Language Log

This morning I received this card from a friend:

Michaela Winberg, "Sonic Devices Target Teenagers In Philadelphia", NPR 7/5/2019: WINBERG: If you look at the rec center building at Philadelphia's East Poplar Playground, you'll see a small beige speaker screwed into the wall. Every night at 10 p.m., that tiny speaker activates. And for eight hours, it plays nonstop. Here's what it sounds like. […]

Cartoon in China Daily (7/5/19):

Matt Wilstein, "Kathy Griffin Calls CNN’s Jeff Zucker a ‘Pussy’ for Caving to Trump", Daily Beast 7/2/2019 [emphasis added]: Griffin tells ‘The Last Laugh’ podcast that the CNN president tried to limit her to one Trump joke per hour during 2016’s New Year’s Eve special before firing her the next year. […] They had such […]

The surname of the mayor of Prague is Hřib (Zdeněk Hřib [b. May 21, 1981]): "Zdeněk Hřib: the Czech mayor who defied China" By refusing to expel a Taiwanese diplomat, the Prague mayor has joined the ranks of local politicians confronting contentious national policies Robert Tait in Prague The Guardian, Wed 3 Jul 2019 01.00 EDT […]

The following English-language quotation is widely (though vaguely) attributed to Montaigne –see also here. But as far as I can tell, he never wrote the French equivalent: Whenever a new discovery is reported to the scientific world, they say first, ‘It is probably not true.‘ Thereafter, when the truth of the new proposition has been […]

Seen on a buffet table in Glasgow: "Profiteer Rolls" for "Profiteroles". There are a fair number of other examples Out There, but not enough to merit a separate dictionary entry, much less to eclipse the original, as in the case of Jerusalem Artichokes.

Chelsea White, "Does people power make a difference? The truth about protests", The New Scientist 6/17/2019 [emphasis added]: Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Hong Kong on 9 June to protest a government plan to allow extraditions to mainland China. The demonstrations have continued regularly since, with seas of protesters surrounding a […]

Hanasaki, a curious term, depending on how you read and interpret it:  "flower blooming" > "scab" A Japanese correspondent asked me the following set of questions (below, after the page break) about the name of a Yosakoi-Sōran dance group.  I'm not sure what the meaning of "Yosakoi" is, other than that it is the designation of […]

[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane] Like pretty much everyone else I know, I’ve been following the news out of Hong Kong with a mixture of hope and admiration and absolute dread. I was looking at reports from yesterday’s rally in support of the police when something caught my eye: the sign text […]

Xi Jinping commits another pronunciation gaffe.  Even if you don't know Mandarin, you can hear it clearly here because it is repeated over and over again.  Instead of saying "pīngpāng wàijiāo 乒乓外交" ("ping-pong diplomacy"), he says "bīngbāng wàijiāo 冰邦外交" ("ice states diplomacy"), which some wits are further distorting as "bīngbàng wàijiāo 冰棒外交" ("popsicle diplomacy"): https://twitter.com/RealEmperorPooh/status/1144817965008744448

"Europe heroically defends itself against veggie burgers", The Economist 6/29/2019: The european union gets a lot of flak. All right, it isn’t literally blasted with anti-aircraft fire, but you know what we mean. One ongoing battle (ok, nobody died) involves the use of words. Earlier this year, the European Parliament’s agriculture committee voted to prohibit […]