Language Log

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!" See "Modification as social anxiety", 5/16/2004.

From Nikola Gotovac: Today I was introduced to the web page "The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility".   There is one quite common misconception about Croatian language on that graph (and similar languages – Slovenian, Serbian, and Bosnian). To be more precise, the expression "it is all spanish village to me" is actually mis-translated to english, […]

In "Last new term of the year in China" (12/16/16), we encountered a very recent neologism in Chinese: hánzhàoliàng 含赵量 ("Zhaoness") (220,000 ghits).  The expression we examine in this post — zhínán ái 直男癌 ("straight man cancer") — has been around a bit longer, for at least a couple of years, and circulates even more […]

This sentence is from a report in The Guardian, a UK paper, but I suspect it was written in the USA, where the (fictive) rule that a pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent noun is often taken very seriously: One person was killed and five others were injured when a large eucalyptus tree […]

It's good to find a prominently displayed list of local bus routes that you can consult when you arrive at the train station in a big city that perhaps you do not know. And Sydney Central station in New South Wales, Australia, has exactly that. There is a big board headed "Find your way" at […]

This post intends to take a deep look at the words for "dog" in Japanese, "inu" and "ken", both written with the same kanji (sinogram; Chinese character): 犬. I will begin with some basic phonological and etymological information, then move to an elaboration of the immediate cause for the writing of this post, observations from […]

Huawei Technologies is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company.  Mark Metcalf sent in this photograph of a scene at their corporate headquarters in Shenzhen:

Michelle Kosinski and Kevin Liptak, "Gloves-off White House creates rift between Obama and Trump teams", CNN 12/16/2016: Donald Trump's dismissal of US intelligence about Russian election meddling has deeply alarmed the White House, prompting a new and combative approach to the President-elect that's caused rifts between the incoming and outgoing administrations. […] In his briefings, […]

Sarah Halzack, "The shipping industry is poised for massive upheaval. Can FedEx weather the storm?", Washington Post 12/15/2016: “Amazon is the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Dick Metzler, a former FedEx executive who now oversees marketing at uShip, an online freight marketplace.

Starting around a year or two ago, the expression "Zhào jiārén 赵家人" ("Zhao family member") emerged as a coded reference for politically powerful and wealthy elites in contemporary Chinese society.  See Kiki Zhao's penetrating post on the NYT Sinosphere blog: "Leveling Criticism at China’s Elite, Some Borrow Words From the Past" (1/4/16) For the literary […]

At the beginning of 2016, Jack Grieve shared the first iteration of the Word Mapper app he had developed with Andrea Nini and Diansheng Guo, which let users map the relative frequencies of the 10,000 most common words in a big Twitter-based corpus covering the contiguous United States. (See: "Geolexicography," "Totally Word Mapper.") Now as […]

The "No Word For X" trope is a favorite item in the inventory of pop-culture rhetorical moves — the Irish have no word for "sex", the Germans have no word for "mess", the Japanese have no word for "compliance", the Bulgarians have no word for "integrity", none of the Romance languages have a word for "accountability", and […]

Alex Baumans sent in this photograph of the logo of a Korean food truck in Belgium, run by one San-Ho Park Correwyn: