Bob Ladd sent in a link to "Five Questions on Brexit to Jo Shaw", Verfassungsblog 6/24/2016 [emphasis added]: There’s a possibility for the Article 50 trigger to be delayed, and the UK simply to carry on in membership, and then – once the UK population has had long enough to digest the real implications of […]
(1/2) For those of you keeping score at home, I gave exactly 18 f*cks about my Pats. Upon reflection, 12 probably would have been sufficient — Ben Affleck (@BenAffleck) June 23, 2016 (2/2) We Boston fans have always been known for our subtlety. One of my favorite interviews; hope you get to see the entire […]
Cameron Majidi sent in this photograph taken on East Broadway in Manhattan:
Or is it portmanteaus? Anyhow, forget Portugexit and Italexit and the rest: Here's what else might happen if we Brexit: Grexit Departugal Italeave Czechout Oustria Finish Slovakout Latervia Byegium#EUref #iVoted — Alvin Carpio (@AlvinCarpio) June 23, 2016 Update — now that Leave has won the referendum, we should be talking about Brexiit (3rd singular perfective […]
At an excellent restaurant in Leipzig last night the server quickly identified me as an Auslander whose German might not be up to grasping every nuance of the menu, so I was given an English menu as well. (It was a bit humiliating, like having a bib tied round my neck. I have tried to […]
Permalink Comments off
A couple of days ago, Dilbert highlighted a problem with robot emotions, beyond the issue that Zach Wienersmith raised a few weeks ago: The external evidence of "cognition" is sometimes obscure and ambiguous, but the Turing Test approach is especially problematic in evaluating "emotion".
Is there some pop culture reference I'm missing here? Or has the Washington Post turned its advertising outreach over to Monty Python?
Nora Kelly, "Susan Collins Unveils a Gun-Control Compromise: It would restrict sales to individuals on two terrorist watch lists", The Atlantic 6/21/2016.
Today's xkcd, headlined "Intervocalic Fortition": Mouseover title: "These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word 'meh.'"
John Oliver on Last Week Tonight recently noted that "Brexit sounds like a shitty granola bar you buy at the airport":
Last weekend's Snap Judgment profiled an interesting case of "Foreign Accent Syndrome", in which Ellen Spencer's speech disorder, caused by a stroke, disappears when she sings — and even to some extent when she thinks about singing:
Japanese is full of loanwords from English, a phenomenon we have often discussed on Language Log, e.g.: "Too many English loanwords in Japanese?" (7/12/13) Not only does Japanese like to borrow words from English, it is fond of borrowing parts of words and combining them with Japanese morphemes to make hybrid coinages. It's not always […]