I think it's becoming clear that alternating male and female personal names to individuate Atlantic tropical cyclones is not a good idea. These storms are becoming far too nasty. Calling a storm "Harvey" makes it sound like your friendly uncle who always comes over on the Fourth of July and flirts with your mom. And […]
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[Or, as David Prager Branner, who wrote the guest post below, jokingly calls it, "hysterical phrenology". Note that Branner uses Gwoyeu Romatzyh ( "National Language Romanization"), a type of tonal spelling, for the transcription of Mandarin.] ================ This is on the subject of Carbo Kuo's 郭家寶 performance of Shyjing "Shyi yeou charngchuu 隰有萇楚" ("In the […]
Chad Childers, "Decapitated Members Arrested on Alleged Kidnapping Charges", Loudwire 9/10/2017. But will they be tried separately?
Obeying the sign: See also "Another step towards gender equality", 8/20/2006, "Dogless in Albion", 9/12/2011, and John Wells on "carrying dogs", 3/15/2013. [From here via Carmen Fought]
Terry Provost wrote to express interest in the topic of "citation plagiarism", linking to a couple of Bill Poser's LLOG posts ("Citation plagiarism", 6/15/2007; "Citation Plagiarism Once Again", 4/23/2008), and noting that "yours was one of very few mentions of the topic I found". Provost points to a somewhat more recent article on a related […]
Photograph taken by a Russian friend of Nikita Kuzmin at a Starbucks in Shenyang, northeast China:
Since "Dognition" is now a Coursera MOOC as well as a company, it might be time to revisit an old, obscure and bitter joke — Garrison Cottrell, "Approaches to the Inverse Dogmatics Problem: Time for a Return to Localist Networks?", Connection Science 1993: The innovative use of neural networks in the field of Dognitive Science has […]
Name on a ship that docked in Yancheng (in Jiangsu province) harbor last Thursday: The reason there are armed public security forces patrolling near the ship is because it was full of smuggled cargo. The story is reported here: "Smugglers caught because they got their Chinese characters the wrong way round: Language blunder gives sugar carriers a […]
This is what happened in a middle school in Anhui's capital city of Hefei on the first day of the new school year:
Glenn Lammi, "Food Court Follies: Judge Grates Parmesan-Cheese Multidistrict Litigation", Forbes 8/31/2017: A recent court case asked the Reasonable Person to put on her "reasonable consumer" hat and determine the meaning of the term "100% Grated Parmesan Cheese" as it appears on containers of shelf-stable, processed shaky cheese. In February 2016, inspired by overblown media […]
Damián Blasi, Susanne Michaelis and Martin Haspelmath, "Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages", Nature Human Behaviour 2017: [W]e analyse 48 creole languages and 111 non-creole languages from all continents and conclude that the similarities (and differences) between creoles can be explained by genealogical and contact processes, as with non-creole languages, […]