This is a picture of the wording on an Italian-made baby jacket, a gift to the granddaughter of a friend of a friend after the child was baptised recently in Florence, Italy. Your guess at the intended meaning is as good as mine.
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I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the Radio Free Asia headline: "China Bans Uyghur Language in Xinjiang Schools" (7/28/17) Some excerpts from the article:
The Edinburgh Festival season has begun. There are more than half a dozen independently run and temporally overlapping festivals, depending on what you want to count. But the biggest of all of them is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the entire world (I admitted in a Lingua Franca post to my love […]
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Victor Mair published a post yesterday under the title "Google is scary good", and reader Philip Taylor commented: "Scary good" reads very oddly to me; would not "scarily" be more customary in such a context ? The answer is that there are quite a few adjectives (or, perhaps one should say, adverbs homophonous with their related […]
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Before I finish typing "red", Google is already suggesting "red herring", which is what I was looking for. When I've barely begun to type "Philadelphia" or "Seattle" and only one "Walla", Google is already suggesting ""Philadelphia weather", "Seattle weather" and "Walla Walla weather", which is what I was looking for in each case. If I […]
"Officials: Flight in Vegas delayed by naked passenger", Washington Post (AP) 730/2017: Officials say a Spirit Airlines flight leaving Las Vegas was briefly delayed after a passenger removed all their clothes while boarding and approached a flight attendant. McCarran International Airport says police and medical responders took the passenger for observation. Police Lt. Carlos Hank […]
Heather Murphy ("Scaramucci Did Not Invent the Word 'Paranoiac'", NYT 7/28/2017) quotes some tweets in which paranoiac "faced charges of being not being real" [sic], and comes to its defense with a link to a very interesting paper about a use of the word (but in Russian!) in 1927 — J. Kesselring, "Vladimir Mikhailovic Bekhterev […]
Following on yesterday's post ("The naturalness of emerging digraphia" [7/28/17]), Alex Wang tells me, "parents and supplementary educators often post photos like these on their WeChat moments". Here's an example of one that he sent along:
From David Moser: 8-year-old in Beijing pens heart-warming letter to dad's boss asking for time off in summer. Have you got a good work/life balance? #China pic.twitter.com/5OYJchuUuh — The Chairman's Bao (@TheChairmansBao) July 28, 2017
Another milestone in the history of NYT editorial policy: Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, "Anthony Scaramucci’s Uncensored Rant: Foul Words and Threats to Have Priebus Fired", 7/27/2017: “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” he said. […] “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said.
[This is a guest post by Alex Wang, a long-term resident of Shenzhen, China] I was wondering if there have been any studies on how readily a language can absorb new elements and features. Yesterday at the Pacific Coffee shop near where I live, by chance I struck up a conversation with a professor who […]
Pearls before Swine for 7/23/2017: A couple of Generation Z language consultants confirm the accuracy of the translations. Or as one of them put it, "Haha right".
Xiaoyan (Coco) Li, a native Chinese speaker with synesthesia (self identified, never formally tested), happened to come across this Language Log post: "Synesthesia and Chinese characters" (3/9/17) She wrote to me saying that she experiences some of what Leo Fransella (quoted in the earlier post) referred to as "'non-trivial' Chinese synaesthesia". For him "trivial" Chinese synesthesia is […]