Language Log

Police giving orders to fire tear gas at protesters, Kowloon Bay, August 24:

From Don Keyser: Perhaps you are familiar with the Taiwan slang word lǔshé 魯蛇 — I was not, and needed to look it up.  Cute.  Picking evocative characters pronounced lu3she2 — for "loser."  This usage is sufficiently common to have found its way into Pleco, though it befuddled Google Translate when I first tried there. […]

They root cause events, issues, and other problems, of course. Graham Rapier, "Tesla solar panels also caught fire on an Amazon warehouse, the retail giant said in the wake of Walmart's lawsuit", Business Insider 8/26/2019 : "All 11 Amazon sites with solar from Tesla are generating energy and are proactively monitored and maintained," a Tesla […]

Taken by Yuanfei Wang at a restaurant in Hangzhou:

From Chenfeng Wang: These were signs in a student cafeteria in Tsinghua University, three years ago. They were taken down after the first day the cafeteria opened, because students were very, very angry about the improper English, and even thought that it was a shame for the top university to have these signs. (Obviously they […]

Photograph taken by Yuanfei Wang at the Hangzhou Xiaoshan airport:

Written on a wall in Hong Kong: (Source)

From a recent email enticing me to read the current edition of The Atlantic magazine:

Readers have recently sent two  links to examples where writers seem to have lost control of piled-up negatives.

Isaac Chotiner, "A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again", The New Yorker 8/23/2019: Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in […]

Sometimes, anyhow — When you notice that Mike Pence always. talks. like. this. #FYC pic.twitter.com/5zXiNndx4s — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 23, 2019

Somebody sent me this sign from a supermarket in China: Yí zhàn shì gòuwù de shǒuxuǎn 一站式购物的首选 One dyadic station shopping head elects This is one of the most bizarre specimens of Chinglish I've ever encountered. If we omit "dyadic", the rest of it is easy to figure out (it should be "First choice for […]

The world has been convulsed this week by the news that China (where all such American social media platforms are outlawed) has been using hundreds of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread gross disinformation about the Hong Kong extradition bill protesters: "Facebook and Twitter Say China Is Spreading Disinformation in Hong Kong", by Kate […]