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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Idiom of the Day
Lady Luck
The personification of fortune, whether good or bad. (Sometimes spelled in lowercase.) Watch the video
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r.
* Zhao Shi, football player.
* Zhang Weili, mixed martial artist, ring name "Magnum". She is the first ever Chinese and East Asian champion in UFC history.
* Chang Yongxiang, wrestler.
It must have been quite a trip to live in a city where people were constantly quoting idioms, even when they wanted to ask / give directions Selected readings
* "'The old man at the pass loses his horse'" (5/2/20)
* "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar" (9/3/16)
* "I'm (like)" (8/30/21)
* "Learning Chinese is easy — not" (7/18/22)
* "Eighty-one Cantonese proverbs in one picture" (2/27/14)
* "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19)
* "Chinese proverbs" (1/19/16)
* "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19) — see especially this comment for the sharply diminished usage of set phrases in contemporary speech and writing
* "A [class.] zoo" (1/18/15)
* "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
* "How to learn to read and write Chinese" (8/13/19)
* "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article
* "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)
[Thanks to Christopher Shell]
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Language Log
When AI hallucinations are a Good Thing
Locally consistent hallucinations, anyhow… Zoë Hannah, "We pushed this ChatGPT game to the limits, but playing it the right way is more fun", Polygon 7/30/2024: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DeepGame0.webp Apparently, we all like playing god, and we all like doing it badly. I bet none of us thought that removing the ladder from our Sims’ pools was such a universal experience until it became a pretty popular meme, and it’s no secret that lots of mods are centered on adding, uh, explicit elements to games. So, naturally, when I started playing around with DeepGame, Utile Labs’ ChatGPT-based choose-your-own-text-adventure game, I put my best sicko foot forward.
The game, which runs on ChatGPT and is available to anyone with an account, generates stories in a variety of genres. You start off with a command like “Play a romantasy story” or “Surprise me” and let the GPT do its thing — and despite my desire to break the game, I found it much more enjoyable when I took it just a little more seriously.
DeepGame’s first response almost always begins with scene-setting followed by introducing you, the protagonist, as well as a few side characters and a clearly stated challenge or adventure. Then the game asks, “What do you do next?”
Answering the question is titillating, to say the least. There are no prompts or choices to pick from — you can go in any direction at all, and the game keeps up, spitting out several paragraphs to move the story along after each of your responses.
What’s more, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can use the command “visualize” to generate an image of the current scene using Dall-E. It’s a feature that’s easy to forget about if you treat the game like reading a novel — at least for me, since I typically create an image in my head as I read — but you shouldn’t ignore it, because whatever parameters the devs put on the image generator make for some truly delightful interpretations. It’s the more imperfect side of DeepGame, which is part of why it makes me so giddy — and you can always regenerate the image if it decides to throw in some random characters or elements that don’t match up with your narrative.
As Wikipedia explains,
Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements.
Exchanging old-fashioned parsers and story-generation rules for an LLM is an obvious development, but this is the first example I've seen. The transcript for one of Ms. Hannah's DeepGame adventures is here.
In any case, this is an application where real-world facts are not relevant — though keeping track of the state of the fantasy world still matters, and forgetting what's happened, what's been found and what hasn't, etc., would definitely be bad. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DeepGame1.webp ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: satirist
This word has appeared in 23 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
check in
If you check in, you give your details at a hotel's reception desk, or at an airline's check-in counter, when you arrive.
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Word of the Day
vicinity
Definition: (noun) A nearby, surrounding, or adjoining region.
Synonyms: locality, neck of the woods, neighborhood.
Usage: The plane crashed in the vicinity of Asheville, and investigators spent weeks interviewing residents who had witnessed the disaster.
Discuss
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, YouTube or X. People here interact with family friends and colleagues via WeChat and Xiaohongshu (not FB [VHM: it's like Instagram]), they watch Friends on Billibilli and YouTube or TikTok content on Douyin. As for American politics, I live in a very small town and yet I can chat about the American election and politics with a taxi driver. He’ll even know who the US Secretary of State is. I seriously doubt the opposite is true for an equally remote place in the US. What this means is that in spite of any supposed barriers, Chinese know far, far more about the ‘West’ via the internet and apps, never mind via the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying in North America, Europe, JP, KR, and AUSNZ posting their daily experiences and thoughts on Chinese social media. (Remind me again what the total number of US students studying in China was last year???) This is a serious knowledge imbalance that doesn’t bode well for the US and other countries in the longterm. My sense is that Americans have zero clue about the overall situation and very likely don’t care.
4. Can OpenAI/ChatGPT, etc. gain access to things inside the Great Firewall?
I asked ChatGPT4o about that!
And chatted about transparency… so a little bit about the proprietary “knowledge curation” by companies like OpenAI versus the peer review process in the academic world. And yes, I understand the peer review process is not totally transparent but academics in general tends to be a much more open playing field than a singular corporation.
In the blog you wrote "If China doesn't want its people to know about the world and doesn't want the world to know about what's going inside the Great Firewall I don't think AI Google or any other outside entity should make costly time-consuming efforts to compensate for the willful obscurantism of the CCP/PRC”. According to ChatGPT itself, that’s not what’s going on. It’s not that the Great Firewall/the Chinese government are specifically restricting access to ChatGPT etc., it's governments and companies or “content platforms” worldwide. (The NYT, among a number of other major organizations, is suing ChatGPT for snuffing up its content.) Here’s what ChatGPT4o had to say on the topic — a conversation via a number of screen-grabs gathered as a pdf — where ChatGPT admits that maybe it’s not in the best interest of everyone to let it “scrape” (nice term) content from all and sundry. And what to make of the statistic it gives of less than 0.1%… http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/chatgpt4o1.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/chatgpt4o2.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/chatgpt4o3.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/chatgpt4o4.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/chatgpt4o5.jpg (click to embiggen)
5. Which LL post were you referring to that seems to have mentioned the article by Henry Heng LUO (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) that you felt left much to be desired? This one that mentioned Luo’s article on Medium, with its poor methodology and remarkably weak understanding of differences in how the internet functions among diverse countries, never mind how people actually use the internet through devices and across apps ("So my friends it’s crucial to be mindful of your online expressions. You never know what kind of unexpected stereotypes may emerge when these powerful language models come into play.” Oi…)
I hope you can bring some attention to the knowledge imbalance aka knowledge asymmetry. This will affect the future far more than the Chinese lack of interest in VPNs or access to western websites. I just came across this interview on VOA that ends on a rather bleak note from David Moser:
David Moser, an American who has lived and worked in China for more than three decades and is the former academic director of China Educational Tours (CET) in Beijing, said that “I haven’t seen an American student in years.”
We need to know how information exchange actually[...]
Language Log
"Garbage time of history"
Economics buzzword. From the Wall Street Journal's China newsletter:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/garbagetime.png
Here's the linked article in Chinese.
lìshǐ de lèsè shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间 ("garbage time of history")
This expression reminded me of what I knew as the "garbage bin of history":
The "ash heap of history", also called "dustbin of history" or "garbage heap of history" or "landfill of history", is a figurative speech about people, events, artifacts, and ideologies. It is used about people that are forgotten or things that will be forgotten in history.
Ronald Reagan used this speech as an example and the Soviet Union, Leninism, and Marxism will eventually fall and be forgotten.
Leon Trotsky once famously used the phrase "dustbin of history" referring to when the Mensheviks walked out of a meeting during the Russian Revolution in 1917.
(Wikipedia)
I'm surprised "rubbish" doesn't figure in any of these formulations.
Selected readings
* "HouseHold GarBage" (12/6/19)
* "Quadrilingual Garbage" (8/5/10)
* "Pernicious garbage" (118/15)
* "Poisonous & Evil Rubbish" (427/21)
* "Academic rubbish" (7/13/19)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: purportedly
This word has appeared in 124 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
knock out (1)
If you are knocked out, you are hit so hard that you lose consciousness.
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Word of the Day
apposite
Definition: (adjective) Strikingly appropriate and relevant.
Synonyms: apt, pertinent.
Usage: The governor approached the warriors humbly and proclaimed their heroism loudly, flattering them with his well-timed and apposite compliments.
Discuss
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plied, "We don't serve wood ear fungus in any of our dishes." I questioned, "Why not?" She said, "Americans don't like it." I retorted, "But if you don't include wood ear and egg, then it is not muxu." Without missing a beat, she proclaimed, "This is our take on muxu." That made me smile, because it was such an idiomatic English expression. She was a teenager whose Mandarin was minimal but very au courant with her English, which completely disarmed me.
