Adam Cancryn, "Why a GOP senator from Trump country opposes the Senate health bill", Politico 7/9/2017: “Collaborating with Democrats on the other side, to me, is not an exercise in futility,” Capito said, noting that she has spoken with Manchin and other Democrats about tackling health care together. “That may be where we end up, […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall."
In an update to his post "Becoming an adjective", Geoff Pullum notes that the existence of name-derived adjectives like Shakespearean and Kafkaesque might have been what "Jane Jacobs … is an adjective" was meant to mean. But he doesn't also note that there are at least two semantic domains where it's long been common to use […]
The hundred or so scholars at the conference on narrative factuality I'm attending here in Freiburg, Germany come from all over Europe and North America, plus a few other countries. All proceedings are in English, and every single person here, both young and old, speaks English like a native (except for one person who came […]
A friend points out to me that according to this Abe Books description of a hardback copy of Jane Jacobs' classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, on the back cover it is reported that Toronto Life made the following assertion: Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an […]
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"Who'll win at Wimbledon? Just listen to the pitch of the grunts", University of Sussex press release 7/4/2017: Never mind counting aces and killer shots. If you want to predict the outcome of a tennis match, pay attention to the players’ grunts. As Wimbledon prepares for another year of the on-court cacophony from the likes […]
The verb "ghost" to mean "leave a social event without announcing one's departure" has apparently been around for a while, but I wasn't aware of it until a couple of weeks ago when I happened upon this 7/3/13 article in Slate by Seth Stevenson: "Don’t Say Goodbye: Just ghost." Because I have often felt awkward […]
In this widely cited article, "China says Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong no longer has meaning", Reuters (6/30/17) quoted PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesman, Lu Kang, as follows: Now Hong Kong has returned to the motherland's embrace for 20 years, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, as a historical document, no longer has any […]
In "Renewal of the race / nation" (6/24/17), we've been coming to grips with the sensitive, vital term "mínzú 民族" ("nation", "nationality"; "people"; "ethnic group"; "race"; "volk"). If we add an "h" and change the tone of the second syllable from 2nd to 3rd, we get mínzhǔ 民主 ("democracy"), another key term in modern political […]