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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
Words for king: Greek, Tocharian, Sinitic
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-seventh issue: “Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord,’ and Possible Wider Connections,” by Douglas Q. Adams. (pdf)
ABSTRACT
Examined here is the possible cognancy of Homeric Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’ and their respective feminine derivatives (w)ánassa ‘queen’ and nāśi ‘lady.’ ‘King/lord’ may reflect a PIE *wen-h2ǵ-t ‘warlord’ or the like. Further afield is the possibility that a Proto-Tocharian *wnātkä might have been borrowed into Ancient Chinese and been the ancestor of Modern Chinese wáng ‘king.’
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
* "Tocharo-Sinica" (5/13/24)
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
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Language Log
Pre-pre-meetings
The Indeed Editorial Team explains to us ("What Is a Pre-Meeting? (Plus Benefits and How To Host One", 8/18/2024) that
A successful meeting engages attendees, achieves organizational objectives and allows professionals to make informed decisions in an allotted time frame. Before the actual event occurs, employees may gather for a pre-meeting to help them prepare. Reserving time for a pre-meeting can enable you and your teammates to strategize for the official meeting by answering questions, developing checklists and preparing venues for presentations.
A 9/16/2024 note from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ("Strengthening our culture and teams") explains that
As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.).
This reminds me of something that happened to me 25 years ago. As I wrote in "Recursive responsibility" (9/27/2009)
In 1989, shortly before I left the industrial research job that I had held for the previous 15 years, corporate headquarters appointed me to a committee to decide on a procedure for evaluating methodologies for prioritizing follow-up actions in the wake of a "technology portfolio fair" where researchers had explained new technologies to heads of product development in various branches of the company.
We weren't authorized to decide what to do, nor even to suggest priorities for alternative actions, nor yet to suggest a methodology for assigning priorities to alternative actions, nor for that matter to evaluate alternative methodologies for assigning priorities to alternative actions. Instead, we were tasked with designing a procedure for evaluating methodologies for assigning priorities to possible decisions. From a certain perspective, the mere ability to conceive and communicate such a task was a triumph of the human intellect.
My level of admiration for this achievement was not unconnected to my decision to move to academia.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bring about
If you bring about something, you cause it to happen or you make it happen.
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Word of the Day
acerbic
Definition: (adjective) Sharp or biting, as in character or expression.
Synonyms: blistering, caustic, acid, vitriolic, acerb, acrid, sulfurous, virulent, bitter.
Usage: The comedienne's acerbic wit drew laughs from the crowd, though some found her jokes offensive.
Discuss
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loses its formidable aspect, when a yard of handsome and substantial stitching can be run off in two minutes." Five years later, the New York Times stated outright that the sewing machine was the "best boon to woman in the nineteenth century."
The sewing machine was hailed as a great labor saver in the mid nineteenth century because at that time sewing was a never-ending, time-consuming task for virtually every woman: farm and city dweller, young and old, rich and poor. The availability of yard goods, or fabrics sold by the yard, in unprecedented quantities contributed greatly to the ubiquity of home sewing. The industrial revolution had mechanized and transformed the fabric industry in both the United States and Europe by the early decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1850 power looms were creating vast quantities of fabric at prices that made yard goods available to almost everyone. Although fabric was now cheap enough to be fairly plentiful, it remained expensive enough to discourage waste, and American women spent a great deal of time and labor constructing, mending, and remaking garments and household linens.
So my impression of the history was half a century off — though when I was a child, local women still "spent a great deal of time and labor constructing, mending, and remaking garments and household linens", and the small strip-mall "sew vac" store where I worked for a while in 1972 had plenty of customers, and imported clothing has continued to get cheaper since then.
Update — For some social history more in tune with my memories, see Prudecne Black and Jan Idle. "‘It was just something you did’: Mothers, daughters and sewing in the 1960s." Clothing Cultures 1, no. 1 (2013): 23-44.
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Word of the Day
straddle
Definition: (verb) Range or extend over; occupy a certain area.
Synonyms: range.
Usage: With his car straddling two lanes of traffic and with fifteen police cruisers in hot pursuit, the out-of-control driver sped down the highway.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: contrive
This word has appeared in four 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
get by
to have just enough of something, like money, knowledge or skills, to do what you want to do
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Of course, if they do step over the line and reference China, their posts will be blocked by the censors. On the other hand, as Amy Hawkins describes in The Guardian (7/17/24), many internet users seem to take delight in flirting with danger:
The sentiment can be summed up by a graphic, widely shared on social media – and since censored on Weibo.
