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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sack (1)
to fire someone from a job, to dismiss
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Idiom of the Day
(one's) final resting place
The location where one's body is interred after death. Watch the video
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model or account for people change from, say, 20 – from 10 to 20 years or beyond?
The full "probably" phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1.png And zeroing in on the pronunciation of "probably", which shows the type of reduction described in the Bluesky link:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1X1.png The speaker there is Jonathon Phillips, electrical engineer, program manager, Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington, DC. This is not a speech error — he's an articulate native speaker of American English, speaking in a fairly formal style, though rapidly.
In my modest 100-phrase "probably" sample, there were many other lenition patterns. Sometimes one or both of the /b/s lost their stop closure and turned into the kind of voiced approximant that phoneticians sometimes call "frictionless fricatives". Sometimes one of them was lenited unto apparently deletion while the other one remained stop-like, with results the might be spelled "probly" or "probby". This sample did not validate the claim that the full lenition-to-one-phonetic-syllable is "near universal", and the result is not the generally the same as the pronunciation of the word "pry", though the patterns probably overlap. But "pry"-like pronunciations of "probably" certainly happen.
I don't have time this morning to survey the full range of "probably" variants and to estimate their relative frequency in the NPR sample — or to look at samples from less formal sources. Those are tasks for another time, maybe — though because the variant performances of "probably" reflect gradient articulatory and acoustic changes, it's not easy to assign them to qualitatively distinct categories, or even decide exactly what to measure. If I were forced to define a set of "probably"-pronunciation categories, there would need to be a dozen or so of them. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of these patterns of variation, and the factors that correlate with them, would be a good phonetics-course term project!
Some earlier posts on the issue of phonetic lenition in English:
"Weak t", 4/17/2017
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018
"Farther on beyond the IPA", 1/18/2020
"First novels", 3/13/2022
"Pronunciation evolution", 4/15/2022
"More post-IPA astronauts", 4/16/2022
"Political flapping and voicing", 5/29/2022
"Ron's Princibles", 8/22/2023
"'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024
"Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction", 7/26/2024
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ill
good, excellent
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Idiom of the Day
be (one's) last resort
To be the only remaining thing or person that may help one or be of any use after all other options have been exhausted. Watch the video
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Language Log
A new Trump speaking style?
Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.
At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.
Here's a short sample from the 8/8/2024 press conference:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Most dangerous period of time I've ever seen for our country.
With that being said uh
we have somebody that
hasn't received one vote for
president and she's running
and that's fine with me.
But we were given
Joe Biden
and now we're given
somebody else
and I think frankly I'd rather be running against the somebody else.
But that was their choice, they decided to do that because uh
Kamala's record is horrible.
She's a radical left
person at a level that nobody's seen.
She picked a radical left
uh
man
that is uh-
he's got things done that he's-
he has positions that are just not- it's not even possible to believe
that they exist.
uh
he's going for things that
that nobody's ever
even heard of.
Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds
having to do with safety
he doesn't want to have
borders he doesn't want to have walls he doesn't want to have any form of safety for our country.
He doesn't mind people coming in from prisons and
neither does she, I guess, because she's not-
she couldn't care less she's the border czar.
By the way, she was the border czar
a hundred percent
and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she's not the border czar any more,
like nobody ever said it.
And I just hope that the uh
media becomes
more diligent, more honest,
frankly, because if they're not going to be honest it's going to be much tougher to bring our
country back.
We have a very very sick country right now.
From "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024:
[O]ver the past 8 years, many LLOG posts have analyzed several aspects of his rhetorical style, both the text and the delivery, which are strikingly different from other contemporary American politicians and public figures. Specifically, these posts have described his
* Repetition
* Informality
* Fluency
* Melody
This has nothing to do with the political and cultural orientation of his speeches — the same techniques could in principle be applied to the promotion of internationalism rather than nationalism, for example. No doubt the content is a large part of the reason for his appeal, but the rhetorical affinity with professional wrestling is probably the rest of it, as discussed in "The art of the promo", 10/31/2020.
The recent recordings certainly continue to be repetitive, but they seem less fluent to me.
A strange side note — YouTube's automated transcription for the 8/8/2024 press conference renders "border czar" as "Bazar":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Bazar.png
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
junk
a dangerous drug, especially an opiate like heroin or morphine
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Idiom of the Day
the last of the lot
The last or final person(s) or thing(s) in a given group or list. Watch the video
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human history" (1/26/23)
* C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998. Vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
* C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000. In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy.
* "Faces of ‘Siberian Tutankhamun’ and his ‘Queen’ buried 2,600 years ago reconstructed by science", by Olga Gertcyk and Svetlana Skarbo, The Siberian Times (1/8/21). Buried with vast amounts of gold and ornate metalwork. "The Arzhan-2 burial of the Scythian ‘King’ and the ‘Queen’, found in 1997 and studied between 2001-2003 by Russian-German expedition is one of the most extraordinary discoveries ever made by archeologists."