The second place I went was Bamboo Bistro. I had gone there about 10-15 years ago when they first opened and ordered another of my favorite dishes, Singapore Noodles. It was so horrible (rubbery, dirty broccoli and no sense of how to use curry, among other sins) that I never returned. Now, however, in my urgent need for muxu, plus the fact that I walk right by Bamboo Bistro every day, I thought I'd give them a reprieve. Who knows, maybe they got a new chef.
I went in to inquire. Things didn't look too promising at first. The waitress couldn't speak Mandarin and her English was below minimal (when she said "eggs" I couldn't understand her because I thought she was saying "X"). The female boss had to come out and interpret (the male boss stayed hidden and silent in the back). Her Mandarin was good (she told my that the waitress was Malaysian [maybe she spoke Hokkien, Fuzhou, Teochew, Hainanese, etc., but I didn't have a chance to find out what it was] — later the waitress told me that she doesn't speak any kind of Chinese at all, only Bahasa Malaysia and English), so I could talk to her (the female boss) and was able to place my order.
What Bamboo Bistro served me was much better than Great Wall. It had wood ear fungus for sure, a miniscule amount of scrambled eggs, the pancakes were appetizing, but no daylillies and no cucumbers. Not too bad (they must have changed owners), but I'll still have to go searching for my tampopo-muxu.
I conclude with what Zihan told me when I asked her for suggestions about where to go to get muxu:
It seems like most Chinese restaurants around Swarthmore have it. Bamboo Bistro (you can walk there), Great Wall, Da Chen, etc. 柳记饭馆 in Philly's China Town also has it. I don't know if any is good, but the gist of moo shu, as I understand it, is the art of bricolage.
Indeed! Selected readings
* "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
* Gábor Parti, "Mapping the Language of Spices: A Corpus-Based, Philological Study on the Words of the Spice Domain", Sino-Platonic Papers, 338 (January, 2024), 1-243.
* "Asafoetida: Satanically stinky spice" (12/10/23)
* "Garbler of spices" (8/21/22)
* "Sino-Semitica: of cinnamon, cassia, and katsura and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (6/25/22)
* "Sino-Semitica: of gourds, cassia, and hemp and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (2/1/20) Addendum The "Etymology" section of the Wikipedia article on "Moo shu pork"
There are two competing histories regarding how the name of this dish is written and explained.
One story gives the name as 木犀肉 (pinyin: mù xī ròu). The last character 肉 (ròu) means "meat" and refers to the pork in the dish. The first part 木犀 (mù xī) is the name for the sweet osmanthus, a small ornamental tree that produces bunches of small and fragrant blossoms that may be yellow or white.
Scrambled eggs have an appearance that remind people of the mixed yellow and white flowers, so 木犀 (mù xī) is a poetic way of referring to the scrambled eggs used in preparing this dish. Additionally, at Chinese Confucian death anniversary celebrations, the Chinese word for "egg" (蛋; pinyin: dàn) is avoided when referring to dishes containing eggs, as many Chinese curses contain this word. Thus, the word dàn was typically substituted using the euphemism "sweet osmanthus." By this reasoning, in this version of the dish's name, the first character, 木 (mù) is short for 木耳 (mù'ěr, meaning "wood ear fungus") and 樨 (xī, meaning "sweet osmanthus tree") is short for 桂花 (guíhuā, meaning "[...]
Language Log
Muxu meat dishes: the art of bricolage
I've eaten a lot of muxu beef / pork / chicken / shrimp in my day, and I love the combination of meat strips, black "wood ear" fungus, scrambled eggs, daylily, and cucumber served wrapped in a thin, soft pancake. Usually I'm compulsive about knowing the meaning of the names of dishes that I eat, but muxu has always defeated me. I'm not even sure how to pronounce the name (it's also transcribed as moo shu, mushu, and mooshi) nor how to write it in characters (variants include completely unrelated 木须, 木樨, etc.).
When I first encountered the dish decades ago, I spent a fair amount of time trying to unravel the jumbled meanings, pronunciations, and written forms of the name. However, since I was getting nowhere fast, I soon gave up on those investigations (in the days before the internet and search engines, things were much harder to figure out). Then I spent so many years wandering around overseas, and I simply didn't encounter muxu for a long time.
