John Lawler writes: I recently had reason to ask the following question of Google https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+words+does+the+average+person+say+in+a+day and the result turned up an old LL post, which is great, except the selection algorithm picked the wrong number as the answer, and even quoted the post you were complaining about as if it were true. This should probably […]
Sam Dorman, "AOC says Trump 'relished' rally chant about Omar, doesn't want to be president anymore", Fox News 7/20/2019: "Once you start telling American citizens to 'go back to your own countries,' this tells you that this President's policies are not about immigration, it's about ethnicity and racism," Ocasio-Cortez went on to applause from the […]
Menachem Wecker, "One NRA fights for guns. One for restaurants. Yes, D.C. has abbreviation overload.", WaPo 7/15/2019: It was the malapropism heard around certain corners of social media. When Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) asked Ben Carson recently about REOs — real estate owned properties — the housing and urban development secretary appeared to hear a […]
Just to show you how up to date Language Log can be, in this post we'll be talking about a neologism that is only a few weeks old in China. The term is "jīwá 鸡娃“, which literally means "chicken baby / child / doll". The term surfaced abruptly and began circulating virally on social media, […]
Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "The other day I was really freaked out that a computer could generate faces of people who DON'T REALLY EXIST, only to later realize painters have been doing this for several millenia."
Brian Costa, "Rory McIlroy’s British Open Chances Collapse on the First Hole", WSJ 7/18/2019 [emphasis added]: Rory McIlroy stepped into the first tee box at Royal Portrush on Thursday morning and waved to a roaring crowd. He knew it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience: his opening tee shot at the first British Open held in […]
The genesis of this post lies in the following newspaper headline: "Ich Bin Ein Hong Konger: How Hong Kong is turning into the West Berlin of the quasi-cold war between the West and China", by Melinda Liu, Foreign Policy (7/16/19) Every historically literate person immediately recognizes the allusion to John F. Kennedy's famous speech in […]
For those interested in the history of concepts and techniques in phonetics, I've scanned the Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (1938), all 550-odd pages of it. Warning: 23 MB .pdf file.
Thomas Friedman, "‘Trump’s Going to Get Re-elected, Isn’t He?’", NYT 7/16/2019 [emphasis added]: I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I […]
Jeff DeMarco writes: "Saw this on Facebook. Google Translate gives 'German salty pig hand' which I presume refers to trotters. Not sure how they got sexual misconduct!"
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It's common to see half used to mean something much vaguer than "1/2" or "one of two equal parts", and as a result, things sometimes end up with three or more halves. A nice recent example (from Megan Twohey and Jacob Bernstein, "The ‘Lady of the House’ Who Was Long Entangled With Jeffrey Epstein", NYT […]
An introduction and guide to this series of posts is available here. The corpus data can be downloaded here. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. New URL for COFEA and COEME: https://lawcorpus.byu.edu. Having dealt in my last post with how bear arms was ordinarily used and understood in 18th-century […]