From Jonathan Lundell: The first comment on this performance of the Brandenburg 6 (nice one, btw): "I very like this authentic manner. And I very like first violist. Who is it?" It's from one Artem Klementyev (so Russian?). So, a question: why can't we say "I very like X"? …when we can do it with, […]
By now practically the whole world knows that Kim Jong-nam, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's older half-brother, was killed by the extremely toxic nerve agent called VX. VX is much more potent than sarin, which was used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult to kill 12 people and injure thousands of others in the Tokyo subway […]
An important rallying cry and usage distinction made by allies of undocumented workers in the current cultural battle over immigration in the United States is Elie Wiesel's assertion above: "No human being is illegal." In the quote, Wiesel gives examples of the kinds of adjectives that he feels can denote properties of people (fat, skinny, […]
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Yixue Yang and I were on a mission to find out what the mysterious "O" in this entry from the previous installment in this series stands for: laan2 / lán 兰O — stands for gaai3laan2 / jièlán 芥兰O ("Chinese kale / broccoli / gai lan / kai lan order") Since that "O" occasioned so much […]
"Dear Abby: Creepy boy follows around eighth-grade girl", Chicago Sun-Times 2/25/2017: DEAR ABBY: I’m an eighth-grader with a good life. I go to a good school, have good friends and a happy family. But at school, there is this boy who follows me around. I tell him to stop, but he keeps doing it. So upstream […]
If you ask Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM — Guóyǔ 國語 / Pǔtōnghuà 普通话) speakers how many tones there are in their language, most of them will tell you without much hesitation that there are four tones (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) plus a neutral tone. Chances are, however, if you ask a Cantonese speaker how many […]
Here on Language Log, we have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the terminology related to kungfu: "Kung-fu (Gongfu) Tea" (7/20/11) See also Ben Zimmer's masterful article on Visual Thesaurus: "How 'Kung Fu' Entered the Popular Lexicon" (1/17/14) Now we have documentation for another type of kungfu that has hitherto eluded us: This #KungFu […]
Commonly referred to as "Devil's language" (èmó zhī yǔ 恶魔之语), because it is considered by outsiders to be extraordinarily difficult, Wenzhounese (Wēnzhōu huà 温州话), the language of the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province 230 air miles south of the Yangtze estuary, has been a topic of discussion on Language Log before: "Devilishly difficult 'dialect" […]
I recently saw a list of revisions suggested by the editor of a scientific journal, which combined technical issues with a number of points of English usage, including these two: Please try to avoid the word ‘impact,’ unless it is part of a proper name. It is now over-used (its ‘impact’ is diminished), and doesn’t communicate […]
In an article called "The increasingly lonely hope of Barack Obama," the The New Yorker showed that it belongs to the increasingly lonely class of educated people who still imagine that if they ever allowed an adjunct to separate infinitival to from the plain-form verb of the infinitival complement that it introduces, demons would break […]
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At the Writers Guild of America Awards on Sunday night, host Patton Oswalt predictably made some Trump jokes in his opening monologue. What wasn't so predictable was an extended analogy involving '80s hard rocker David Lee Roth and the linguistics department at Rutgers University. The key line: "Donald Trump taking Obama's job would be like […]
Wondermark for 1/24/2017, In which a Run is made:
One of the most widely noted aspects of Donald Trump's campaign rally yesterday in Florida was his reference to a terrorist incident the night before in Sweden: Your browser does not support the audio element. You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden — Sweden! Who would […]