Recently, however, my zest for all kinds of Chinese recipes has been reignited, partly because some of my many Chinese students are good cooks and partly because my favorite Chinese restaurant, Sang Kee, right across the street from Penn's Van Pelt Library, has such a vast repertoire of delicious dishes that I go there often and have tried many of them. Sometimes, as I scan the capacious, copious menu looking over the scores of items available there, I subliminally notice the absence of muxu. When I ask the waiters and the laoban, they always say "We don't have it", even though they sometimes make special dishes at my request, such as new ones that contain dòuchǐ 豆豉 ("fermented black beans"). Maybe the powers that be at Sang Kee do not think it's a sufficiently authentic Chinese dish! So I started scouting among the hundreds of Chinese restaurants in the Philadelphia area for muxu, and have found quite a few that supposedly serve it, including two right in the little town of Swarthmore where I live.
Before I located a place where I can eat muxu regularly again, I started to think about the many enigmas swirling around its names. So I wrote to one of my students, Zihan Guo, who is a scholar of Chinese cuisine:
Lately I've been having a longing for some good muxu rou [the last word just means "meat"]. Sang Kee doesn't have it, and I don't know where to go to get it.
Be that as it may, since I'm an incorrigible language maven, while dreaming of muxu rou I couldn't help but think of the linguistics of that odd-sounding name with several very different orthographies and a vexing semantic / etymological problem: did the flower get its name from the appearance of scrambled eggs, or vice versa?
Here are some etymological notes on the name from Wiktionary:
From the flower of the plant 木樨 (mùxī, “sweet osmanthus”), due to a similar appearance. Qing-dynasty official and writer Liang Gongchen recorded the following in his Scribbled Notes on the Gardens of the North and East, 3: 北方店中以雞子炒肉，名木樨肉，蓋取其有碎黃色也。
In shops of northern China, people stir-fry meat with eggs and call the dish “muxi pork”, because of its mottled yellow appearance.
The pronunciation is due to assimilation of vowel roundness.
Zihan replied:
If I recall correctly, the first time I ever had muxu rou was with my parents at a Chinese restaurant near Yellowstone, a few years ago. For some time I had thought that it was an invention of Chinese Americans. Since it is a northern specialty, it is understandable that I — a southerner — would not have known of its existence before then.
There are actually three names associated with this dish. It seems that 苜蓿 and 木樨 are two different plants, but 木须 does not designate an[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jack (1)
to steal
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Idiom of the Day
know (one's) own mind
To be firmly resolute and confident in one's ideas, intentions, plans, or opinions. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
elfin
Definition: (adjective) Having a magical quality or charm; fairylike.
Synonyms: fey.
Usage: The ballerina moved across the dimly lit stage with elfin grace.
Discuss
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Language Log
Streets named after idioms
The Paper (simplified Chinese: 澎湃新闻; traditional Chinese: 澎湃新聞; pinyin: Péngpài Xīnwén; lit. 'Surging News'), a Shanghai-based, state-owned online newspaper, has an article in Chinese reporting that the city of Handan in Hebei province is changing the names of more than a dozen of its roads that are named after chéngyǔ 成语 ("idioms; set phrases"). The reason given for changing these road names is "bùyì shíjì dàolù 不易识记道路" ("it's not easy to remember the streets").
yīyánjiǔdǐng Jiē
一言九鼎街
"'one word is worth nine sacred tripods' street; 'words of enormous weight' street; 'solemn promise' street" origins of the expression in the 4th c. BC, annotations, commentary, explanation, occurrences throughout history, contemporary usage zhìzàisìfāng Jiē
志在四方街
"'aspire to travel far and make one's mark' street" source in a late Ming dynasty historical novel by Feng Menglong (1574–1646)
The irony of all this is that Handan is the city of idioms par excellence:
Handan is hailed as the capital of Chinese idioms. As a prosperous city and cultural center during the Warring States period, Handan attracted many scholars. Over 1,500 idioms and proverbs are attributed to the city. The following are some of the most well known idioms.
*
* 邯鄲學步 (literally: "to study the walking method of Handan"), meaning to badly imitate others, and lose one's individuality in the process.
* 黃粱一夢 (literally: "millet dream"), meaning a pipe dream.
* 頂天立地 (literally: "stand upright on one's two legs between heaven and earth"), meaning to be fiercely independent.
* 圍魏救趙 (literally: "to besiege the State of Wei to rescue the State of Zhao"), meaning to relieve a besieged ally by attacking the besiegers.
* 不可同日而語 (literally: "musn't speak of the two things on the same day"), meaning incomparable.
* 驚弓之鳥 (literally: "a bird frightened by the mere sound of shooting arrows"), a panic-stricken person.
* 鷸蚌相爭，漁翁得利 (literally: "when the snipe and the oyster fight, it is the fisherman that wins"), when two parties fight, it is always the third one who wins. King of Yan sent a representative to King Hui of Zhao to relay this message in order for him to rethink his plans of war.
