Email from Julia Preseau: "The word 'masklessness' — going to surge?" She sent a couple of examples: [link] So it was that until this week, Mr. Trump’s mask aversion extended well beyond his person, echoing throughout the White House. Top aides generally eschewed them, as did those who attended meetings with the president or appeared […]
Michael Marshall, "The hidden links between mental disorders", Nature 5/5/2020: Perhaps there are several dimensions of mental illness — so, depending on how a person scores on each dimension, they might be more prone to some disorders than to others. An alternative, more radical idea is that there is a single factor that makes people […]
This note is about the site of Shimao in northern Shaanxi. It is dated to around four thousand years ago. The architectural details alone are astonishing for that age and place, but there are so many other cultural riches, including sculpture and engraving, plus agricultural advances not found in central China till later. It is […]
A commenter to this post, "Matthew Pottinger's speech in Mandarin" (5/9/20) posed the questions in the title. These are interesting questions that raise important issues. Since I don't know Matthew Pottinger, I am unable to say for sure what he was reading, whether it was Hanzi, Hanyu Pinyin, or something else. The reason I say […]
Something extraordinary happened on May 4, 2020. Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger delivered an extremely impressive speech in virtually flawless Mandarin. Here it is:
This headline puzzled me: I interpreted it as Doctors are showing a buried CDC report to top White House officials And I wondered, what was that report? and why did the CDC bury it? And who are the doctors digging it up? What the headline actually meant, of course, was Documents show that top White […]
Two years on, and still my favourite Chinese mistranslation…. pic.twitter.com/0EHeQjybeB — Antiokhos in the East (@AntiokhosE) May 6, 2020
There are dozens of articles Out There on "Zoom fatigue", with a wide range of ideas about causes and cures. Gianpiero Petriglieri offered the BBC a couple of hypotheses about why "Zoom calls drain your energy": Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat, says Petriglieri. Video chats mean we need […]
Valerie Hansen has a new book just out: THE YEAR 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner, 2020. A NYT review of Hansen's landmark volume is copied below, but let's first look at some interesting language notes concerning the background of the word for "slave" (Chapter 4 is on […]