Language Log

The last three panels of Dumbing of Age for 8/10/2017, featuring Danny and Sal: Mouseover text: "They have a similar smell."

When the White House issued a statement that finally condemned white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville this weekend, the version that was originally released had an unusual typo: "nephew-nazi" for "neo-Nazi": The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred and of course that […]

David Brooks recently argued that James Damore's anti-gender-diversity memo was right, and that Google was wrong to fire him ("Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.", NYT 8/11/2017), giving us another example of Mr. Brooks' long-standing fascination with pseudo-scientific justifications of gender and ethnic stereotypes. The best evaluation of Damore's memo that I've seen is Yonatan […]

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic."

From a long blog post on contemporary Chinese religious art and architecture:

Donald Trump's "fire and fury" warning to North Korea, we now know, was unscripted, not the product of speechwriters and advisers. As some have suggested, Trump's aggressive language may have been (at least unconsciously) modeled on Harry Truman's announcement that the U.S. had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. Truman: If they do […]

More than a year ago, I made this post: "Which is harder: Western classical languages or Chinese?" (3/6/16) In that post, I described a sense of anxiety that seems to pervade the venerable discipline of philology, which seemed to be in the process of morphing into something called "Classical Studies".  This feeling of uncertainty about […]

Some charmingly reflective and sincere writing in the latest xkcd comic as Cueball types a reply to a long-neglected email correspondent: Dear Kevin, I'm sorry it's taken me two years to reply to your email. I've built up so much stress and anxiety around my email inbox; it's an unhealthy dynamic which is more psychological […]

One of my favorite Chinese words is GANGA (pronounce as in "Lady Gaga", but put a nasal at the end of the first syllable).  It is so special and has had such a deep impact upon me since I began learning Chinese half a century ago that, in this post, I shall refer to it […]

From William Lou, "Obvious Chinese knockoff ruled trademark infringement of Under Armour ", theScore (8/4/17):

I've long since accepted that most people use "passive voice" to mean "vague about agency": see "Passive Voice" — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.", 3/12/2009. And I've made my peace with an extra-extended use of the term passive to convey only a vague sense of disapprobation: "'Passive construction' means… nothing at all?", 7/25/2009. But in David Brooks' […]

Tom Porter, "New York Times cross word: NRA spokeswoman denies bizarre threat to 'fist' the publication", Newsweek 8/5/2017: A National Rifle Association spokeswoman in a bizarre dispute denied that she threatened to "fist" the New York Times in a video atacking [sic] the publication. In a video released Thursday entitled “Dana Loesch: We’re Coming For You New York […]

Just saw this great post by the editors of supchina: "Here are all the words Chinese state media has banned:  A full translation of the style guide update from Xinhua, and why it matters." (8/1/17) We can be grateful to the editors for their reliable translations, complete with Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin romanizations, with […]