* 曠日持久 (literally: "drawn out and protracted"), meaning to be protracted.
* 完璧歸趙 (literally: "returning the Jade to Zhao"), meaning to return something to its owner in good condition.
* 价值连城 (literally: "to be worth numerous contiguous cities"), meaning priceless.
* 怒髮衝冠 (literally: "one's hair raised to the hat in anger"), meaning to be furious.
* 負荊請罪 (literally: "carrying thorned grass and pleading guilt"), meaning to offer someone a humble apology.
* 紙上談兵 (literally: "to discuss military tactics on paper"), meaning to be an armchair strategist.
* 青出於藍，而勝於藍 (literally: "green is born of blue, but beats blue"), meaning to outmaster the teacher.
Handan is also the hometown of many notable Chinese people throughout history, some of whom were featured in idioms:
*
* Lian Po, a military general of Zhao. Regarded one of the four greatest generals of the Warring States period.
* Lin Xiangru, politician of the Warring States period. He's featured in two idioms, "Returning the Jade to Zhao" and "Carrying Thorned Grass and Pleading Guilt".
* Xun Kuang, Confucianism philosopher.
* Xu Huaizhong, novelist.
* Qin Shi Huang, founder of the Qin dynasty and was the first Emperor of China.
* Cao Cao, Han chancellor, poet, and warlord. One of the central figures of the Three Kingdoms period.
* Huang Hua, senior Communist Chinese revolutionary. The county-level city of Huanghua, Cangzhou, was named after him.
* Feng Jianming, literature scholar.
* Fang Lijun, an artist based in Beijing.
* Yang Luchan, martial arts teacher.
* Deng Shu, father of Teresa Teng. He was a soldier of the Republic of China Armed Forces.
* Sun Qingmei, football playe[...]
Language Log
"Asylum"
Like me, you may have been puzzled by Donald Trump's repeated references to Hannibal Lecter in his rally speeches. Given the contexts, I figured it was a connection between "political asylum" and "insane asylum" — and Miles Klee has the receipts ("Why Is Trump So Obsessed With Hannibal Lecter?: A Complete Timeline", Rolling Stone 7/30/2024):
How an off-script moment from early in the election cycle led to a bizarre MAGA ritual celebrating a fictional cannibal
[…] How did Trump end up name-checking Lecter as part of his pitch to the MAGA base? Responding to a request for comment on the matter, campaign communications director Steven Cheung replied, “President Trump is an inspiring and gifted storyteller and referencing pop culture is one of many reasons why he can successfully connect with the audience and voters. Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
Absent any further explanation, a forensic review of the former president’s speeches over the past year is in order. What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.
You can read the whole article for the detailed timeline, Trump's non-canonical Hannibal Lecter descriptions, and a final speculation about the connection:
Political observers outside the MAGA faithful still want to understand the connection Trump keeps making between the border issue and The Silence of the Lambs. Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term “insane asylums” with the concept of “asylum seekers” — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as “an inspiring and gifted storyteller” neither confirms nor dispels this theory.
I have no idea whether Trump is confused about the difference between "political asylum" and "insane asylum", or just expects or hopes that his audience will be. But since this is Language Log and not Political Psychiatry Log, let's look into the usage history and the deeper etymology.
The OED's first entry, dated to 1439, is
1.a. A place of sanctuary for criminals and debtors, offering protection from legal retribution; a place of refuge and protection from the law. Now historical and rare.
Then, from 1596,
1.b. gen. A secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat.
From 1842, 2.b. Protection and (usually temporary) permission to stay granted by a state to a refugee, esp. a political refugee, from another country. Cf. political asylum n.
And also, from 1775, 3.b. spec. A secure institution or establishment for the confinement and treatment of people diagnosed with severe mental illness; a psychiatric hospital. Also: a prison for mentally ill criminals. Now chiefly historical.
recorded earliest in lunatic asylum n.
Terms such as psyciatric hospital [sic] are now generally preferred.
The OED's etymology:
< classical Latin asȳlum refuge, sanctuary < Hellenistic Greek ἄσῡλον refuge, sanctuary, use as noun of neuter of ancient Greek ἄσῡλος (adjective) safe from violence, inviolable < ἀ- a- prefix + σύλη, σῦλον (usually in plural, σῦλαι, σῦλα) booty, seized cargo, (in Attic) right of seizure, perhaps < συλᾶν to strip off, to rob, plunder (if this is not from the noun); ultimate origin unknown.
