It's a card game with a strange name. "Throwing eggs" is a shedding-type card game in which the players (2 pairs of 2 partners) try to get rid of all their cards before their opponents. The characters in Guandan (掼蛋) literally mean "Throwing Eggs". The second character is a homophone of the character 弹, meaning […]
Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024: I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever […]
Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales: Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane…. By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened […]
[This is a guest post from Brett Powley] I ran into something recently that I thought might be log-worthy. My wife was watching Van Helsing, the TV series, and I heard one of the characters say this: I didn’t save you because you’re not important. Now, what he meant was: I wouldn’t […]
One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction. Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter. They simply are fated / predestined to be together. They have an undeniable affinity for each other. I […]
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue: "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024). AbstractWriting systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that […]
From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech: Your browser does not support the audio element. I mean look, what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly talks about himself right? So the next time you hear him, don't count the lies. Count the I's. Count the I's. His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his […]
[This is a guest post by Don Keyser] I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday: VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started […]
For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things similar to) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.
[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.] Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese). The atypical feature […]
Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the […]
We've been on the trail of the griffin for some time: "Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread" (8/9/24), "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor, with illuminating illustrations. Following the leads in […]