Entitled the “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, it tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned in China this year. The first star is unemployment. For two stars, add a mortgage. For a full suite of eight stars, you’ll need the first two, plus debt, childrearing, stock trading, illness, unfinished housing a-nd [sic], finally, hoarding Moutai, a famous brand of baijiu, a sorghum liquor.
“Some people say that history has garbage time,” wrote one Xiaohongshu [China's Instagram] user who shared the graphic, along with advice about self-care. “Individuals don’t have garbage time.”
[…] But some social media users are sanguine about being online in such an era. One Weibo blogger, who feared his account might soon be deleted because of a post he made about a recent food safety scandal, wrote a farewell to his followers. “No matter what happens, I am very happy to spend the garbage time of history with you”.
The phrase has become a sort of meme for expressing economic anxiety without overtly blaming the Chinese government or the CCP for the sorry state of the economy. There is also the phenomenon of "soft search censorship" of the phrase which permits the state to use the term to criticize it. Consequently, there is not a blanket ban on “garbage time of history", enabling internet users to push the envelope to see how far they can go without getting shut down altogether. For example, "there are dozens of articles and videos debating the term—and China’s relation to it." Selected articles
* "'Garbage time of history'" (7/31/24)
* "HouseHold GarBage" (12/6/19)
* "Quadrilingual Garbage" (8/5/10)
* "Pernicious garbage" (118/15)
* "Poisonous & Evil Rubbish" (427/21)
* "Academic rubbish" (7/13/19)
* "'Lying flat' and 'Involution': passive-aggressive resistance" (6/4/21)
* "'Lying flat" and "Buddha whatever' (part 2)" (6/24/21)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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Language Log
Political deepfakes
Daysia Tolentino, "Trump shares fake photo of Harris with Diddy in now-deleted Truth Social post", NBC News 9/20/2024:
Amid the recent news of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ arrest, former President Donald Trump reposted a doctored image falsely showing Vice President Kamala Harris with Combs with text questioning if she was involved in his alleged “freak offs.”
The image, which Trump reposted to his Truth Social profile, is an edited version of a 2001 photo of Harris with former talk show host Montel Williams, whom she briefly dated, and his daughter Ashley. The edit replaced Montel Williams’ face with a photo of Combs.
This is not the first time the Republican presidential nominee has posted a fake image in an effort to bolster his campaign. Trump has posted several AI-generated images, including some falsely depicting Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing him, and one of Harris speaking to a crowd of communists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.
Thanks to the Trump's Truth archive, here's the now-deleted faked picture of Harris with Combs:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake1.png
…and the post with the faked "Swifties for Trump" pictures:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake2.png
Here's an image of the (more obviously faked) picture showing Harris addressing communists, from X-formerly-Twitter:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake3.png
The potential for this sort of thing is further (and even more strongly) exemplified by the "exploding goats" video. Jordan Liles, "Exploding Goats? Fake CNN Video Claimed Israel Targeted Hezbollah with Bizarre New Strategy", Snopes 9/20/2024:
A rumor circulating online in September 2024 claimed a video showed CNN anchor Jake Tapper reporting that Israel targeted Hezbollah — a Shiite Muslim political party and militant group based in Lebanon — with exploding goats. […]
However, the video clip was fake. CNN never ran any such report. Stand-up comedian, actor and writer Danny Polishchuk created the video as a gag. He also played the role of the field reporter opposite Tapper. Polishchuk engineered Tapper's mouth movements and vocal sounds with deepfake video technology and artificial-intelligence tools.
The video is quite well done — a step forward from last year's "Failure to Launch" — though the silly content means that most people would be skeptical:
BREAKING NEWS:
Mass Hezbollah Casualties Reported After Goats Rectums Explode.
pic.twitter.com/xqKRZzI23C
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) September 20, 2024
A less absurd deepfake of similar (or better!) quality could go very far before being debunked.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
busted
to be charged with a criminal offence
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Idiom of the Day
be like oil and water
To be incompatible or unable to interact or coexist easily, as due to fundamental differences in personality, opinions, beliefs, etc. Watch the video
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Language Log
"A fancy way to say 'fancy'"
I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods. It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).
[*I absolutely love that Italian word! So much depends on the intonation with which you say it. A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:
You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms.
In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end. To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”
Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)
It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]
I was chatting with two of the young staff members at Caputo's and asked them what they thought of a nearby Italian trattoria. They said, "A bit too bijou". There may have been a final syllable, something like "-y; -ni", but I didn't quite catch it, at least not the consonant segment, if there was one.
So I asked them to spell the word, and neither of them could do so. Then I asked them what the word meant, and the girl said "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", and the guy agreed with her, "Yeah, it means 'fancy'."
