This is a guest post by Reza Mirsajadi, who previously published a version on Facebook. For much of my adult life, whenever I have had to defend the Iranian people to conservatives, they have fought back with the "Death to America" argument. This more or less amounts to "They [Iranians] want to kill us, they […]
Adam Wren, "'I'm Still All Trumped Up'", Politico Magazine 2/13/2017: On the first Saturday of Donald Trump’s presidency, as protesters and marchers stormed the nation’s capital and cities around the country, Dick and Jane Ames threw a party. […] “Oh, Trump—I’m still all Trumped up,” Jane, a retired insurance broker, told me, reveling in the memory […]
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] Yes, the following image from the most recent Weekly Playboy (週刊プレイボーイ Shūkan Pureibōi; not a regional edition of Hugh Hefner's Playboy), is labeled "Poop":
A friend of Anne Henochowicz spotted this T-shirt in an Akihabara, Tokyo shop:
Now that a black man is no longer president, George Will has stopped obsessing about presidential overuse of first-person singular pronouns, and has turned his attention to other pressing matters, such as the role of liberal higher education in promoting the political ascension of Donald Trump ("Trump and academia actually have a lot in common", 1/27/2017): Much […]
As soon as I saw the reports about the mobile PaPaPa vans roaming the streets of Chengdu (see "PaPaPa" [2/15/17]), I immediately thought of a similar expression with a similar meaning that I heard forty years ago. On that occasion, someone described to me the actions of a man who was trying (unsuccessfully) to get […]
During the 2016 presidential campaign, there was a lot of negative commentary about Hillary Clinton's voice. Some examples from across the political spectrum are compiled and discussed here, and even-the-liberal-The-Atlantic published on "The Science Behind Hating Hillary's Voice". Since Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump pretty much got a pass for vocal characteristics analogous to Hillary's, it was […]
My, my! What does the signage on this van in Chengdu, Sichuan Province (China) say? From: "Chinese firm ordered to remove sexually suggestive Valentine’s Day advertisements" (SCMP, 2/15/17).
From the "Press Briefing by Press Secretary Sean Spicer, 2/14/2017, #12" (starting at 15:23 of the ABC News video): Your browser does not support the audio element. JONATHAN KARL: Back in January, the President said that nobody in his campaign had been in touch with the Russians. Now, today, can you still say definitively that nobody […]
In a comment to this post, "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17), liuyao remarked, Interesting that 愛 to mean (romantic) love might be a modern invention. A search in Dream of the Red Chamber (which is regarded as Beijing Mandarin in 18th century) reveals that all instances of it are in fact "to like" […]
The latest from Ben Zimmer — "A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon: The Insult’s Originator Steps Forward", Slate 2/13/2017. Following up on a comment by David Quantick on Ben's Strong Language Blog post, Ben found this passage in the 1/13/1990 issue of the New Musical Express, in which David Quantick and Steven Wells […]
In his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, President Trump received contradictory instructions about where to look. Pres. Trump and Japanese PM Abe meet, shake hands in the Oval Office https://t.co/rG1oCqyhkf pic.twitter.com/njJ13Qi3s1 — CBS News (@CBSNews) February 10, 2017