I suppose it's been around for at least 5-10 years, but I just encountered the expression "tài shuǎng le 太爽了" in the English informal sense of "cool!". With 409,000 ghits, it seems to be fairly widespread, though not all of those ghits are to the informal sense of the English word (see the numbered items […]
Several people have asked me about how the various U.S. presidential candidates use various indicators of epistemic status. It's easy to calculate word frequencies as a proxy, so here are some numbers from this season's debates. I've tallied feel words (feel, feels, felt, feeling, feelings), think words (think, thinks, thought, thoughts, thinking), and believe words […]
Reader K.N. comments on a WSJ headline "Indiana Poll Bears Good News for Trump": To my surprise, the article does concerns neither actual ursines nor pundits who feel Indiana polls will be worth less than they are now. It also fails to explain why people in Fort Wayne were cheering a glowing effigy of Mr. Trump (see […]
The recent flurry of posts on feel as a propositional attitude verb has, I now feel, buried the lede. Kids today may have started using "feel like S" with increasingly frequency in recent years. But their elders have apparently been abandoning "feel that S" ever since the middle of the 20th century.
In a NYT Op-Ed a few days ago, Molly Worthen identified as "a broad cultural contagion" the "reflex to hedge every statement as a feeling or a hunch", and urged us instead to "think, believe or reckon". I countered that emotion has largely been bleached out of feel used with sentential complements — "feel that SENTENCE" has long been a standard way to […]
Following up on the issues raised yesterday in "Feelings, beliefs, and thoughts", it might be helpful to explore the etymology of the various verbs that people commonly use to express the epistemic status of their assertions. From their entries in the Online Etymological Dictionary, we'll learn that several common propositional attitude verbs have roots in sensation, motion and emotion, […]
In "Character amnesia in 1793-1794" (4/24/14), I described the so-called Flint Affair, which refers to James Flint (?1720-?), one of the first English persons to learn Chinese. For his audacity, Flint was imprisoned for three years by the imperial government, and two Chinese merchants who helped him write a petition to the emperor were executed.
Molly Worthen, "Stop Saying 'I Feel Like'", NYT 4/30/2016: In American politics, few forces are more powerful than a voter’s vague intuition. “I support Donald Trump because I feel like he is a doer,” a senior at the University of South Carolina told Cosmopolitan. “Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale student […]
The Republican presidential campaign is getting apocalyptic. The Bloomberg News headline on a story by Ben Brody — "Boehner Uncorks on ‘Lucifer’ Cruz, Says He Wouldn’t Back Him in Fall" — led reader A.R. to wonder whether that "fall" is merely the November election, or rather the fall of Him the Almighty Power Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal […]
Mike Miller received the text below via WeChat recently, where it seems to be making the rounds: Gěi dàjiā jiǎng yīgè gǎnrén de gùshì: Yīgè qiāng kōng hé jī shè jī cǎn chǐ dú ē, túrán, chài yī líng diàn máo bīn qǐ, lí yuè miè chán…ránhòu jiù sǐle. Tài gǎnrénle…! Zhè gùshì jiào “yīgè […]
Jordan Hoffman, "Mother's Day review — almost transcendentally terrible", The Guardian 4/28/2016: One can’t deny, however, that this sort of badness – this transcendent, almost unearthly badness – isn’t oddly comforting.