In the middle of last month, I participated in a double book launch by Cambria Press in Singapore (links here, here, and here). The event was held at one of Singapore's most outstanding art galleries, called iPreciation (links here and here). This is what I saw as soon as I walked in the door:
Article in The Guardian (8/5/18) by Verna Yu: "Why do millions of Chinese people want to be 'spiritually Finnish'?: A Finnish cartoon about a socially awkward stickman has become a hit in China – even inspiring a new word in Mandarin. Why has it struck such a chord?" The new word is jīngfēn 精芬 ("spiritually […]
Alexis Wellwood et al., "The Anatomy of a Comparative Illusion", Journal of Semantics 8/3/2018: Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more […]
Japanese artists depicted almost anything imaginable concerning humans, animals, and the natural world, and they did so with great skill and emotional power. One sub-genre of Japanese painting that I recently became aware of is that of the fart battle (hōhi gassen 放屁合戦): "21 Classic Images Of Japanese Fart Battles From The 19th Century", by […]
Dana Millbank, "Goodbye, Republican Party. Hello, Bigfoot Party.", WaPo 7/31/2018: By now, there are few in the political world who have not yeti heard about what’s going on in the 5th Congressional District of Virginia. The Republican candidate in the race, Denver Riggleman, was discovered to have posted images of “Bigfoot erotica” on Instagram, with […]
Robert Hay writes: There's a Korean pitcher in the majors named Seung-Hwang Oh who was just traded to the Colorado Rockies. Both his previous uniform numbers, 26 and 22, were already taken, so he got number 18, leading to this realization by Sung Min Kim on Twitter: So, it occurred to me that Seung-Hwan Oh […]
Be careful what you write. via the National Diet Library
In late June Lila Gleitman noticed a case of "A is pessimistic that S" meaning that A considers it likely that S will happen/turn out to be the case, and A considers S to be an unwanted outcome. Her example was "I am more pessimistic than I was two weeks ago about the trade war spinning […]
Corey Robin, "Was Bigger Thomas an Uptalker?" (10/18/2017), describes a bit of fictional forensic sociolinguistics: The funniest moment in Native Son (not a novel known for its comedy, I know): when the detective, Mr. Britten, is asking the housekeeper, Peggy, a bunch of questions about Bigger Thomas, to see if Thomas is in fact a […]
In the good / bad old days of Chinese communism, people talked about having a "tiě fàn wǎn 铁饭碗" ("iron rice bowl"), which meant essentially that they had a "job for life", though the pay might have been extremely meager. With the transformation of communism to mercantilism* (in the PRC's case, we may refer to […]
The clearest demonstration I know of for the pronunciation differences between the two:
The Guardian published an article on "10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)" (7/27/18). Calling on nine of their correspondents, they introduced a bouquet of beautiful words, each one of which I am enamored: SPAIN: sobremesa (Sam Jones in Madrid) PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta (Juliette Jowit) ITALY: bella figura (Angela Giuffrida […]
Tweet by Timothy Grose, a specialist on Islam in China, especially in Xinjiang: A confidant in #Xinjiang asked me to share this image/report: All 伊 characters (also used for "Islam" in Chinese 伊斯兰教) appearing on signage must be removed or changed to a homophone (e.g. 依). The rumor is that even the Chinese name for […]