* J. P. Mallory, The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective (Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 [Nov. 2015]; free pdf, 63 pp.)
* Victor H. Mair. "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians'." In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle, ed., Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse. McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004. Pp. 163-187.
* Barry Cunliffe. By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
* Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West". In Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. 30-61. Especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east.
* Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26. This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".
[Thanks to Adrienne Mayor]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: cuneiform
This word has appeared in six articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fix up (1)
to repair something or to improve the condition of something, especially something old or second-hand
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Word of the Day
farsighted
Definition: (adjective) Planning prudently for the future.
Synonyms: foresighted, long, longsighted, prospicient.
Usage: The presidential candidate spoke about his farsighted policies that would stabilize the economy for years to come.
Discuss
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ople of the original group would think his speech is weird for the way it has mixed in an English word.
The reasons why I think these developments are so significant are the following:
1. their speech and writing are so longer restricted to syllables and sinographs
2. they do not think they are code switching; they think they are speaking pure Chinese.
3. they are not bound by Mandarin or other topolectal phonotactics (twenty-thirty years ago, by and large they still strictly adhered to Sinitic phonotactics).
Many of the above phenomena may be attributed to the way English is being taught and learned by Chinese in China and abroad. Very successfully! I'm often astonished by how good my PRC students' spoken English is. The sheer scope, scale, and numbers of individuals studying English are enormous — 400,000,000 in the PRC alone, and millions outside of China. Plus the impact of popular culture, scholarship, science and technology, business being conducted in the global language can hardly be overstated. But that's the subject for another post. Selected readings
* "YouCool" (3/7/08)
* "Too cool!" (5/4/16)
* "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 5" (7/6/23)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
* "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
* "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
* Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: fatalistic
This word has appeared in 39 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
read out
if you read something out, you read it aloud so everyone can hear it.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go over (1)
to look carefully at something like a report, essay, document, etc. to check for mistakes or to make improvements
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Word of the Day
unabashed
Definition: (adjective) Not disconcerted or embarrassed; poised
Synonyms: unembarrassed.
Usage: And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to laugh…and remain unabashed.
Discuss
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Language Log
Probably
From Technology Connections on Bluesky:
My favorite weird language thing is the near universal shortening of "probably" to "pry" in speech.
And people don't notice they're doing it! If I write "yeah that's pry not gonna work" that doesn't parse right, but if you say it out loud it absolutely does.
— Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social) Aug 10, 2024 at 2:52 PM
As a first pass at checking this, I took 100 instances at random from the 39,731 occurrences of "probably" in the NPR podcast corpus that I've referenced before (3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours).
What did I find?
The (dictionary pronunciation of the) word "probably" /ˈpɹɒbəbli/ has two intervocalic onsets, /b/ and /bl/, that are not followed by tautosyllabic stresssed vowels. They are therefore are candidates for the general process of intervocalic non-pre-stress lenition that's typical of American English, the best-known version of which is the flapping and voicing of coronal stops.
This articulatory and acoustic weakening happens to various degrees in the /b/ and /bl/ of "probably", including to the point of apparent deletion.
Let's start with an example that happens to have no lenition, from "Online Calculator Estimates Breast Cancer Risk", Morning Edition 4/19/2007:
Professor KARLA KERLIKOWSKE (Medicine, University of California San Francisco): When you do these models, you want something that's relatively simple and easy to measure.
AUBREY: And lifestyle isn't. No one can remember precisely what they eat or drink. But there are ways Kerlikowske would like to revive the Gail model. She would toss out the question asking women how old they were when their first baby was born. Not because other factors such as breast-feeding confound it, but because research suggests it is not as important as breast density.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We've appreciated the significance of breast density for probably 30 years.
AUBREY: The trouble is, there's never been an automated way to measure in a mammogram, the volume of epithelial cells and surrounding tissue that are typically involved in breast cancer.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We think if we had a quantitative measure of breast density that might add to the specificity of the model and really improve prediction for the individual woman.
Here's the full phrase containing un-lenited "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0.png And here we zero in on the word "probably" itself:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0X1.png As you can see, each of the two /b/ performances has a well-defined silent stop gap, followed by a clear release burst.
At the other end of the lenition continuum, here's an example where both onsets are lenited unto apparent deletion, from "Machines Slowly Mastering Art of Recognizing Faces", Talk of the Nation 1/22/2022:
CATHY (Caller): Well, hi, Ira. I love your show and you have a very interesting subject today as usual. My question for your guests is about the ability of the facial recognition technology to recognize faces as they change over the years, say a photo of an infant versus a teenager, adult or a senior.
