From Bjarke Frellesvig (University of Oxford), Stephen Wright Horn (NINJAL), and Toshinobu Ogiso (NINJAL): [VHM: NINJAL = National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics] We are very pleased to announce the first public release of the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ). We will be grateful if you would circulate and share this information as […]
Or maybe it should be the sound pattern of architecture? Anyhow, Ariel Goldberg sends this interesting demonstration of the fact that Google Books still sometimes gets jiggy with its category choices:
Garden-path headline of the day — Stephen Burgen, "Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians", The Guardian 4/10/2018. By the usual rules of U.K. headlinese, it seem that the first four words should reference a dog that somehow played a key role in some fake degree claims. But no.
This quote made me do a double take: "Trump's attorney Michael Cohen will 'fold like a cheap deck of cards,' Stormy Daniels' lawyer says". And I wasn't the only one — Peter Norvig asked on Facebook Hey David Regal, as a professional magician, can you tell us exactly how a cheap deck of cards folds? […]
For several weeks, the "Kindle Store" panel of the Kindle app on my cell phone has been presenting Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale at the top of its version of the New York Time Nonfiction Bestsellers list:
David Langeneckert thought that I "might find this mashup of languages interesting", and indeed I do!
"Growing up on wolf's milk" — when I first encountered this expression, which was applied to youth who had survived the multiple catastrophes of the first quarter-century of the PRC, I took it literally because I thought that they didn't have much of anything else to eat. Naturally, though, I did wonder how they would […]
In Elizabeth George's recent novel The Punishment She Deserves, there's a passage where someone uses a sociolinguistic choice to communicate her attitude towards an interaction. This reminded me of another fictional example of the same thing, and I'm sure that readers will come up with more.
From David Denison — Hard working ISA [contrasted with] not hardly working ISA: David's comment: This is an ad for an ISA (Individual Savings Account – tax-free for UK taxpayers), pushing the advertiser's Stocks & Shares offering against some other ISA that (presumably) merely pays interest. For me, not and hardly are alternatives before an […]
On Twitter, Katherine Connor Martin (Head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press) writes: In the latest @oed update, dozens of entries relating to sexual and gender identity were revised, the first phase of a project to revisit this rapidly changing segment of the English lexicon. She links to the lengthy Release Notes, of which […]
In an evening session on March 24, at the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington DC, there was a surprise announcement: publication of Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, edited by Haun Saussy. At least the announcement was a surprise to Victor. According to this blog […]
From Grice v. City of St. Robert (Mo. Ct. Ap. 1992) (citations omitted): This court should not create an exception where none is present. Where a statute has no exception courts should not engraft one by judicial legislation. Words used in the statute must be accorded their plain and ordinary meaning. When language is plain […]