Language Log

A new political advertisement, apparently from the campaign of Kelly Loeffler:

A guest post (guest list?) by Anthony Bladon: A verb walks into a bar, sees an attractive noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines. An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars. A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and […]

Yesterday morning, two friends and I ate at Alma del Mar, a new Philadelphia restaurant, on an outdoor terrace featuring a mural unveiled just a few days ago. There are three panels: on the right is a poem in Spanish by Carlos José Pérez Sámano; there's a fish skeleton in the middle; and on the […]

From Alex Baumans: I'm getting more and more interested in Chinese pop culture, so I keep discovering things.   I recently watched Painted Skin 2, which is your typical fantasy action movie, with star crossed lovers, a princess, a fox spirit and a lone outpost of the area surrounded by barbarians.   When these barbarians […]

On September 11, Friday afternoon, Diana Shuheng Zhang gave a virtuoso presentation before the Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC), a venerable institution that has been meeting regularly for decades.  The text she discussed was what she calls the "rhapsodic subcommentary" of the Daoist scholar, Cheng Xuanying 成玄英 (ca. 605-690), on the Zhuang Zi 莊子 (3rd […]

An interesting malapropism:

Seen on the internet:

Screenshot of a comment on a funny video on Weibo:

Announced only yesterday, Alibaba has a new robot delivery vehicle for the last mile:

That's part of a message from one of my students.  I knew right away what he meant, but — as always — I'm curious about what causes such off-the-wall typos.  It can't be because of a spellchecker gone awry.  So I asked the student, "What type of input system do you use?  I'm trying to […]

Recently I was doing some background research on Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), and one of the references that Google Scholar handed me was a Semantic Scholar page for J.A. Willeford and J. Burleigh, "Handbook of central auditory processing disorders in children", 1985, with the following abstract: The handbook of central auditory processing disorders in […]

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce] Chris Chappell finally caught up with you on the nàge nàge nàge / nèige nèige nèige 那个 那个 那个 ("that that that") story from USC that you introduced to the public more than two weeks ago (see the second item in the list of readings below). (In […]

"Wowkie Zhang【Sunshine, Rainbow, White pony】"