Blog Profile / Language Log
| URL : | http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Linguistics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 3684 | |
| Posts / Week: | 13.5 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
X, let alone Y
"No pictures should have been sent out, let alone been taken," said Trent Mays after he was found guilty of disseminating a nude photo of a minor, according to this account of the notorious Steubenville rape case. If that is what Mays said, then he has apparently internalized the wrong meaning of the idiom let [...]
Oral what?
Geoff Wade sent in the following banner:
The first thing I noticed was that the banner had something to do with Y?ngy? ?? ("English") and that it was announcing some sort of dàsài ?? ("big contest"). Then I saw the simple, yet conspicuous, character k?u ? ("mouth") twice — right in the middle of the [...]
Nozzle thought gun
Y.M. sent in a link to a story with the headline "Jury awards $6.5M in CA case of nozzle thought gun", remarking that This is the first I ever heard of nozzle thought guns. Needless to say, I am worried. I believe that nozzle thought guns are mentioned in one of Iain Banks' earlier novels, maybe The [...]
Depopularization in the limit
George Orwell, in his hugely overrated essay "Politics and the English language", famously insists you should "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." He thinks modern writing "consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by [...]
Haha right
Apparently awakened early this morning by a stray cosmic ray, a slumbering mainframe somewhere in the depths of the University of Pennsylvania Health System sent me this email: Subject: Required Training Expiration Notification DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL – SYSTEM GENERATED These items on your Knowledge Link Learning Plan may need your attention as soon due or [...]
Boiling / boiled water
Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University:
Since I wrote about the Chinese penchant for hot water in two recent Language Log posts ("Opens the waterhouse; open water rooms" and "Water between"), naturally I [...]
Condensation and displacement in word aversion
Matthew J.X. Malady summarizes readers' comments on his Slate "word aversion" piece — "Which Words Do Slate Readers Hate?", 4/2/2013: Hundreds of commenters chimed in to report aversions keyed to words extending from apple to zesty. Among the others mentioned: foyer, salad, hose, lapel, plethora, funicular, groin, nostril, and munch. Several commenters noted an aversion to [...]
John J. Gumperz, 1922-2013
John J. Gumperz, the Berkeley sociolinguist who, among his many contributions, introduced "the speech community" as a unit of linguistic analysis, died on Friday at the age of 91. Margalit Fox has a nice obituary in the New York Times. Professor Gumperz, who at his death was an emeritus professor in Berkeley’s anthropology department, was a [...]
Spam comment of the month
Here's one that Akismet missed, so I got to read it before deleting it by hand: What a data of un-ambiguity and preserveness of precious knowledge on the topic of unexpected emotions. What indeed. I conjecture that this was written by one of Iain Banks more gnomic aliens — an Oct, say.
What is this?
Daniel Tse spotted this sign in Seoul recently:
The Korean says:
juchageumji ???? = ???? = No Parking
This is from Japanese:
ch?sha kinshi ????
In Mandarin, for "No Parking", it would be more common to write one of the following:
jìnzh? tíngch? ????
bùdé tíngch? ????
bù zh?n tíngch? ????
In Cantonese, this would be expressed as bat1 zeon2 paak3 [...]
Scientific Babelism
The proponents of "Wrathful Dispersion Theory" have been vulnerable to the criticism that their viewpoint is religious rather than scientific in nature. But now, we see a strong scientific alternative to the increasingly-discreditedShow More Summary
Malady on Word Aversion in Slate
Matthew J.X. Malady, "Why Do We Hate Certain Words?", Slate 4/1/2013: The George Saunders story “Escape From Spiderhead,” included in his much praised new book Tenth of December, is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. The sprawling, futuristic tale delves into several potentially unnerving topics: suicide, sex, psychotropic drugs. It includes graphic scenes [...]
I'm against it, myself
Commenting on a link to Conor Pope, "New poll shows Labour support nose-diving", Irish Times 3/30/2013, B.H. remarks that "If I knew what it was, I might do it for them …" The obligatory screenshot: The OED's entry for nosedive indicates that it originated in reference to airplanes: "Aeronaut. A steep downward descent by an aircraft with [...]
Chranna and Fluffya
From the start of "What Can Doctors Learn by Admitting Their Mistakes?", Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Making Mistakes: Guy Raz: That's Brian Brian Goldman: I'm uh staff emergency physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada Guy...Show More Summary
Noodle devils
Nathan Vedal wrote to tell me about an interesting mistranslation into Chinese that he recently came across. Having purchased some not particularly healthy, but quite delicious, instant noodles produced by a Korean company, he was perusing the Chinese instructions, which included the following sentence: ======== Ji?ng [...]
Ask Language Log: SAT "Identifying Sentence Errors" questions
From reader Q.C.: I'm writing to you as your article "The SAT Fails a Grammar Test" came to my mind the other day when I happened to stumble on the following Identifying Sentence Error question from a PSAT: Opposite to the opinion of several respected literary critics, Jane Austen does not make good taste or manners in [...]
John McIntyre on varieties of plagiarism
John McIntyre, at You Don't Say, has some cogent remarks on self-plagiarism: Yesterday, writing at Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark suggested that our current attitudes about plagiarism have conflated relatively minor or innocuous literary borrowings with serious thefts. One of the points he identified was the clamor about self-plagiarism. After quoting him, I'd like to add some [...]
Androids in Amazonia: recording an endangered language
The village of Akazu’yw lies in the rainforest, a day’s drive from the state capital of Belém, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Last week I traveled there, carrying a dozen Android phones with a specialized app for recording speech. It wasn't all plain sailing… Read the full story here.
Calvert Watkins, 1933-2013
The great Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins passed away in his sleep on the evening of March 20. From the Harvard Gazette: Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died earlier this month at the age of 80. A towering figure in historical and Indo-European linguistics and a pioneer in the [...]
Victor Mair's birthday book
An announcement at Cambria Press:
The announcement explains:
In honor of Professor Mair’s birthday, a rare collection of his essays titled China and Beyond has been compiled. China and Beyond was unveiled at the Cambria Sinophone World Series reception this past Friday at the 2013 AAS annual conference in San Diego.
A surprise birthday celebration for Professor Mair was [...]