Language Log

Sign on the wall of a school: (Source)

That's the title of a wonderful new Wikipedia article from a volunteer editor who has written scores of major articles (ancient Chinese thought, religion, culture, literature, language and linguistics, lexicography, etc.) for the online encyclopedia of record.  This one is about a peculiar type of ancient Chinese drinking vessel, the zhī 卮, which tilts over […]

Matthew Gault, "Here’s Why Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns at Their Dicks", Vice 5/27/2020: Like with any other fandom, there’s levels to gun culture. In the online gun community there are "normies" and "fudds." Normies cover a range of people, anyone from a basic handgun owner to the completely uninitiated. Fudds—as in Bugs Bunny hunter […]

A recent Frazz:

This morning, someone sent me a message that began, "Welp, at least word boundaries are respected…".  I had no idea what he meant by the first syllable.  It didn't even seem like a word to me.  Or, I thought, perhaps it's a typo for "well". Still, I was curious, so I looked around a bit, […]

Alex Hern, "Anti-porn filters stop Dominic Cummings trending on Twitter", The Guardian 5/27/2020: Twitter’s anti-porn filters have blocked Dominic Cummings’ name from its list of trending topics despite Boris Johnson’s chief adviser dominating British political news for almost a week, the Guardian can reveal. As a result of the filtering, trending topics over the past […]

Posted to the Twitter thread that began with the Arabic menu full of spectacularly bad mistranslations into English featured here ("Accuracy of sheep meat" [5/26/20]): It reminds me of pic.twitter.com/wWEYOOKvjU — robert affinity (@affinity292) May 25, 2020

Banner in Hong Kong: (source)

So-called "verbal fluency" is one of the tasks we're using in the first iteration of the SpeechBiomarkers project (and please participate if you haven't done so!). Despite the test's name, it doesn't really measure verbal fluency, but rather asks subjects to name as many words as possible from some category in 60 seconds, like "animals" […]

As is my custom, I was zipping along merrily, letting my fingers dance on the keys to transfer my thought-flow into typed words.  Usually when I'm in a good mood and this happens — which is almost always — I'm thinking thoughts in my head (speaking the sounds of the words I want to type) […]

So my mother's friend's husband is stuck in a hotel in Saudi Arabia and this is the order menu they gave him Do I have any Arabic speaking followers that can help make sense of this but also, tag yourself, I'm "Normal doubt" pic.twitter.com/MVemyCCON9 — Vlada ✨😈✨ (@vladadraws) May 24, 2020 A large-enough-to-read image is […]

Twitter thread on small waterway names: My husband wants to know what you all call this & where you live: pic.twitter.com/C9XAoXvAfI — square peg mama (@squarepegmommy) May 23, 2020  

News you can use, from The Forward: "Etsy vendor who doesn’t know Yiddish accidentally sells 'NYC crotch' face mask" (Aiden Pink, May 26, 2020). A vendor on the e-commerce site Etsy wanted to sell facemasks that said “NYC Strong” in Yiddish – but the final product said “NYC Crotch” instead. The vendor Tees Go Bling, based in […]