Today's xkcd:


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There has been quite a ruckus over the impending ban on TikTok, a mainland Chinese short-form video hosting service, and its supposed replacement by REDnote (aka Xiaohongshu [XHS], aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, aka RED), a Chinese social networking and e-commerce platform.  I think that much / most of the commotion is sheer hype to stir up ( Read more... )

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

Selected readings

• "Hu Shih and God: thearchs across Eurasia" (12/28/24)
• "'Lord of Heaven' in ancient Sino-Iranian" (5/28/24)
• "Some Old Chinese terms relating to religion, mythology, ritual" (9/17/23)
• Pulleyblank, Edwin G. "The Ganzhi as phonograms and their application to the calendar", Early ( Read more... )

Marco Rubio has been named Secretary of State by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, swiftly and unanimously approved by the United States Senate, and promptly sworn in by Vice President JD Vance.  When it comes to China, our most formidable foe, however, there is a hitch - Rubio is under a travel ban by the Chinese government.

Zěnme bàn 怎么办 ( Read more... )

Variety told us a few days ago that Bad Bunny's new album made it to first place on the Billboard 200 - "Bad Bunny Beats Taylor Swift in Extremely Tight Race to No. 1 on Albums Chart". In other coverage, Pitchfork's review leads with the assertion that "Bad Bunny synthesizes the past and present sound of Puerto Rico for an anthemic, cross- ( Read more... )

Poor cattle, they suffer for / from their gallstones in more ways than one.  If you want to know why, read the previous Language Log posts on bezoars, for which see "Selected readings" below.

For linguists, one of the most interesting things about the Chinese term for "bezoar", niúhuáng 牛黃 ("cow yellow"), is that it is among the earliest attestable ( Read more... )

[I wrote this piece more than a year and a half ago, but neglected to post it because I was in the midst of a long run.  Nonetheless, it's still relevant and interesting, so I'm going ahead to post it now.  Since I was able to revise some small points and we garnered several interesting new comments, it was worth a second throw.]

"Linguists have ( Read more... )

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I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this:  "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25".  Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost ( Read more... )

From Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster at The Endless Knot, 50 minutes on "The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail":

Click to view

Mark Sudaram describes himself as

…an interdisciplinarian, medievalist, philologist, linguist, academic, musician, and philosophical layabout. He is the co-host of the Endless Knot Podcast and is the main force behind the ( Read more... )