Everybody's talking about Xi's Buddhist sanctification since it hit the headlines in this article: "Xi Jinping's latest tag – living Buddhist deity, Chinese official says" (Reuters [3/9,18]. Speaking on Wednesday on the sidelines of China’s annual meeting of parliament, the party boss of the remote northwestern province of Qinghai, birthplace of the Dalai Lama, said […]
An interesting topic, presented [in French] in a fun way: [If you have trouble with the Facebook embedding, try this YouTube version.]
My Wall Street Journal column this week looks at the history of the word rider, inspired by Frances McDormand's cryptic use of the phrase "inclusion rider" at the end of her acceptance speech at the Oscars on Sunday, after she won the Best Actress award for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (Link to WSJ column […]
Now that speech technology is good enough that voice interaction with devices is becoming widespread and routine, success has created a new problem: How should a device tell when to attend to ambient sounds and try to interpret them as questions or commands? One solution is to require a mouse click or a finger press […]
At the conclusion of "Barking roosters and crowing dogs" (2/18/18), I promised a more philologically oriented post to celebrate the advent of the lunar year of the dog. This is it. Concurrently, it is part of this long running series on Old Sinitic and Indo-European comparative reconstructions: “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16) […]
Linda Qiu, "President Trump’s Exaggerated and Misleading Claims on Trade", NYT 2/6/2018: Correction: March 7, 2018 Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the […]
Morphological negative concord? Or just a slip of the fingers? [link] The Labour Court report does not detail what was contained in the graphic, but stated it “was inappropriate and inoffensive”. [link] Al Franken, who was also scheduled to appear on the show, has canceled, calling Maher's words “inappropriate and inoffensive.” [link] The IPSA worker said they found […]
"Dead mouse in protein supplement claimant admits lying", BBC News 2/7/2018: A man has admitted to lying about buying a pack of protein powder containing a dead mouse. Adam Brenton tweeted criticism of Myprotein Impact Diet Whey seller The Hut.com Ltd and contacted local press with his claims. The story was widely republished but "unequivocal" […]
We are thoroughly familiar with the use of puns to foil and irritate the censors in China: "Punning banned in China" (11/29/14) "It's not just puns that are being banned in China" (12/7/14) — with links to earlier posts on puns in China "Fun bun pun" (4/9/17) And many others, including the most recent post […]
Thomas Carlyle, "Sir Walter Scott": There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. Nay, in sober truth, is not this actually the rule in all writing; and, moreover, in all conduct and acting? Not what stands above ground, but what […]
In MS Word, buried deep in File|Options|Advanced|Compatibility Options|Layout is the option to check 'Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does'". If you use full justification, your document will look ugly unless you check that box. Does that qualify as a form of nerdview?
You may have thought that idea of rhinoceroses peeving about semicolons (when they're not snorting and snuffing) was silly. But the comments on Mark's post Peeving and breeding have devolved to a level of even greater silliness: the pressing question of whether to type one space after a period or two.
Rhona Fenwick has put up a GoFundMe for the Ubykh Dictionary Project: My name’s Dr Rhona Fenwick. I’m an archaeologist and linguist who’s spent sixteen years working to document and begin reviving the beautiful, rich, and dying language of the Ubykh people, and I’m humbly asking for your assistance to support me financially while I finish writing […]