Blake Shedd sent along a series of forty pictures of plant identification signs from the botanical garden in the small southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt am Wörthersee. He was rather impressed that the botanical garden staff went to the trouble of including non-Latin / non-German names for the plants. And I was impressed at the […]
From Mark Seidenberg (though I think that I may originally have sent it to him years ago):
Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Life rule: Never do anything you've done more than 3 times already."
Lila Gleitman points out to me that in one of the slowly increasing number of articles passing round the pseudoscientific story about Yiddish originating in four villages in Turkey you can see that hallmark of non-serious language research, the X-people-have-Y-words-for-Z trope: Putting together evidence from linguistic, history, and genetics, we concluded that the ancient Ashkenazic […]
Permalink Comments off
We started teaching Cantonese at Penn more than a quarter of a century ago, and it has been a very successful program. Yale was teaching Cantonese long before us, and the title of this post is the same as that of a famous Yale textbook for the teaching of Cantonese by Parker Po-fei Huang and […]
British comedian Richard Herring is the author of a 2003 book entitled Talking Cock: A Celebration of Man and his Manhood, so he naturally seized upon the republicization opportunity provided by the recent story of the world's first successful penis transplant. He made it the topic of his weekly humor column in The Metro, the […]
Or maybe David Crystal does — as reported in Dan Bilefsky, "Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style", NYT 6/9/2016. Better late than never, in any case. For some background, see "The new semiotics of punctuation", 11/7/2012 "Aggressive periods and the popularity of linguistics", 11/26/2013 "Generational punctuation differences again", 8/1/2014 […]
From Lane Greene: Got all that? Godawful information design. pic.twitter.com/A5M8GfMSFW — Robert Lane Greene (@lanegreene) June 6, 2016
Eric Lonergan, "The economics of language: David Hume & valuing Facebook", Philosophy of Money 2/19/2016: Language, law and money have very similar economic properties. Specifically, the resilience and propagation of these institutions does not reside in some intrinsic, physical value, nor in a promise, nor in the value each individual derives from them. It resides […]
Cameron M. sent in a screenshot of his weather report from a couple of days ago, in which the current weather in New York City is described as Pilvistä:
A few years ago, I noticed hosts and callers on sports talk radio using the phrase "dumpster fire" as a metaphor for chaotically bad situations. And recently the usage seems to have spread to other domains and become more popular: Klaus Marre, "Sheldon Adelson’s Newspaper Is a Dumpster Fire", Who.What.Why 5/7/2016 Greg Wyshynski, "Dallas Stars goaltending […]
Emily Rauhala has an entertaining, enlightening article about a startlingly improbable new kind of PRC officialese: "‘Ever been to Tibet bro?’ A nationalistic Chinese Twitter account goes rogue" (WP, 6/1/16) The article is so well written that I wouldn't want to try to steal Rauhala's thunder, so I will just quote the first part, and […]
Arriving at the London Underground subway station deep below King's Cross railway station, the main London terminal for trains to Edinburgh using the East Coast main line. I'm lugging a heavy wheeled bag, and there are flights of ordinary stairs as well as escalators, so I take the passenger elevator upward. Several of us crowd […]