I've mentioned my old friend Liu Yongquan in various posts and comments — see, inter alia, here, here, and here, where I wrote: A colleague, Liu Yongquan 刘永泉, who spent most of his life working in Beijing as an applied linguist (especially concerned with machine translation and computer applications), spoke quite good MSM, referred to […]
Following up on this story, Matt Blaze makes a key point (and see the whole conversation): (whispers to flight attendant): "I don't want to upset anyone, but I think the man in 15C is modeling credit default swaps". — matt blaze (@mattblaze) May 7, 2016
Rachel Barney, "[Aristotle], On Trolling", Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5/3/2016: That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear. And […]
The following photograph of a page of Chinese characters comes from this BuzzFeed article: "21 Pieces Of Handwriting So Perfect They’re Borderline Erotic" (5/4/16)
The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature: With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […] The judgments here are backed up […]
Geoff Hackelford, "Olympic Golf: (Some) 'Powers-That-Be-Whiffed'", 5/6/2016: But as Marika Washchyshyn writes for Golf, the women's side has a very different view, with not a single player declaring themselves out in spite of the health scare […] Ron Irving, who sent in the link, notes that themselves is used to refer to an individual (if generic) […]
Nathan Hopson spotted this on Facebook:
Permalink Comments off
This headline in yesterday's NYT caught my attention: "Despite His Credentials, Nyquist Has Many Doubters". Of course the story is about Nyquist the Horse, who is named after Nyquist the Hockey Player. But for a moment, I thought it might be about Nyquist the Engineer. Now, you may not have heard of Nyquist the Engineer, but […]
Today's Frazz deals with the phenomenon of flapping/voicing in American English:
Back in February, we covered the whole Donald Trump big league → bigly business at length, and if you want details, go read that post: "Bigly", 2/26/2016. But Trump continues to say things like Your browser does not support the audio element. We're not going to lose, we're going to start winning again, and we're […]
[The following is a guest post by Mark Metcalf, a retired Naval officer and adjunct Lecturer in Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia.] One of the joys of being semi-retired is having the luxury of being able to chase the occasional squirrel that appears in my field of view. This morning one of those […]