I wrote this sentence: "Hong Kong was one of the freeest cities on earth". My automated spell checker flagged "freeest", so I changed it to "freest", and the spell checker let that stand. But in my mind I was still saying "free‧est", with two syllables, whereas when I see "freest", it's very hard for me […]
Tweet by Daphne K. Lee: Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours. — Daphne K. Lee (@daphnekylee) June 28, 2020
The next SCRIBO guest will be John Baines (Oxford), on the invention of writing in Egypt and China, with the title: “Pairs of Early Script Forms: Contrasting Aesthetics in Early Egypt and China”. Don’t miss it next Wednesday 8th July, *4.30pm* (Italy time) = *10:30am* (Philadelphia time). The Zoom link is direct: https://tinyurl.com/y9mu7bpo […]
Today's SMBC: Mouseover text: "I actually only made this so nobody will ever invite me to a party again."
From Shī jīng 詩經 (Poetry Classic), circa 6th c. BC: (Her) hands are like catkins; skin is like congealed lard; neck is like larva of longicorn; teeth are like calabash seeds; forehead (like that of) cicada, eyebrows (like antennae of) moth, (her) enchanting smile is winsome; (her) beautiful eyes are clear-set. — Ode 57, […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession."
Boogaloo is in the news these days, in reference to what a recent Forbes article calls "a loose group of far-right individuals who are pro-gun, anti-government, and believe that another civil war in America is imminent". The politics is complex and evolving, as a USA Today article explains: [T]here are various facets to the loosely […]
There are scores of words in Sinitic languages that regularly get translated into English as "barbarian". One of the most conspicuous and pervasive is hú 胡, which we have often discussed on Language Log, perhaps most extensively and intensively in "The bearded barbarian" (8/26/15), with detailed etymological, orthographical, morphological, and philological notes. The term came […]
There are a few years whose meaning everyone knows, like 1492. This song invokes 1918 (for the flu pandemic, not the end of WWI), 1930, and 1968:
Since 1979, being in a department that proudly called itself "Oriental Studies", a distinguished component of which was Arabic Studies, I had often heard of "maqama" and was quite aware that it was a virtuoso literary form: Maqāmah (مقامة, pl. maqāmāt, مقامات, literally "assemblies") are an (originally) Arabic prosimetric literary genre which alternates the Arabic […]
What do you say? pic.twitter.com/3emc8tAwfB — Lakeyshia Alexander (@KeyshiaAlexnder) June 25, 2020
From David Brophy: I’ve often wondered why the Uyghur word for carrot is sewze, etc., which comes from P. sabz “green”. I know carrots range from orange to yellow, and maybe occasionally purple, but I’m pretty sure there’ve never been green carrots. It's a good question. One thing I do know is that, whenever I […]