Language Log

A friend of mine who does research on the history of tea in China recently shared the following photo in a WeChat group that focuses on Chinese food culture:

For several days I've been aware of a strange poem that has gone viral in China: "Read The Smog-Inspired Poem That China Can't Stop Talking About" (NPR, 1/12/17) The strangeness of the poem is due to its being written from the perspective of lung cancer and addressed to the patient.  You judge for yourself — […]

In "The Road to Wazoo", I mentioned a striking 1919 advertisement for Prince Albert Tobacco . What was striking was partly the drawing and partly the text: PRINCE ALBERT the national joy smoke Say, you'll have a streak of smokeluck that'll put pep-in-your-smokemotor, all right, if you'll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or cigarette papers and nail […]

A retired English teacher sent in this question: Please look at a) and b): a) The American government spends billions of dollars a year defending the rights of people who cannot defend themselves because they are weak. b) For your examples of injustice, you mention only birth defects. Horrible as they are, they make up only […]

As Mark Liberman has often reminded us, when taking things from newspapers you have to be very careful about what to attribute to the person who allegedly said something and what to attribute to the journalist who reported it or the subeditor who futzed with what the journalist turned in. So when we read this […]

It's only January, yet we may have already seen this year's winner in the category of Misapprehensions about Chinese Characters and the Nature of Language.  It appears in Xiaolu Guo's "‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain" (The Guardian, 1/10/17).  Ms. Guo's long essay, an adapted […]

The OED has wazoo, n., glossed as "The buttocks; the anus",  noting that it is used "Freq. as a (euphemistic) substitute for ass in fig. phrases, as pain in the wazoo, etc.", giving special notice to the expression up (also out) the wazoo, glossed as "in great quantities, in abundance, to excess. Wiktionary has the gloss "(vulgar, […]

[This is a guest post by Silas S. Brown] It seems a few native Cantonese speakers employed in the production of Cantonese language courses are quite happy to read out Mandarin vocabulary with Cantonese pronunciation, rather than the actual native Cantonese versions of the words, and I can't help wondering why.

Today's xkcd is distressingly close to not being a joke:

I doubt that many native speakers of American English will recognize this word: Your browser does not support the audio element. But with a little more context, more people will get the message: Your browser does not support the audio element. And if we play the whole pause group, it becomes obvious: Your browser does […]

Fascinating episode of a Japanese TV program called Detective Knight Scoop (Tantei Knight Scoop):

The press release is here: In its 27th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted for dumpster fire as the Word of the Year for 2016. Defined as “an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation,” the term dumpster fire was selected as best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past […]

It's one thing to lose your first language when you move as a child to another country where a second language is spoken, but it's quite a different matter when you go to another country as an adult and make a conscious choice to give up your native tongue and adopt the language of the […]