FLATOW: Hmm. Jonathan, any comment on that?
Dr. PHILLIPS: So theres probably – there again, this is a very active research. But there's probably two different areas of aging with face recognition. The first, for example, is going from an infant as somebody grows through adulthood, because there are fixed ways of changing and there is substantial change. The other is for an adult from the age, say, from age 20 as they grow older in life.
And face recognition seems to be relatively stable up to about five years. But the challenge is then how do you [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pass on
If you pass something on, you give it to another person after receiving it yourself.
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Word of the Day
audacity
Definition: (noun) Fearless daring; intrepidity.
Synonyms: temerity.
Usage: Skill, coolness, audacity, and cunning he possessed in a superior degree, and it must be a cunning whale to escape the stroke of his harpoon.
Discuss
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Language Log
Primate preferences
Today's SMBC:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillas.png
Mouseover title: "Unprompted, they will walk into a cafe and pretend they have important business to do."
The aftercomic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillasAfter.png
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knock around (2)
If you knock around with someone, you spend time together because you're friends.
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Word of the Day
centromere
Definition: (noun) The most condensed and constricted region of a chromosome, to which the spindle fiber is attached during mitosis.
Synonyms: kinetochore.
Usage: Down syndrome, a congenital disorder caused by the presence of an extra twenty-first chromosome, can result from aberrant functioning of the centromere.
Discuss
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Language Log
Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread
A Language Log reader asked:
I’m curious, do griffin motifs (creatures with four legs but beak) appear in China at a known date? do you think the imagery dispersed from the East, i.e., from Scythia and Asia westward to the Mediterranean or vice versa, from the West to the East?
Since we have often discussed language spreads of the Scythians and other nomadic groups of Central, Inner, and Southwest Asia, I believe it is a worthy topic to pursue the transmission of art motifs associated with these groups across the Eurasian expanse. Consequently, I asked Petya Andreeva, who is a specialist on this type of nomadic art, what her response to this question would be. She replied (note especially the last two sentences):
While no definitive trajectory has been agreed upon, I would say transmission certainly happened from the Iranian plateau – actually without a doubt. We see griffins on cylinder seals from Uruk, very early on, then we see them with great frequency at Ziwiye. It is worth noting that they also dominate the Urartian repertoire – I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara last summer, and noticed they are present in some reliefs and on smaller scale objects. Then they permeate the Luristan culture very noticeably, and it is from the Iranian realm that the Scythians – many later captured by Darius [king of the Achaemenid Empire]- might have transmitted the motif. No doubt the intrusion into Chinese material culture happened from Iran. We start to see some creatures resembling griffins in the Eastern Zhou when nomadic contact is quite tangible in China.
See Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh: University Press, 2024). Selected readings
* "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor
* "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21)
* "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
* "The Names of Metals in the Turkic, Indo-European, and Finno-Ugric Languages"
* "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with a bibliography of numerous relevant previous posts
* "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08) — see especially this comment
* "Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4" (10/11/20)
* "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
* "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
* "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19) — details how the akinakes and other attributes of Saka / Scythian culture penetrated to the far south of what is now China; excessive sacrifices of horses in the south and in Shandong
* "Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth" (5/7/24)
* "Winged lions through time and space" (5/4/24)
* "What is the difference between a dragon and a /lʊŋ³⁵/?" (2/10/24)
* "The role of long-distance communication in[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
memo
a written message or note, usually in business
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Idiom of the Day
last-minute
(used before a noun) Done at the very last possible moment or opportunity. Watch the video
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Language Log
Refugees
Marilyn Singer is reponsible for the local (re-)invention of "Reverso Poetry: Writing Verse in Reverse":
A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half (otherwise it becomes what one blogger’s kid called a “same-o.”)
Wikipedia uses the term "Reversible poem", and tells us that
A reversible poem, also called a palindrome poem or a reverso poem, is a poem that can be read both forwards and backwards, with a different meaning in each direction, like this:
Initial order Reversed order The world is doomed We can save the world I cannot believe that I cannot believe that We can save the world The world is doomed
Reversible poems, called hui-wen shih poems, were a Classical Chinese artform. The most famous poet using this style was the 4th-century poet Su Hui, who wrote an untitled poem now called "Star Gauge" (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú).This poem contains 841 characters in a square grid that can be read backwards, forwards, and diagonally, with new and sometimes contradictory meanings in each direction.[2] Reversible poems in Chinese may depend not only on the words themselves, but also on the tone to produce a sense of poetry. Beginning in the 1920s, punctuation (which is uncommon in Chinese) was sometimes added to clarify Chinese palindromic poems.
The focus of this post is Brian Bilston's Reverso Poem "Refugees".