I thought that was an interesting way to define a word that their auditor (me) did not have the foggiest idea of what it meant.
After I left Caputo's, I gave a lot of thought to what that word "bijou'i" was and its derivation. To tell the truth, from the moment I heard the girl say "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", I could not help but think of "bijoux" ("jewelry", something precious; cf. "bling"). Also, the way these two young Americans said the word and talked about it, for some reason, I couldn't escape thinking that it was Congolese, of whom there are many in the SLC area. I may be completely wrong about this, and it is merely a surmise, but "bijou'i" just seemed like a Franco-Dutch Congolese creole word with an American adjectival ending. (Hah!)
Selected readings
* "Lexical bling: Vocabulary display and social status" (11/20/14)
* "Tyrant's bling" (11/12/13)
* "Bring the bling" (1/27/06)
* "Annals of word rage" (5/2/09) — Beowulf "had a bling-bling shield".
[Thanks to Nick Tursi and Vito Acosta]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
It's hip to be square! #hueylewisandthenews #americanpsycho #weirdal @alyankovic
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Lindsay Lohan's eHarmony Profile (2009) #LindsayLohan #eharmony #sketchcomedy
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sicko
a deranged or perverted person
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Idiom of the Day
if (one's) life depended on it
Under any circumstances; no matter what. (Used almost exclusively with a negative statement regarding something that one couldn't or wouldn't do.) Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
@TefiShow the astrologist reporting for duty! #Bennifer #HelloTefi #Astrology
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Language Log
Pun of the week
From George Takei, on Bluesky:
This left me in stitches. [image or embed]
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 10:00 AM
Replies includes "I'm torn", "This is the kind of knit-wit I enjoy reading", "It's a race to the bobbin", "oh brother…", "I expect this thread to be patchy", "Rip it up!", "Needling us with dad jokes, eh?", "Were you hemming or hawing?", and this image, referencing George Takei's Star Trek role: [image or embed]
— DJ Maryalee Scarlet (@djmaryaleescarlet.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 10:46 AM
I know quite a bit about Singers (and other sewing machines), because I briefly worked as a sewing-machine mechanic between the army and grad school. But the history of the Singer Corporation is much more complex than I knew, since learning to "clean, oil, and adjust" Singer (and other) machines didn't require any information about corporate shenanigans — a lot of which happened after 1972 anyhow.
Sewing machines were a big part of American home life in the middle of the 20th century, because clothes were expensive, (some) fabric was cheap, and women were taught sewing skills in Home Ec classes (and/or in the home). In those days, fabric stores and sewing-machine stores were a common feature of small-town business districts and strip malls. I have the impression that all of this declined after 1970 or so, partly because of cheap imported clothing, and partly because of the changing role of women, so that sewing today is a (relatively rare) chosen craft, rather than an economic necessity.
But the Google Books ngram viewer shows a much earlier decline: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SewingMachine1.png The plot for "English Fiction" shows a quite different trajectory, which is still not consistent with my stereotypes: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SewingMachine2.png Google Scholar finds a large literature on sewing machine social history, including one paper (Marguerite Connolly, "The Disappearance of the Domestic Sewing Machine, 1890-1925." Winterthur Portfolio 1999) that helps explain that first graph:
Montgomery Ward Company seemed almost apologetic. In describing the merits of a full cabinet sewing machine in its 1912 catalogue, the company admitted, "You know that the sewing machine is not a very attractive addition to your parlor, bedroom or dining room furniture. The cabinet machine is. Inconspicuously it will fill a corner of a room, and when noticed, it is in words of admiration." When the cabinet of this model was closed, the sewing machine head dropped completely out of sight. By the early twentieth century it had become most desirable to hide the sewing machine. This desire for concealment was a product of the sewing machine's gradual loss of status, a process that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth. During this period, the availability of inexpensive machines as well as the emergence of the ready-made clothing industry resulted in the devaluation of the sewing machine in the minds of Americans, which led to its "disappearance" in American culture. Since it was no longer a status symbol, the sewing machine became an object whose use was assumed but not proclaimed-something akin to a wash-tub or broom. This, however, had not always been the case.