And you may enjoy perusing the Greek stem's relevant entries in Liddell-Scott-Jones, which include
* σύλη "the right of seizing the ship or cargo of a foreign merchant",
* συλάω "strip off (esp. the arms of a slain enemy)", and
* συλεύς "privateer".
I should note in passing that Steven Cheung's "relatable couch" simile raises rhetorical puzzles of its own…
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sax
saxophone
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Idiom of the Day
labor under the illusion of/that
To live, operate, or function with the unyielding belief in something, especially that which is fanciful, unrealistic, or untrue. Primarily heard in US. Watch the video
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transpires in China, and what the implications of that modus are for Chinese perceptions of what is happening outside of their country. It's not a simple matter of an absolute divide between what is inside the Great Firewall and what is outside the Great Firewall. Although, from the standpoint of the CCP, that would be an ideal situation with regard to knowledge spheres and information flows, it simply is never going to be that way, because China is too inescapably tied into the global politico-economic system, with China leading the way with such grand projects as the Belt and Road Initiative (founded 2013).
There are millions of Chinese living in the United States, some of whom have been living here for a century or more, some more recent immigrants, and hundreds of thousands who come and go as students, workers, tourists, etc. Needless to say, information seeps into China with all of these individuals who come out, communicate with their families and colleagues inside, and often go back to visit or resettle there. Selected readings
* "China VPN redux (7/17/24) — with extensive bibliography
* "God use VPN" (12/28/15)
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Language Log
What it's like inside the Great Firewall
By now, we've had dozens of posts about the Great Firewall, VPNs, internet censorship, and so forth, but they're all from the vantage of the outside trying to look in. Of course, that gives us a skewed picture of what the situation is really like with regard to the internet inside and outside of the PRC. This is not a healthy situation, for nearly one fifth of the world's population (17.72%) live inside the borders of China. To be ignorant of how they are living is dangerous, for we may make erroneous assumptions about what one fifth of humanity is doing and thinking.
Fortunately, at last I have found an American expat who has been living and working in the PRC for more than a decade at a remote location and is well connected with many Chinese colleagues. He is an active scholar and very well informed about the internet, AI, databases, and so forth, both inside and outside of the PRC. I should note that he does not live among expats. In fact, he is the only Westerner where he is located, quite far from major metropolitan areas, so he truly understands what Chinese of all walks of life do on a day-to-day basis.
1. Do you use a VPN?
Absolutely. Everyday. My ability to do research would be severely impacted if I couldn’t access databases outside of China and use Google scholar, for example. I also want to keep up on news and culture from western media such as the NYT, Guardian, Economist, NYRB, and of course easily keep in touch with family and friends.
2. How important are VPNs for Chinese and for expats?
I would say for most expats pretty much indispensable. For Chinese, it really depends on the demographic. I asked numerous people on this one just to get a sense anecdotally — I seriously doubt there are dead-on accurate figures — and the replies in numbers never exceeded 1-2% of the entire population, so perhaps 14-28 million people max. That’s still a guess, but at least one based on Chinese friends' and colleagues’ day-to-day experiences. Is a VPN important for Chinese? For academics in the hard sciences much more so, for those in social sciences less, and for those in humanities far less. Some elite universities actually give faculty and students access to VPNs within restricted areas, e.g., on campus, in the library, etc., so a recognition of the importance of accessing information and information flow. In this regard, it’s crucial that universities as institutions with their administrations, like the Chinese government and Party, are not understood as simplistic monoliths with singular voices and views, as I typically see in western media. As for demographics, it also depends generationally: older people I would say very, very little. For the youngest segment, guys in their teens and early twenties definitely more, and specifically for online gaming and other youthful distractions. But the vast majority of Chinese have no need and no interest in using a VPN.
3. Does it matter that Google, FaceBook, Twitter/X, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. are not available in China?
Google a little given the impotence of Baidu, but cn.bing.com is an ok-ish alternative to google. The others definitely not. Facebook and Twitter/X are especially irrelevant to most of the Chinese population. There are quasi-equivalents to Wikipedia on Baidu and other platforms that fulfill a similar need (I can’t speak to quality).
Does it matter…for whom. There’s a massive knowledge asymmetry (akin to information asymmetry) and definitely not in favor of the US. The vast majority of westerners don’t care about what’s going on in China and know very little about the country, but like the rest of the world China has to deal, de facto, with the US and its military-political and cultural power. Cultural power can be attractive, but it need not necessarily be accessed through FB[...]