The last three (of 24) lines, in top-down order:
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way
And in bottom-up order:
The world can be looked at another way
Do not be so stupid to think that
A place should only belong to those who are born there
In verbal as opposed to textual form, the differences will not be punctuation and capitalization, but rather timing, pitch, voice quality, and other aspects of prosodic interpretation (syntactic as well as rhetorical…).
Those last/first three lines, as read by Simon Clark: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/RefugeesReadBySimonClarkX1a1.png Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/RefugeesReadBySimonClarkX1a2.png Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/RefugeesReadBySimonClarkX2a1.png Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/RefugeesReadBySimonClarkX2a2.png Your browser does not support the audio element.
Simon Clark's whole reading:
And for your convenience, here's the poem with lines in order from bottom to top:
The world can be looked at another way
Do not be so stupid to think that
A place should only belong to those who are born there
These are people just like us
It is not okay to say
Build a wall to keep them out
Instead let us
Share our countries
Share our homes
Share our food
They cannot
Go back to where they came from
We should make them
Welcome here
They are not
Cut-throats and thieves
With bombs up their sleeves
Layabouts and loungers
Chancers and scroungers
We need to see them for who they really are
Should life have dealt a different hand
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
So do not tell me
They have no need of our help
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Language Log
The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase
Xinyi Ye came upon this post on Zhīhū 知乎 ("Did you know?"), a Chinese social media site that is comparable to Quora:
Rúhé kàndài huíguó rénshì shuōhuà jiádài Yīngwén? 如何看待回国人士说话夹带英文？
"How should we view / treat people returning to China [from abroad] who mix English in their speech?"
The author is Ren Zeyu, who seems to be an anime artist, based on the bio of his account.
He begins by questioning whether what they are adding to their speech is English or whether it has already become bona fide Chinese.
He takes the well-known example of "cool" (I'll summarize what he says here). Before the year 2000, if somebody mentioned in a praiseworthy way that something was "kù 酷", which at that time literally meant "cruel; ruthless; brutal; oppressive; savage", people would consider that he was mixing English "coo[l]" in his Chinese speech, because at that time English "cool" was still in the early stages of being absorbed into Chinese. Standard dictionaries listed only the negative, pejorative meanings of "kù 酷"; there was not a trace of the positive meaning of "neat; nifty" and so forth. However, with the passage of time and with more and more saying "coo[l]" in a positive, approbatory sense, it gradually became a Chinese word. Now, if you say that someone or something is "kù 酷" (i.e., "cool"), no one would think that you're mixing English in your speech. The positive meanings "cool; neat; nifty" have now become the primary definitions for "kù 酷".
The author then proceeds briefly to discuss other early borrowings that are polysyllabic transcriptions, such as those for "sofa", "media", and "hysteria". Here is where he moves on to new territory, and I believe that this is where the situation has become enormously important, because people are no longer feeling the need to syllabize, much less hanziize, English words. They just say them flat out, and nobody blinks an eye that they are English words in Chinese. They have already instantly become Chinese terms — at least in speech. Nobody has cared to figure out how they should be written in hanzi. Even if you write them, you write them with roman letters, and this takes us back to the old point that Mark Hansell made decades ago (see "Selected readings" below): the roman alphabet has become an integral part of the Chinese writing system, just as romaji is in the Japanese writing system.
Ren makes the very interesting point that, even if you are planning to study abroad in Germany, you wouldn't say "ná dàole Zulassung 拿到了Zulassung" ("got a Zulassung"), you would still say "ná dàole offer 拿到了offer" ("got an offer"), because "offer" has become a Chinese word and that is the correct way to say what you want to express in Chinese".
There are hundreds of such words in current Chinese discourse, and they are at diverse stages of absorption into Chinese, e.g., "app", "logo", and "Ptú P图" (lit. "P picture/image"). Though I don't know for certain exactly what English expression this ("Ptú P图") is supposed to correspond to, it is very widely used. If you do a Google search on "P图", you will get lots and lots of suggestions, and they all seem to have to do with Photoshop. I have a feeling that some of the English origin expressions were coined by Chinese, sort of like "Handy" in German for "mobile / cell phone".
When it starts to look like this, it's easy for me to get lost:
Nǐ zhīdào nàgè B zhàn up zhǔ ma?
你知道那个B站up主吗?
Tāde nèiróng hǎo low ò!
它的内容好low哦!
Since that's insider's Chinese, I'm not going to render it into English. In bold type, Ren insists that it's "quán Zhōngwén 全中文" ("completely Chinese"). But, if an outsider to that group comes up and says, "Tài wǎnle, wǒ yào go jiāle 太晚了，我要go家了" ("I'm too late, I'd better go home"), the pe[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
zit
pimple
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Idiom of the Day
last-ditch attempt
A final effort or attempt to solve a problem or avoid failure or defeat, especially after a series of failures or setbacks. Watch the video
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