"Corpse sex kill threat prisoner gets 45 year sentence", BBC 12/14/2016. This is a case where even after reading the story, the structure is unclear. Is it [[[corpse sex] [kill threat]] prisoner] ? Or [[[corpse [sex kill]] threat]] prisoner] ? Or has the BBC decided, in this post-truth era, to go post-syntax as well? Philip […]
Ken Adams, "Courtesy of the High Court of England and Wales, A Reminder that Ambiguity Is Best Left to Experts", Adams on Contract Drafting 12/11/2016: Here’s the language at issue (emphasis added): Without prejudice to the provisions of paragraph 3 if all of the Conditions have not been discharged in accordance with this Schedule […]
Some evidence that we might be drifting back towards Elizabethan spelling rules (i.e. "whatever, dude"): [link] More raw and grizzly testimony expected in Dylann Roof case [link] Just before Snyder held her news conference, Oakland police and fire chaplain Jayson Landeza took several family members to the grizzly site. [link] A grizzly piece of evidence has been […]
Last month, in "Apostrophe in Hebrew" (11/22/16), we saw an "s" and an apostrophe incorporated in Hebrew writing. Here, on top of a taxi, from left to right it says "taxi", and from right to left it says מוֹנִית ("taxi").
Larry Horn, following up on "Hyperbolic scalar indifference" (7/14/2015) and "Expletive deficits" (7/18/2015), points to the following passage from Augusten Burrough's 2003 memoir Dry: Background: Augusten, 90 days sober after a stay in PRIDE, a gay rehab facility in Duluth, followed by group and one-on-one sessions and AA meetings back in Manhattan, has fallen for Foster, […]
There was quite a stir this week surrounding a high profile court case in China over Michael Jordan's suit to control the branding rights to his name. The controversy is described in this NYT article by Sui-wee Lee: "Michael Jordan Owns Right to His Name in Chinese Characters, Too, Court Rules" (12/7/16) After reading the […]
Many's the time that we have encountered biscriptalism in the Sinosphere and elsewhere (see here, here, here, and here). Now Jenny Chu has sent in this photograph of an interesting ad, currently in Hong Kong's MTR, which fuses Japanese- and Korean-appearing lettering with English, presumably in order to seem in touch with the latest trends.
Somebody asked Mark Swofford to help her devise a speedy, easy way to locate all the Chinese characters in a book-length manuscript that she was working on. Mark set to work on the problem, and this is what he came up with: "How to find Chinese characters in an MS Word document" (12/10/16)
Tecumseh Fitch et al., "Monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready", Science Advances 12/9/2016: For four decades, the inability of nonhuman primates to produce human speech sounds has been claimed to stem from limitations in their vocal tract anatomy, a conclusion based on plaster casts made from the vocal tract of a monkey cadaver. We used x-ray […]
From a reader: I just noticed this headline in our local news (which I read on line…): "Seahawks QB Russell Wilson pens letter on behalf of Sonics arena project." Does anyone pen a letter these days, or dial a phone number? I am sure this raises issues that have come up in your blog. Maybe […]
My son sent me this wonderful, learned post called "The best bits" from the "Old European culture" blog (12/7/2015). It begins: Offal, also called variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by […]
Yuletide is upon us, so it's time for some more reindeer talk. The guest post below comes from Juha Janhunen, to whom I put the following questions: Do any of the following ride reindeer? Sami, Lapp, Evenks (or other Siberian people) How long ago did the Sami, Lapp, Evenks (or other Siberian people) domesticate reindeer? […]