Paul Farhi, "‘Racist’ tweets? News media grapple with how to label Trump’s latest attacks", Washington Post 7/15/2019: When is it time to call a statement “racist,” and when is it time to let others characterize it that way? News organizations wrestled with that question Sunday and Monday after President Trump tweeted a series of statements […]
There is much hullabaloo over the new "Mulan" trailer:
In response to my question about a "term for exchange errors in the mapping from thematic roles to syntactic positions" (in "Thematic spoonerisms"), Jerry Friedman pointed us to hypallage. The OED's first citation for this word is to George Puttenham's 1589 The Arte of English Poesie: 1589 G. Puttenham Arte Eng. Poesie iii. xv. 143 […]
Matt Richtel, "Urinary Tract Infections Affect Millions. The Cures Are Faltering", NYT 7/13/2019 [emphasis added]: For generations, urinary tract infections, one of the world’s most common ailments, have been easily and quickly cured with a simple course of antibiotics. But there is growing evidence that the infections, which afflict millions of Americans a year, mostly […]
"Porsche and BMW are known as 'broken shoes' and 'don’t touch me' in China", by Echo Huang (7/11/19) Many of these names are off-color and some even quite vulgar, but they are all affectionate: Audi’s RS series: xīzhuāng bàotú 西装暴徒 (“a gangster in a suit”), inspired by the car’s smooth look and impressive horsepower (some […]
Echo Huang from Quartz (7/5/19) has written a fun and interesting article on Shanghai’s new waste sorting rules: "'What kind of rubbish are you?': China’s first serious trash-sorting rule is driving Shanghai crazy" Echo also has a related Chinese version. "Starting Monday (July 1), individuals and businesses in China’s financial capital who fail to separate trash […]
A recent request from Steve Anderson led me to borrow from our library its copy of the Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Held at the University of Ghent, 18-22 July 1938. (Why the scanned book isn't available from Google Books or from the Hathi Trust isn't clear to me…) There are […]
Farhad Manjoo, "Call Me 'They'", NYT 7/10/2019: The singular “they” is inclusive and flexible, and it breaks the stifling prison of gender expectations. Let’s all use it. I am your stereotypical, cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad. I dabble in woodworking, I take out the garbage, and I covet my neighbor’s Porsche. Though I do think men […]
According to abcduvin.com ("tout sur le vin, ses techniques, son vocabulaire"), the phrase "À faire danser les chèvres" ("To make the goats dance") means "Vin trop acide, désagréable à boire" ("Wine that's too acid, disagreeable to drink"). The Dictionnaire de L'Académie Française cites the same expression: "Du vin à faire danser les chèvres, du vin […]
[Part 1, Part 2.] 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. From The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut From October, 1735, to […]
Here's an emoji: 😻 Here's an emoticon: :‐) As we will see below, the superficial resemblance of the two words is completely coincidental — even though they both have to do with the visual depiction of emotions and ideas in texts. This post began as a comment to "Emoticons as writing" (7/7/19), but it soon […]
From Zhizheng Wu: We are pleased to announce that the Blizzard Challenge 2019 listening test is now live. The paid listening tests have been running in the University of Edinburgh for two weeks and will finish by 19th July. We need your help as a listener, and to help us recruit more listeners. Speech experts (you decide if you are one! Native […]
Donald Trump's July 4 speech included this puzzling passage: Your browser does not support the audio element. In June of seventeen seventy five the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York and named after the great George Washington commander in chief The Continental Army suffered […]