
Alayna Treene, "Scoop: How Omarosa secretly taped her victims", Axios 9/3/2018: Omarosa taped nearly every conversation she had while working in the White House, including ones with "all of the Trumps," a source who watched her make many of the tapes tells Axios. Omarosa did this with a personal phone, almost always on record mode. […]
A reader sent in a link to this article, with the note "I know LL sometimes publishes examples of unusual usages of language; I came across this in an article on climate change. It’s a regularization I’ve never seen before" — Joshua Bowling, "Study: Climate change could transform Arizona's forests, deserts, worsening drought and fire", […]
Here at Interspeech 2018, the first presentation will be by Bishnu Atal, winner of the ISCA medal for scientific achievement. Though you probably don't know it, Bishnu has had an enormous impact on your life — at least if you ever talk on a cell phone, or listen to music on iTunes or Spotify or […]
Or maybe it was a genius move — the coverage hasn't quantified the effect on brand recognition and sales. Jelisa Castrodate, "Mountain Dew Mistakenly Tells All of Scotland to Masturbate for 'Epic Thrills'", Vice 8/29/2018: Not terribly long ago, The Scotsman newspaper printed a helpful list of 15 words that have alternate meanings in Scotland. […]
The Wikipedia article on cyberpunk derivatives lists, among others, biopunk, nanopunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, decopunk, and atompunk. These are all subgenres of speculative fiction, unlike glam-punk, electropunk, cowpunk, etc., which are subgenres of punk rock (music). And these words are also prime examples of the quasiregularity of morphological (and sometimes phrasal) composition.