A couple of days ago, in "Mistakes", I noted that verbatim transcripts of spontaneous speech are often full of filled pauses, self-corrections, and other things that must be edited out in order to create what that commenter would count as a "coherent sentence". And this is true even for people who have risen far in […]
The Chinese government has grown mildly addicted to the use of rap for disseminating propaganda. I'm going to call this new variety "rapaganda", but I am not the first to do so. The use of this portmanteau word might have started here: "Chinese Communist Party Modernizes its Message — With Rap-aganda" (China Real Time Report, […]
Today's xkcd, with a "cot-caught merger switch": Rumored in the XKCD Phone 6: a "Northern Cities Shift slider".
I was initially baffled by the political stance of "John Q. Esq.", who submitted this NYT comment: Having simultaneously benefited from Obamacare and despised Obama and his party for bringing it to them, I have absolutely no doubt what-so-ever that the low information voters who voted for the Republican Congress and Trump will enthusiastically turn out […]
"The bizarre political scandal that just led to the impeachment of South Korea's president" (Jennifer Williams, Vox, 3/9/17) Protestors wearing masks of South Korean President Park Geun-Hye (R) and her confidante Choi Soon-Sil (L) pose for a performance during a rally denouncing a scandal over President Park's aide in Seoul on October 27, 2016. JUNG […]
Mark Meckes noticed a tweet about an interview with Emma Watson, who was being discussed in this Language Log post, and mentioned it in a comment thereto. It was completely off topic (and thus violated the Language Log comments policy), but I felt it was too interesting to be left languishing down there in a […]
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Leo Fransella asks: I'm curious to know whether, in your years studying and teaching written Chinese, you've ever come across synaesthesia as applied to Chinese characters (zi) or words (ci)? The most common form of synaesthesia (~1% of people, I think) involves the systematic assignment of colours to letters, numbers or (sometimes) whole words. I have this […]
This week I'm at IEEE ICASSP 2017 in New Orleans — that's the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing". pronounced /aɪ 'trɪ.pl i 'aɪ.kæsp/. I've had joint papers at all the ICASSP conferences since 2010, though I'm not sure that I've attended all of them. This year […]
Here we go again. Image trending on WeChat, a sign on a Beijing bus:
Below is a guest post by Larry Horn, based on a note submitted to the American Dialect Society's mailing list. The topic is the the slaves-as-immigrants flap occasioned by Ben Carson’s reference in his recent remarks characterizing slaves as immigrants who worked particularly hard for particularly low wages.
There are multilingual signs all over Swarthmore (where I live) that say "Hate Has No Home Here". The signs are printed in six languages: English, Urdu, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic, and Spanish. I wondered about the choice of languages, but — with a little googling — I found that these are apparently the languages most commonly […]
Yesterday's post "A stick with which to beat other women with" discussed the duplication of prepositions in the title phrase, and a commenter complained that The woman interviewed has a pretty mediocre command of English (she doesn't pronounce a single coherent sentence and keeps stuttering) although she is an actress speaking in her native language. That she would […]
There have been dozens of articles in the news recently about Emma Watson's Vanity Fair photo shoot, the reaction to it, and her reaction to the reaction. For example, Cherry Wilson, "Is Emma Watson anti-feminist for exposing her breasts?", BBC News 3/6/2017; or Jessica Samakow, "26 Tweets Prove #WhatFeministsWear Is ‘Anything They F*cking Want’", Huffington […]