Tokyo crime beat: "Arrest for fraud follows man’s failure to fulfill writing request", by Tokyo Reporter Staff (7/24/20) TOKYO (TR) – With personal computers, smartphones and tablets now more common than ever, many may consider the actual writing of kanji characters to be of diminished importance. But for one man, now in custody for fraud, […]
In reacting to the fierce denunciation of Xi Jinping by Cai Xia (see bibliographical note at the bottom of this post), Conal Boyce mused: Mind-boggling material. I had to do a double-take on the passage you show that contains both chǔn and jiāhuo (蠢家伙 ["stupid guy / fellow"]). And sure enough, in the video, she […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I like trying to make it as hard as possible. 'I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft'"
Today this ad popped up for me on a newspaper site: So I tried to figure out how the mysterious object on the left could be used to tunnel out through concrete and earth, and how it could safely be combined with C-3 plastic explosive, and what all this has to do with the woman […]
Stephen H writes: I was shuffling French Impressionists in Art Authority on my iPad and came across this:
Sensational article by Hagar Hosny in Al-Monitor (7/23/20): "Google presents new tool to decode hieroglyphics: Google has created a new tool to translate hieroglyphics into English and Arabic at the stroke of a key." It starts like this: In a July 15 press release, Google announced the launch of a new tool that uses artificial […]
Yesterday Diana Shuheng Zhang and I went to a Trader Joe's and saw some pretty, gleaming yellow berries for sale. Diana was delighted because it reminded her of the same type of berries she used to eat when she was back home in the Northeast of China. I asked her what they were called in […]
There's a bit of fuss on Twitter about what reporter Kimberley Halkett said when the press secretary Kaleigh McEnany cut off her follow-up question at yesterday's White House briefing (overall video here, official White House transcript here). Thanks for asking @charliespiering … there's a lot of misreporting out there about that briefing. The answer to […]
Meet Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan's de facto ambassador to the United States:
There's been a lot of political reaction to what Donald Trump said in Chris Wallace's 7/19/2020 interview. But I haven't seen any reactions to a curious linguistic innovation — or maybe it was a mistake? — that happens at about 10:52 of the interview: Your browser does not support the audio element. hey Dr. Fauci […]
Michael Silverstein, a titan in the field of linguistic anthropology, passed away on Friday. UChicago News has an obituary today. Prof. Michael Silverstein, a leading University of Chicago anthropologist who made groundbreaking contributions to linguistic anthropology and helped define the field of sociolinguistics, died July 17 in Chicago following a battle with brain cancer. He […]
There is a phenomenon in Japanese publishing called "san-gō zasshi 三号雑誌", which refers to a short-lived magazine that puts out three issues and then folds. Sino-Platonic Papers, a scholarly journal I started in 1986, just put out its 300th issue, and we're still going strong, with about ten more issues in the pipeline, and others […]
Some things that "everybody knows" are refuted repeatedly by the experience of everyday life. A notably example is the function of "filled pauses", whose American English versions are conventionally written "um" and "uh". Dictionaries all say that these are are expressions of hesitation, doubt, uncertainty; ways to fill time or hold the floor. The OED […]