In "The shape of things to come" (5/13/2016) and "Trump the Thing Explainer" (3/16/2016), I wondered why Donald Trump's spartan linguistic style is so different in character from his taste in interior design, which seems to be firmly placed in the tradition of elaborate artificiality that flows from 18th-century Roccoco and 19th-century Beaux Arts to the fantastic excesses […]
From an anonymous correspondent: Here’s an article about how Ann Coulter described the audience at a Trump rally as "a melting pot full of 'Hispanics' and 'Mandarins.’” (Her actual words seem to be, “They have Mandarins in the audience. They have Hispanics in the audience.”) "Ann Coulter brags about the large number of 'Mandarins' at […]
From Florent Moncomble, a language academic in France: My father came back recently from a trip to Japan and was intrigued by the following notice, which he found in his Tokyo hotel room one day. He gets by in English but could not make out its meaning and was wondering whether the fault lay with […]
Since I began writing blogs for Language Log around ten years ago, I have never received so many tips on what to write about as I have in response to the furor that has arisen over Nintendo's plan to change the Chinese names for some of the characters in their immensely popular Pokémon (ポケモン < […]
Comedian Doug Stanhope is unable to sleep at night over the way his friend Johnny Depp is being pilloried as a wife-abuser by Amber Heard (she says he hit her in the face with a cell phone); so he did the obvious thing any friend would do: he submitted an expletive-laced article about his angst […]
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Anne Amnesia, "Unnecessariat", More Crows than Eagles, 5/10/2016: In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial “work for labor” to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers (who, for instance held their […]
In advance of tonight's Game 7 in the NBA Western Conference finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder, the New York Times recalls a similar Game 7 faced by the Chicago Bulls in 1998: That spring, the top-seeded Bulls were taken to a seventh game by the Indiana Pacers in the […]
A tweet from Cherie Chan: Man arrested for commemorating #June4th1989, accused of naming his alcohol BaJiuLiuSi (8964) https://t.co/U56ghlcjaj pic.twitter.com/CrnHAVrf10 — Cherie Chan 陳卓妍 (@cheriechancy) May 29, 2016
Last Thursday, during LREC 2016, 16 participants from ELRA and LDC had a festive dinner at a restaurant named Na Burji. On the drive from Portorož, we had a discussion about what the restaurant's name means — our first guess, stimulated by the extreme switchbacks we traversed as the road climbed steeply from the coastal plain towards Nova Vas […]
So asked Michael Rank in the comments section to this post: "Triple topolectal reprimand" (5/29/16) That's a very good question. It's a common expression among Wuhan speakers, a pet phrase for men and women alike, almost as though it were a sort of mantra or dharani. If you ask them what it means, they will […]
One of the most annoying things about being in China is that people will cut in front of you in lines when you're waiting for a bus, to buy a train ticket, or whatever. If you wish to achieve your aim, sooner or later you learn that you have to take defensive / offensive measures […]
Or are they just programmed to act like they do? Today's SMBC asks (and answers) the analogous question about emotions:
Just a couple of weeks ago, we learned about 19 Singaporean expressions that had been newly added to the OED: "New Singaporean and Hong Kong terms in the OED" (5/12/16) Among these expressions was "Chinese helicopter", which was characterized as "derogatory" and defined as "a Singaporean whose schooling was conducted in Mandarin Chinese and who […]