The following YouTube presents "25 Crazy Things You’ll Only Find In Chinese Walmarts". If you have 4:14 to spare and want to know what special sorts of things are sold in Chinese Walmarts, you can watch the whole video. If you're pressed for time, then skip to 3:13, which is what I'll be discussing in […]
From Bert Vaux: I hope that if you're American you'll consider taking my new American English dialect survey, which is now available at dialectsofenglish.com. You can answer as few as 30 and as many as 60 questions, and immediately see heat maps for where your answers are most popular. Please pass this along to your American […]
What follows is a guest post by Bob Ladd. When I lived in Germany in the early 1980s, I bought a few style guides in the hope of improving my written German. One of them turned out to consist primarily of what I would now (as a long-time Language Log reader) recognize as ‘peeving’ – […]
The naming of the recently discovered synthetic chemical element Nihonium offers an interesting opportunity to reflect upon the policies, practices, and principles of scientific terminology. Nihonium has the atomic number 113. It was first reported to have been created in 2003, but it did not have a formal name until November, 2016, when "nihonium" was […]
Jeff Goodman, "Dan Hurley, front-runner for UConn job, hasn't thought about openings 'for a second'", ESPN 3/18/2018: "Listen, I could give a crap about who's got an opening anywhere," Hurley said. "I haven't thought about it for a second. I could care less what any other school in the country that's looking for a coach […]
From Shawn Zhang's Twitter account: Xi Jinping mispronounced the name of Tibetan Epic King Gesar as "King Sager" 习近平把“格萨尔王”说成”萨格尔王”。 pic.twitter.com/okiAEgraRP — Shawn Zhang 章闻韶 (@shawnwzhang) March 20, 2018
This morning, Thierry Michel sent in a link to the "soundtrack opening and theme" from the 2016 TV Movie Maigret Sets A Trap, which he describes as "a french-sounding song that actually makes no sense in french, something that was called 'yaourt' back in the 60s when french singers did the same with English (you […]
A week ago I posted Don't skunk me, bro!, which riffed on Jonathon Owen's post Skunked Terms and Scorched Earth on Arrant Pedantry. Jonathon's post had discussed Bryan Garner's practice of declaring that certain expressions should be avoided because they are supposedly "skunked". Garner uses that term to refer to expressions that are in the […]
As a counterpoint to "Peeving and breeding", 3/4/2018, here's Lorenzo Baglioni's "Il Congiuntivo":
Query from reader RR: Just trying to get unpaid labor from a phonetician here… I've written a puzzle which involves swapping out one phoneme for another in various words. A couple of testsolvers have objected that "flense" doesn't become "friends" if you change the second phoneme; they insist they pronounce the D in "friends" (or […]
[This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson.] Though it's generally agreed that "on the fritz" means, more or less, "in an unsatisfactory or defective state or condition" (Oxford English Dictionary), there is no agreement on its etymology. Some currently associate "fritz" with a sound from a malfunctioning electric machine, but the early uses of […]
My friend James Cathey sent me an eyebrow-raiser this morning: “Here is a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: "Robinson, who has a warm voice and is easy to laugh, has a way of setting the record straight …" (TIME: March 12, 2018, p. 50)" Jim says he could never say "is easy to […]