Postal orders are a way for people in Britain to send money by post without having a checking account, but there is a fee, dependent on the face value of the order. For a postal order with a face value of more than £100 the fee is shown on the Post Office web page as […]
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Gordon Smith, "Michigan Supreme Court Embraces Corpus Linguistics", The Conglomerate 6/28/2016: In the case of People v. Harris, the Michigan Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the United States to embrace corpus linguistics. (I have written here about Justice Thomas Lee's concurrence in the Utah Supreme Court's Rasabout case, which is cited […]
Eric Garland of The Hill shares a video of Hillary Clinton at a June 22 campaign appearance in North Carolina, and it provides ammunition those who would like to portray her as a soulless automaton vainly trying to seem like an authentic human being.
Some eloquent 17th-century Quaker peeving, from The history of the life of Thomas Ellwood: Or, an account of his birth, education, &c. with divers observations on his life and manners when a youth: … Also several other remarkable passages and occurrences. Written by his own hand. To which is added, a supplement by J. W., […]
In a comment to "Pinyin literature contest" (6/30/16), DG asked an excellent, reasonable question: I am not a Chinese speaker, so I am wondering if the requirement that it's not originally written in Chinese characters is a sort of honor code, or is there some way to tell from the pinyin submission?
Yesterday I gave a lecture on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age "mummies" (they're really desiccated corpses, but "mummies" sounds cuter) of Eastern Central Asia before an audience of about twenty-five at the Franklin Inn Club in Philadelphia.
The following two images come from Graham and Kathleen's video diary of a trip to the Daitoku-ji temple complex in Kyoto.
Hangzhou is handing out “crash course” manuals for residents to chat with international visitors at the G20 Summit in September, complete with Chinese character transcriptions of such beginner’s phrases as “Hangzhou, a paradise on Earth” and “orioles singing in the willows”: Source
The portmanteaux just keep on coming — most recently in "Brexit's fallout: Adrift", The Economist 7/2/2016, we get a section heading "Point of no Breturn". See also (updated from the comments): [link] Are You Brexhausted yet? [link] Not “Brexit” but “Braccident”. [link] Newspaper headlines: 'BoJo Brexecuted' on Tory 'Day of Treachery' [link] #brexecution [link] Is this […]
I wish to call your attention to the Li-ching Chang Memorial Pinyin Literature Contest. The purpose of the contest is to commemorate the life and work of Li-ching Chang (October 5, 1936-June 20, 2010), who was an outstanding teacher of Mandarin at the University of Washington, the Oberlin center in Taiwan, Middlebury College Summer School, […]
A couple of years ago, a LLOG guest post by Richard Hudson proposed "Three cheers for Michael Gove" in recognition of his role in "the re-introduction of grammatical analysis n the British School curriculum". Now Ben Hemmens draws our attention to A L Kennedy's recent BBC 4 manifesto, "The power of language", which introduces the topic this […]
Nancy Friedman came across the website of RippleInfo, a technology company in Suzhou. Nancy doesn't read Chinese, so she submitted it to Google Translate, whereupon she discovered a section titled “Suzhou Siege Lions Have Caused”. That led her to a statement from the CEO that included this sentence: If the siege lion apes and procedures […]
Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon, and Charles Carson, "Among The New Words", American Speech May 2016: In this installment we continue our consideration of items nominated at the American Dialect Society’s 2015 Word of the Year proceedings […] The overall winner is considered here: they used as a singular third-person pronoun, a gender-neutral (or “epicene”) alternative […]