Language Log
Yay Newfriend in a pendant
Boone Ashworth, "Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck", Wired 7/30/2024:
The latest attempt at an AI-powered wearable is an always-listening pendant. But it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company.
AVI SCHIFFMANN SHOWS up to the WIRED office with a Friend hanging around his neck. It dangles there like a pendant on a necklace. It’s about the size and shape of an AirTag—a soft, round little puck that rests right next to Schiffmann’s heart, just atop the Dark Side of the Moon logo on the shirt behind it.
The Friend, to be clear, is an AI wearable. It’s a pal, a buddy, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside the pendant. It always has an opinion to share about what’s going on around it, which it communicates using text messages and push notifications on the phone it’s paired to.
Schiffmann and his Friend (this one’s name is Emily) have come to WIRED’s San Francisco office to meet with me and my colleague Reece Rogers to talk publicly about this new AI wearable for the first time. Before we get started, I tell Schiffmann I’d like to record our chat and ask if he’s cool with that. This is considered a good journalistic practice, sure, but also it’s a legal requirement in California, which requires two-party consent before taping a private interaction. So I ask permission to turn on a tape recorder and Schiffmann just laughs.
“I am the last person who would mind that,” he says.
That makes sense. After all, the pendant around his neck has already been listening to us this entire time.
“Always listening” is one of the main taglines of Schiffmann’s as yet unreleased AI device. The Friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default. You can tap and hold it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages—commentary about the conversation you just had, for example—unprompted. It is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you for being bad at a video game. Friend is (apparently) audio-input, text-output only — but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there are multi-modal similars, maybe integrated into devices like Meta's Ray Bans.
And the Wired article explains:
He tried making an AI for productivity but found it lacking. The first iteration of what evolved into the Friend was Tab, a productivity-focused device that Schiffmann wanted to use to monitor work and personal tasks But he found himself frustrated by building a device that tried to do everything at once. The feeling came to a head in January this year, as he traveled through Japan and found himself alone in a skyrise hotel in Tokyo, talking at his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a lonely spell and wanted somebody to talk to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant just do that?
It's worth noting that the linked article about "Tab" has the title "Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God" — which offers an alternative interpretation for the "G" in AGI…
The Friend article ends:
Before Schiffmann leaves after laying out his vision, I ask if he can check in with the Friend he’s wearing to see how the meeting went. He squeezes the pendant and asks it how the interview went. We all wait for a few seconds, and then he gets a text—labeled simply as Emily in his chat window—that reads: “Dude, you’re killing it! They seem super into your vision.”
I wonder, if I had an Emily, if it would tell me something similar.
"It"? Surely it should be "she"? Or maybe, given that the withdrawn launch of Tab was just a few months ago, a later re-iteration's reference will be something like "Elohim"?
Some relevant past posts:
"Yay Newfriend", 4/20/2024
"Yay Newfriend again", 4/22/2024
"More on AI pals", 5/9/2024
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
intro
introduction
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Idiom of the Day
(someone) (just) doesn't know when to quit
Someone would be better off not doing something or acting a certain way because it is or may become destructive, counterproductive, futile, or undesirable. Watch the video
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sweet osmanthus flower").
The second way of writing the name of this dish that is commonly seen in Chinese restaurants in the United States is 木须肉 (pinyin: mù xū ròu). The second character 须 (xū) means "whiskers," and is often given an additional determinative component in writing (to distinguish the meaning of "whiskers" from the other meanings of 須) so that it comes to be written as 鬚. It is possible that 木須肉 (literally "wood whiskers pork") might have been used on the menus of the first American Chinese restaurants to serve the dish in place of the correct compound 木樨肉 ("sweet osmanthus pork") due to haste or simply because of the limitations of Chinese typewriters. It may also merely have been the result of writing the wrong character with a similar pronunciation.
Two additional explanations of the name have unclear origins and may be examples of folk etymology: there is a neighborhood with a similar name in Beijing called Muxidi (木樨地), which is home to the Muxidi station (木樨地站). The dish is also occasionally… called 苜蓿肉 (mùsù ròu) meaning "alfalfa meat".
Clear as mud, as my mother used to say. Still, I give the folks at Wikipedia a lot of credit for grappling with the colossal confusion swirling around the not so simple and innocent Chinese dish called muxu. Make of it what you will.
