From Alex Baumans: Miss Cayley's Adventures, a delightful novel by Grant Allen from 1899, is about Lois Cayley, who is left penniless after her stepfather dies (actually, she gets tuppence) and sets out to make her way in the world trusting to her wits and luck. She meets an American inventor-entrepeneur who wants her to […]
From Bob Ladd: Thanks to an old pair of swimming goggles, I’ve just become aware that Italian doesn’t have a word for ‘leak’ – or alternatively, that the English word ‘leak’ covers a very wide range of situations in which a substance (often water) passes through a human artefact designed to prevent it from passing […]
By "fruit salad", here I am referring to the military slang expression for a servicemember's display of medals and ribbons on a dress uniform. In this post, I will be focusing only on the racks of ribbons worn on the left chest. Defense Secretary James Mattis was recently in China and met with a number […]
From an anonymous contributor (photo taken at noon yesterday):
Mark Meckes asks: Is there a name for the mistake of substituting one kind of participle for another? I feel like I've seen a number of examples of this lately, most recently in Ross Douthat's current NYT column ("The Red Hen and the Resistance", 6/27/2018): "But to mitigate the effects of backlash, an effective protest […]
Roger Lustig, commenting the headline "Paul Ryan calls on Maxine Waters to apologize" (Sunlen Serfaty and Katherine Sullivan,CNN 6/26/2018): At first I thought he'd gone over to her house and said he was sorry. If only.
I'm in Hamburg for lectures and meetings this week. The first day I was here, in the afternoon I went out for a walk. After taking about 50 steps from the front door of my hotel, I saw this lettering on the glass facade of a nearby building:
As background to the discussion of Melania Trump's jacket choices, Giovanni Tiso presents "A brief (fascist) history of ‘I don’t care’", Overland 6/22/2018: Fascism lay its roots in the campaign for Italy’s late entry in the First World War, of which Mussolini was one of the leaders. It was at this time that the phrase […]
Article in NBC Sports (6/22/18) by Drew Shiller: "Report: Chinese prospect Abudushalamu Abudurexiti will play for Warriors in Summer League". Quips heard around the Language Log water cooler: Geoff Nunberg: "It’ll give the announcers something new to chew on, now that they’ve learned to toss off Giannis Antetokounmpo." Barbara Partee: "If that article has the […]
"Koko, the Gorilla Who Knew Sign Language, Dies at 46", Associated Press 6/21/2018: Koko the gorilla who mastered sign language, raised kittens and once playfully tried on the glasses of the late actor Robin Williams, has died. She was 46. The Gorilla Foundation says the western lowland gorilla died in her sleep at the foundation's […]
Let me try to pull together the information from my previous two posts, and add information that I'm seeing on Twitter. I will update this as I get more information. Service-providers looking for interpreters. Much of the interpreting that is needed can be done by phone, so geographic location shouldn't be an issue. RAICES: volunteer@raicestexas.org. […]
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