Language Log

Dilbert for 5/2/2018:

pic.twitter.com/WO2XxMNUUW — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 2, 2018 Maybe only 33 words for it, but tens of thousands of words about it… [h/t Francis Thompson]

The porcine princess seems innocuous enough, but for some reason(s), the Chinese government has decided to censor her: "China bans Peppa Pig to combat 'negative influence' of foreign ideologies" (businessinsider.com) "Chinese video app targets 'subversive' Peppa Pig in online clean-up" (CNN) "China gives 'subversive' Peppa Pig the chop" (AFP) More links here. Why go after […]

I've been noticing a lot of wellness around recently. The word, that is — like Manlu Liu, "Penn announces new position of Chief Wellness Officer to centralize and improve resources", The Daily Pennsylvanian 4/24/2018: Penn will institute the position of a chief wellness officer, Penn President Amy Gutmann announced in an email to all Penn […]

Jason Cox, who sent the following photograph to me, says that his "uncle-in-law has this all over the place":

A while back, I peeved about the people for whom public devotion to single-spacing after a period is a form of virtue-signaling. I’ve now learned that the one-space-or-two issue has found its way into the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, which has posted “Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing following periods […]

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Sorry but I love this badly phrased memorial bench so much pic.twitter.com/oe6gj6BUEz — Jen D'Angelo (@jenlikespizza) April 29, 2018

On Friday, April 27, I participated in "Seeking a Future for East Asia’s Past:  A Workshop on Sinographic Sphere Studies" at Boston University.  Among the participants was Terry Kawashima who talked about the commodification and fetishization of kanji.  The following paragraphs are a revised version of a portion of her remarks:

There's an impression among some people that "deep learning" has brought computer algorithms to the point where there's nothing left to do but to work out the details of further applications. This reminds me of what has been described as Ludwig Wittgenstein's belief in the early 1920s that the development of formal logic and the […]

A Cantonese grad student from Guangzhou sent me this headline that means something very different in Cantonese and in Mandarin: Mandarin Érzi shēng xìngbìng, mǔ bèi gǎn ānwèi 儿子生性病,母倍感安慰 ("When her son contracted a venereal disease, the mother felt redoubled happiness"). Cantonese Ji4zi2 saang1sing3, beng6 mou5 pui5 gam2 on1wai3 儿子生性,病母倍感安慰 ("[Given that] her son is […]

Word of the day from Robert Macfarlane: Word of the day: “sjushamillabakka” – ‘between the sea & the shore’, i.e. in the shifting space between high & low tide, neither quite water nor quite land. Metaphorically, therefore, a threshold or border realm (Shetland, archaic). pic.twitter.com/dUZDIuHmy8 — Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) April 29, 2018