The Zeesea cosmetics company, based in China, is advertising three new sets of products "X the British Museum", in a relationship that they call a "partnership" and a "cobranding product line": "Mysterious Egypt", "Alice in Wonderland", and "Angel Cupid". I'm guessing that the British Museum's role in the partnership did not extend to input on […]
David Denison writes: This ludicrous headline in my Feedly feed caught my eye just now: "Learning wild to swim with confidence". The actual story in The Guardian revealed an alternative version, usable but (to my ears) still in over-anxious thrall to the don't-split-infinitives mantra: "Learning to swim wild with confidence". I think I'd have naturally […]
If you ask Google (in various ways) how to pronounce pecan, you'll get suggested additional questions like these:
From Annie Gottlieb: This kind of mistake is becoming a pandemic!This is a twofer!—misnegation AND the opposite of misnegation, whatever you call that—misaffirmation? On the rare occasions that his team actually trusts him in front of a camera, the presumptive democratic nominee never ceases to disappoint with his ability to — for lack of a […]
[This is a guest post by Ken Hilton] I came across this Facebook post and I thought it might be worth sharing on Language Log.
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Trump mispronounces Thailand as "Thighland" pic.twitter.com/PgTRnHpAA8 — The Recount (@therecount) August 6, 2020
Sean Hannity's new book, Live Free or Die, was released a couple of days ago. The original cover featured a Latin motto, "Vivamus vel libero perit Americae", whose source was apparently Google Translate's version of "Live Free or America Dies": As Spencer Alexander McDaniel observed, this is gobbledygook — or perhaps we should say "googledygook". […]
Annie Gottlieb asks: Here's a question for you: These words all have the same meaning— goy, goyim (Yiddish) gajo (Roma) gaijin (Japanese) Is there any relationship or is this a coincidence?
There's a Reddit page with this title: "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English". Feast your eyes: (source)
Today's adventure in AI brought yet another robocall, which my Google Assistant intercepted since the calling number (probably spoofed) was not in my contacts list. Here's Google Assistant's rendering of the interaction
The title and the following observations come from Rebecca Hamilton: I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: on Foot to Constantinople, as I convalesce from COVID-19 (I've had a hard time of it), and I stumbled upon an aside he made about the French "hongre," meaning "gelding," as does the […]
[Update — apparently the data for the graphs presented by Sabeti and Miller came originally (without attribution) from work by David Rozado, who has provided useful information about his sources and methods. I therefore withdraw the suggestion that the counts were wrong, pending further study, though I am still not persuaded by the arguments that […]
Barbara Partee asked me to comment on this thread by Arram Sabeti — crucial bit here: 2/ The data makes it plain that the NYT has abandoned its commitment to nonpartisan reporting. When the internet threatened their business they made a devil’s bargain to amplify outrage and us-vs-them psychology. Racism wasn't a new problem in […]