Language Log

What's going on here?  How did Justin Bieber become an infix (more precisely tmesis) inserted between the "O" and the "K" of "OK"? 

Piers Morgan, "The wife-beater, the witch and the White House: Why the hell did Trump ever tell Rob Porter and Omarosa ‘you’re hired’?", Daily Mail 2/13/2018: 'Shut the f**k up, a**hole,’ snarled Omarosa Manigault-Newman at me. ‘How are your kids going to feel when they wake up and discover their dad’s a f**king f*gg*t?’ Yes, […]

I'm reading Paul Midler's What's Wrong with China (Hoboken, NJ:  2018).  Midler has spent two decades as a business consultant in East Asia and speaks Mandarin.  His book is replete with penetrating observations about many aspects of society and culture and is solidly based on extensive first-hand experience and deep learning in Chinese history.  Its […]

It's here. Not the car battery, and not another one of the movies, but the First DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge and the associated Interspeech 2018 special session. As discussed in "My summer" 6/22/2017, I spent a couple of months last summer in Pittsburgh working with a couple of dozen other people on a workshop project with the […]

[This is a guest post by Bathrobe] Global Times have an article on the archaeological site mentioned in this recent LL post: "Questionable Sino-Mongolian toponymy" (1/18/18) The Global Times article is "Chinese-Mongolian archeological team study mysterious Xiongnu city" (2/5/18) by Huang Tingting.  The relevant section is: Since 2014, Song's institute, the National Museum of Mongolia […]

People have been wondering if there has been a language problem between North Korean and South Korean players on the combined Korean women's hockey team at the Olympics.  As a matter of fact, there is a gulf between the two nations in the language of hockey itself.

Hard core communist journal for Party members gets hip with English in the title of an article: "@中共党员:  你该get的精神品质和追求!" (Qiúshì 求是 ["Seeking Truth"], 2018, #3) I will translate and explicate the title fully below.  For the moment, it needs to be emphasized that this article was published in the CCP's leading theoretical journal, Qiúshì 求是 […]

It all started with an English language South Korean newspaper making unsubstantiated claims that a staff member on President Trump's National Security Council was said to have mentioned that a limited strike against North Korea "might help in the midterm elections".

Why would "rice rabbit" become a buzzword in China? The answer is simple:  it's one of the ways that Chinese netizens try to get around the banning of #MeToo by government censors.  The CCP doesn't like #MeToo because it enables women to organize and speak out against harassment and repression. "China Is Attempting To Muzzle […]

One of the linguistically interesting aspects of Jason Kelce's victory-parade speech was his pronoun usage: Your browser does not support the audio element. And you know who the biggest underdog is? It's y'all, Philadelphia! For fifty two years, y'all have been waitin' for this. Although this is a perfectly idiomatic use of y'all, one thing about […]

From the Washington Post: Jan. 30, fine, but Jan. 31? Apology required.

The immediate reason for writing this post is the curiosity of an important Chinese product, Shadowsocks, whose name is known only in English and whose author, clowwindy, has only an English name. Shadowsocks is an open-source encrypted proxy project, widely used in mainland China to circumvent Internet censorship. It was created in 2012 by a […]

At the parade celebrating the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl victory today, Eagles center Jason Kelce (decked out in a Mummer suit) led the crowd in a rousing chant that fits the team's underdog mentality: No one likes us, no one likes us No one likes us, we don't care We're from Philly, fucking Philly No […]