Long have we pondered the overwhelming dominance by individuals of Indian heritage over the spelling bees. Do they have some sort of mysterious power or secret for memorizing hundreds of thousands of obscure words? Now we have an answer from one of the masters himself, Dev Shah, a ninth-grader living in Largo, Florida, who won […]
Klaus Nuber, who four years ago sent us this amusing post, "Restaurant logo with a dingus" (5/29/19), has contributed another droll Anekdote. The following article is in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung, "Kannste knicken?"* (11/23/23) — herewith the second anecdote of three from all over the world: *VHM: The meaning of the article title escapes me — […]
From Philip Taylor: The British media were flooded yesterday with reports that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by scientific evidence presented during the Covid-19 pandemic. My understanding of "bamboozle" has always been that deception must be involved, and this is borne out by the OED, but there was clearly no deception in […]
The Google Books ngram plot for "artificial intelligence" offers a graph of AI's culturomics: According to the OED, the first use of the term artificial intelligence was in a 13-page grant application by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, "A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence", written in […]
In "LOL, ROTFL, IJBO" (11/2/23), all the talk of laughter made me think of the epitome of that particular animal behavior, the hyena. Of all creatures on earth, the hyena is one of the most curious. Can you imagine going through life laughing at everything, especially when life is so full of tragedy? Listen: here, […]
If you can't make up your mind what to do about something, then in French you would say "je suis partagé": I'm torn or divided over it. You can't decide what to do about it. You can't make up your mind whether to be pleased or angry with something. But the verb "partager" means "to […]
Not Chinese. Do you understand? This has long been a cabbage of contention, but make no mistake about it: fermented kimchee / kimchi (gimchi 김치 (IPA [kim.tɕʰi]) (lit., "soaked [in their own juices of fermentation] vegetables") is not the same thing as pickled paocai / pao tsai 泡菜 (lit., "soaked [in brine] vegetables"). Kimchee and […]
Recent article in Scientific American: This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality By Anvita Abbi on June 1, 2023 From just a small handful of Andaman Islanders, the last speakers of their languages, […]
The Differences between Old English, Middle English and Modern English By Danièle Cybulskie When people study Shakespeare in high school, I often hear them refer to his language as “Old English.” As far as the language goes, Shakespeare’s English actually falls under the category of “Modern English.” This may be a little hard to believe, […]
This curious Cantonese couplet appeared on Weibo today:
Despite the evidence of my most recent relevant post, the best current speech-to-text systems still make mistakes that a literate and informed human wouldn't. In this recent YouTube video on the history of robotics research, the automatic closed-captioning system renders "DARPA" as "Dartmouth":
I've always been fond of this pretty, little word, but I seldom use it in my own speech (maybe once every five or ten years), because it seems too triumphant. This morning, however, after a long, numerical list of steps that some colleagues and I need to take, followed by a conclusion we wished to […]