Language Log

Interesting Chinese translation of the title of Yale philosopher Jason Stanley's book, How Propaganda Works:

13-year-old Zaila Avant-garde of Louisiana is your 93rd Scripps National #SpellingBee champion ‼️ The first African-American winner of the competition 👏 pic.twitter.com/y2Y5dAGcVN — ESPN (@espn) July 9, 2021

Like the previous post (7/7/21) on gender-inclusive French, it is difficult to refrain from quoting the bulk of this thought-provoking article by John McWhorter in The Atlantic (7/4/21):  Even Trigger Warning Is Now Off Limits The “Oppressive Language List” at Brandeis University could have come from countless other colleges, advocacy groups, or human-resources offices. —– […]

Wikipedia defines Murphy's Law as an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", and documents an origin story crediting Edward R. Murphy, whose article explains that Following the end of hostilities, in 1947 Murphy attended the United States Air Force Institute of Technology, becoming R&D Officer at […]

It's often observed that current AI systems will generalize confidently to areas far away from anything in their training, where the right answer should be "huh?" This is true even when other available algorithms, often simple ones, could easily diagnose the lack of fit to expectations. We've seen many amusing examples, which we've filed in […]

From blood and gore to hatred. In China, revolutionary operas or model operas (Chinese: yangban xi, 样板戏) were a series of shows planned and engineered during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) by Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. They were considered revolutionary and modern in terms of thematic and musical features when compared with […]

Jake Eberts, "Why Do Analysts Keep Talking Nonsense About Chinese Words?", Foreign Policy 7/6/2021: Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually […]

Going through a box of papers from years ago, I found one of Sally Thomason's famous doodles: I've set it aside to be framed and hung, facing the Haida frog that was a gift a decade earlier from Nicola Bessel.

An unusual article on language in Foreign Policy: "Aux Armes, Citoyen·nes!  Gender-neutral terms have sparked an explosive battle over the future of the French language," by Karina Piser (7/4/21) The article is long and detailed.  Here I try to quote only the most important and telling points. In early May, France’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, […]

Amid the intensive coverage of the Champlain Towers condominium collapse, there have been some indications of more widespread problems. But I haven't seen many references to John D. MacDonald's novel Condominium, which was originally published in 1977, a bit before the Champlain Towers condominium was built in 1981. And some of those few recent references […]

Since unidentified aerial phenomena (=UFOs) have been in the news recently, so has the "Fermi Paradox". And the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox has an interesting linguistic resonance, aside from all the speculation about what communication with aliens might be like. Here's Wikipedia on the original Los Alamos conversation: In the summer of 1950 […]

In his major July 1 speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the CCP, one of Xi Jinping's many pronouncements featuring "blood" was this: yù xuè fèn zhàn 浴血奋战/ 浴血奮戰 lit., "bathe blood energetic / rousing / fierce battle / fight" i.e., "fight hard in bloody battles; a bloody fight" It is hard to pronounce four […]

I've been going through old boxes of paper, looking for (the very small fraction of) stuff that I want to keep, and recycling the rest. I'm uncovering many interesting memories, as well as a few things that I have no recollection of at all. Representing the latter category is a faded xerox of the cartoon […]