Language Log

David Ulin, "I Can’t Stand These Words Anymore", The Atlantic 12/30/2020: Recently, I noticed a headline in The New York Times that featured the word tasked. This is among my least favorite rhetorical strategies—the verbing of the noun. Contemporary American English is rife with such constructions: to journal, to parent, to impact, to effect. I wince a […]

[The following is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] The results are in from the 11th Kanji Creation Contest (Sōsaku Kanji Kontesuto), sponsored by Sankei Shinbun newspaper and the Shirakawa Shizuka Institute of East Asian Characters and Culture at Ritsumeikan University. Out of a total of over 26,000 entries in the general, high school, and elementary and middle school divisions, the […]

From r/TikTokCringe via Reddit: @gegethejing Reply to @gegethejing Chinese Fergie comin ATCHU 🎤🎵 #fyp #comedy #chinese #asian #growingupasian #lyric #fergie #singing ib: @ggnohadid ♬ original sound – ♡ Gege Jing ♡

Sign at a shop in Changzhou, Jiangsu, specifically at the Computer City mall:

From Engrish.com:

Looking through the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2), I saw that one of its sources is Chapter 10 of Volume 2 of Jane Austen's Emma. I've been using seven or eight different audiobook versions of that novel as a source of examples and exercises in ling521 over the past few years, so I […]

From the time I began the systematic study of the language family in the summer of 1990, I have known that the word "laks-" ("salmon") is important for the early history of Indo-European, yet I felt that something was not quite right about the claims put forward in this article: "The English Word That Hasn’t […]

Today's Non Sequitur:

[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang.  It was prompted by "'Involution', 'working man', and 'Versailles literature': memes of embitterment" (12/23/20), where we discovered that the word "involution", which is little known in English-speaking countries, except in highly specialized contexts, has gone viral in China in a sense that is barely known in […]

Or maybe "little sticky toes"? 'Tis the season for articles about mistletoe, like this one: Rachel Ehrenberg, "Marvelous Misunderstood Mistletoe", Knowable Magazine 12/18/2020: Some plants are so entwined with tradition that it’s impossible to think of one without the other. Mistletoe is such a plant. But set aside the kissing custom and you’ll find a […]

Candice Norwood, "In battle for the Senate, Georgia organizers fight to mobilize voters of color", PBS News Hour 12/3/2020: For Susana Durán, Georgia State director for the civic engagement group Poder Latinx, informing voters about the race starts with the basics. “What is a runoff? There’s no Spanish language word for runoff,” Durán said. “I’m […]

Article by Ji Siqi in South China Morning Post (11/21/20): "China’s frustrated millennials turn to memes to rail against grim economic prospects" Chinese youth are venting their disillusionment with bleak job prospects and widening inequality with new memes and buzzwords online The stinging online sentiment jars with the government line that China’s economic boom is […]