When the domestic sewing machine was introduced to American homes in the 1850s, it was heralded as a mechanical wonder that would transform the lives of women. The popular and influential Godey's Lady's Book called the sewing machine "The Queen of Inventions" and in 1855 proclaimed the sewing machine's indispensability to its female readers: "Every family in the United States ought to have one, and would if they only knew the saving and the quantity of work that can be done in a day …. The spring sewing or the fall sewing for half a dozen children [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: patently
This word has appeared in 55 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
scum | scumbag
a worthless or very disliked person
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Idiom of the Day
like (one's) life depends on it
With maximum, possibly desperate, effort or energy (i.e., as if one is at risk of losing one's life if one fails). Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
So the birthplace of bureaucracy is actually Miami: Tefi talks politics at the DNC
Tefi joins us to talk astrology, Bennifer, Miami, and more! Listen in on the message we are using to reach Latin voters (we're talking to you lizard conspiracists). Will Tefi achieve a 10/10 performance in our game, Tim Walz or TV Dad? Spoilers: she always has a 10/10 performance.
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Language Log
"Garbage time of history", part 2
This is a phrase that has been sweeping through China during recent months. In Chinese it is "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间". The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" started out in sports to characterize a situation where one side has such a commanding lead that it would be impossible for the other team to catch up. It's a foregone conclusion who is going to win, so the leading team can do what is called "play out the clock", putting in second- and third-string players to give them experience. Furthermore, it would be considered unsportsmanlike to pile up the score against the losing team.
The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" was only applied to historical analysis when essayist Hu Wenhui coined the fuller phrase "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间" in a 2023 WeChat post.
According to this China Digital Times post (8/21/24) by Alexander Boyd, "Word of the Week: Garbage Time of History (历史的垃圾时间, lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān)",
“the garbage time of history” refers to the period when a nation or system is no longer viable—when it has ceased to progress, but has not yet collapsed. Hu defined it as the point at which “the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile.” Hu’s sweeping essay led with Soviet stagnation under Brezhnev and then jumped nimbly between the historiography of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and Lu Xun’s opinions on Tang Dynasty poetry. Unasserted but implied in the essay is that China today finds itself in similar straits. CDT has translated a small portion of the essay to illustrate its main points:
During Brezhnev’s nearly 20 years in power (1964-1982), the New Russian Empire lashed out in all directions, and even seemed capable of taking down mighty Uncle Sam. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to recognize that [the Soviet] colossus had feet of clay, and was a hollow shell riven with internal difficulties. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, plunged the empire into a quagmire. It would be fair to say that the 1989 fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union both began in 1979.
I am willing to state unequivocally that the “garbage time” of the Soviet Union began in 1979. Gorbachev only hastened the end of that garbage era.
[…] In [Chinese-American historian] Ray Huang’s opinion, the history of the Ming Dynasty came to an end in 1587, during the fifteenth year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign. The subtext of Huang’s “macro-historical” viewpoint is that that was the year in which all of Chinese history came to an end, as well. The rest, including the remaining three hundred years of the Qing Dynasty, had lost any historical “significance” and were nothing more than a “garbage time” in history.
VHM: This is a most audacious claim, one that I hope Ming historians assess, both in terms of the remainder of the Ming Dynasty after 1587 (i.e., until 1644) and in terms of the rest of Chinese history. See Huang's 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.
[…] In history, as in all competitive sports, there will always be some garbage time. When that time comes, the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile, and the best you can hope for is to reach the end with as much dignity as possible. [Chinese]
Naturally, the PRC government is not taking these insinuations about its impending demise lightly, and has brought out its big guns to pontificate against the very idea that Chinese history may be in its "garbage time of history". The probable reason why the government doesn't enforce complete censorship against the phrase is that Hu Wenhui — in his original essay about the concept — does not make explicit claims that it is about the fate of China. Similarly, sensible netizens avoid making such claims. [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: conscious
This word has appeared in 792 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
get together
to meet and spend time together
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Word of the Day
mesa
Definition: (noun) A broad, flat-topped elevation with one or more clifflike sides, common in the southwest United States.
Synonyms: table.
Usage: They scaled forest-clad heights until they emerged on a naked mesa.
Discuss
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Language Log
Teeth as part of the vocal tract
The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract. Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds. If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.
Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.
It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate. Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself. It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.
As a thoughtful, sensitive, creative listener, after a while, I got used to what aspects of his pronunciation were missing or altered, and it gradually became easier for me to understand what he was saying.
In the Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi (Wandering on the Way), there's a character whose name I translated as "Gnaw Gap". I wonder if he was missing some teeth.
Selected readings
* "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
* "Mosey" (7/19/21)
* "Goblet word" (5/30/20)
* Mair, Victor H., tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; first ed. New York: Bantam, 1994); also available as Zhuangzi Bilingual Edition, translated by Victor H. Mair (English) and Minci Li (Modern Chinese) (Columbus: The Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications, production of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center, OSU, 2019) — this is actually a trilingual edition, since the 736 pages volume also includes the original Classical Chinese version.
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