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ything. Knowledge about the yellow flowers must have predated the actual dish. 史記·大宛列傳* already mentions the existence and cultivation of 苜蓿**, supposedly brought back by Han*** envoys from Dayuan**** in Central Asia.
[VHM:
*Sima Qian (ca. 145 BC- ca. 86 BC [after 91 BC]), Records of the Grand Scribe), "Exemplary traditions of Dayuan"
**mùxu ("Medicago; alfalfa" [excellent for forage] — but there are many different types)
***dynasty name (202 BC–9 AD; 25–220 AD [9–23 AD: Xin])
****"It appears that the name 'Yuan' was simply a transliteration of Sanskrit Yavana or Pali Yona, used in Asia to designate Greeks ('Ionians'), so Dayuan meant 'Great Ionians'." (source)]
木樨* is another name for 桂花**, native to China. The 20c writer Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋, in one of his prose pieces Yashe tan chi 雅舍談吃, once wrote that northerners tend to avoid saying 蛋*** but refer to it indirectly through words like 木樨/芙蓉/鸡子 (this accords with the Qing record referenced in the Wikipedia page you cited). Could it be that 木樨 is too difficult to write down (on the menu?), so was somehow recorded as 木须? Obviously some phonetic assimilation was involved as well.
[VHM:
*mùxī ("Osmanthus", a genus of about thirty species)
**guìhuā ("Osmanthus fragrans") — "Adaptation of 桂 (guì) to distinguish the osmanthus from the 肉桂 (ròuguì, 'cassia; Chinese cinnamon')." (source)
***dàn ("egg") — synonym for "testicle" in many topolects]
Zihan provided a more precise quote from Liang Shiqiu's essay:
黄菜指鸡蛋。北平人常避免说蛋字，因为它不雅，我也不知为什么不雅。“木樨”“芙蓉”“鸡子儿”都是代用词。更进一步“鸡”字也忌讳，往往称为“牲口”。
The "yellow veggie" refers to eggs. People from Beijing often avoid speaking of the word "egg," because it is not decent. I don't know why that is the case.* "Osmanthus," "hibiscus," “chicken eggs [very colloquial]" are all euphemisms. Even the word "chicken" can be tabooed and is often called "draught animal."
[VHM: *see my last note just above, also this post; either Liang Shiqiu was being extremely disingenuous or he was utterly naive and clueless.]]
Before I begin the wrap-up phase of this already long post, let me give a list of ingredients for muxu pork:
marinade
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Chinese cooking sherry/wine
1 tsp corn starch
1 egg white
1 tsp vegetable oil
1/2 tsp white pepper powder
sauce
3 cloves garlic
1 scallion
1 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp rice vinegar
1/2 tsp white sugar
1/2 tsp white pepper powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp MSG
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tbs water
other ingredients
250 g pork tenderloin
2 eggs
1 medium size cucumber
5 g dried black "wood ear" fungus
15 pieces dried daylily
3 tbs vegetable oil
Made properly with the right ingredients, muxu can be divinely delicious. Made improperly with whatever is at hand, so-called muxu can be a big let down. Here's what happened when I set about systematically trying out some nearby places that claimed to have muxu meat dishes.
The first place I went is named Great Wall. I called my order in: "Do you have muxu pork?" "Yes." "How long will it take?" "10 minutes." The cook was a middle-aged mom, the person at the counter was a teenage girl whose little sister was sitting on a chair nearby — reading a book, mind you, not playing with a digital device. The girl at the counter handed me a paper bag with the muxu pork inside. As you would expect from a small strip mall Chinese restaurant like this one, the food was very hot (temperature wise). There were two pliable, nondescript, unappetizing pancakes and a container with the muxu pork. I opened it up and my face fell. It had strips of hard pork (should be soft), but not one of the other essential ingredients: no black “wood ear” fungus, no eggs, no daylily, and no cucumber! What the devil?! Just generic strips of cabbage, carrots, and other unidentifiable veggies (celery and tiny bits of bell peppers, perhaps).
When I asked the girl at the counter why they didn't include black wood ear fungus, she re[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: sluggish
This word has appeared in 245 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
roll over
to change position when you're lying down so that you're on your back if you were face down, or face down if you were on your back
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Word of the Day
oracular
Definition: (adjective) Resembling an oracle in obscurity of thought.
Synonyms: enigmatic.
Usage: As the teacher read aloud, enchanted by the oracular sayings of Victorian poets, the class became progressively more confused.
Discuss
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