Ed Silverman, "An unchartered situation for all of us’: From shipping containers to security concerns, a Covid-19 vaccine supply chain takes shape", STAT 9/8/2020 [emphasis added]: The pandemic has prompted the U.S. government and others across the globe to secure huge numbers of doses from Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers, who are pushing clinical trial timelines like […]
Sok3 Kei1索K ‘to inhale, ingest, take Ketamine, which is an illegal drug in Hong Kong’ ["Ketamine is a medication mainly used for starting and maintaining anesthesia. It induces a trance-like state while providing pain relief, sedation, and memory loss. Other uses include sedation in intensive care and treatment of pain and depression." Source]
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] This came across the transom: "Your Global Mansplaining Dictionary In 34 Languages" The Japanese in this "handy crowdsourced linguistic guide to a universal blight" is a bit off, as I'll mansplain below, and I'd love to know how the LL hivemind sees the other languages. 横柄な男の解説 (ōhei […]
The9 is a Chinese girl group hailing from different parts of the PRC. Here they are playing the telephone / Chinese whispers game with their own topolects*, which they refer to as fāngyán 方言, almost universally mistranslated into English as "dialect". *See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, q.v.
Researchers looking at infectious disease transmission found that loud speech is more of a problem than coughing and sneezing, and this was true regardless of the language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic). Aerosol emission and superemission during human speech increase with voice loudness Sima Asadi, Anthony S. Wexler, Christopher D. Cappa, Santiago Barreda, Nicole […]
Headline in Global Times today (9/10/20): "People's Daily has right to reject US article containing vicious smears against China: FM" "FM" means "Foreign Minister", Wang Yi 王毅. Since the colorful, eye-catching term "vicious smears" has been popping up elsewhere in PRC English language media these days, colleagues have been wondering where it comes from […]
A new kind of Artificial non-Intelligence? A subversive easter egg of human origin? I'm not sure, but in the course of researching preposition usage, I discovered an odd result of Google searches for terms in various languages for dish soap — a panel (in English), attributed to Wikipedia, explaining that Dishwashing liquid, known as dishwashing […]
In response to the previous post, "More completely new sinographs from Hong Kong" (9/8/20), John Rohsenow remarks: I can see that it would be easy to use these "new" characters on hand-written posters, but how does one do it on line, or in printed form? One would have to "zao zi", (Lit. 'construct [a] character') […]
From @togetherfightingdisease on Instagram: View this post on Instagram A post shared by 🇭🇰 | 一齊打怪獸💛 (@togetherfightingdisease) on Sep 6, 2020 at 9:43pm PDT
Esha Mitra, "India didn't prioritize mental health before Covid-19. Now it's paying the price", CNN 9/7/2020: No words for mental health [,,,] Experts say the historical reluctance to address mental health in India could be partly due to a lack of terminology. None of India's 22 languages have words that mean "mental health" or "depression." […]
Final panel of this New York Times article: "What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong" (9/4/20), by Jin Wu and Elaine Yu:
A protester holds a placard that reads "Do not forget 831 terror attack, truth needs to be seen on CCTV" during a demonstration at a Hong Kong mall on Aug. 30 on the eve of the first anniversary of the Prince Edward MTR station incident when police stormed the station to make arrests during massive anti-government protests. (Photo: AFP) […]
I assigned this book to my class on the Silk Road: The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction, by James A. Millward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) I noticed that it bore the following dedication, one of the most peculiar and eye-catching I've ever encountered: For Herrgottsbescheisserle and all their cousins It looked German, but […]