In the comments on a recent LanguageHat post two of the most articulate, literate, and thoughtful members of the blogsphere, John Emerson (aka Zizka) and LanguageHat discuss teaching English in Taiwan. My first thought was to think of Taiwanese who complain about the poor quality of native speaker English teachers who come to Taiwan. How [...]
Geoff Nunberg has a LA Times op-ed on how difficult it is for Europeans to translate US political speech: when foreigners are scratching their heads over the keywords of our political debates, it’s usually a sign that English is trying to get away with some semantic sleight of hand. One example is “ownership”, as in [...]
I’m really fascinated with the Keith Idema story. I’ve written about it twice before (here and here). But Stacy Sullivan’s extended New York magazine profile is truly devastating. Idema was more than simply obsessed with the Afghan war—he was, as other journalists on the scene have recounted, absurdly keen to capture dramatic war footage, even [...]
Languaghat has previously covered controversies over how to spell “Euro”, but this latest one is truly hilarious: All official EU texts must be spelt the same way even if it makes no sense in the Baltic languages. The biggest headache is for the 3.5 million people of Lithuania, who would normally write euras, eurue, eura, [...]
Being a member of the American Anthropological Association is usually fairly boring. Sure, there are your occasional controversies, such as when Chagnon and Tierney were accused of spreading disease in the Amazon for research purposes. But that didn’t really affect the organization as a whole, not the way this does. Every year the AAA hosts [...]
I have always found it interesting that there is tremendous anger at tort lawyers, but not at the insurance industry. How bad is the problem of frivolous lawsuits? Stephanie Mencime’s Washington Monthly article tells it like it is: most tort lawsuits in this country–nearly 60 percent–involve simple fender-benders, and the awards are generally quite small [...]
Following Joi Ito, I am going to quote David Weinberger’s post in its entirety. I’ve really become interested in the way tagged meta data works (see this), and this post contains lots of useful links: David Weinberger Metadata without tears Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the [...]
I didn’t know the full story: Well over a decade ago she was a PR rep for “Coors,” called into action to repair the damage caused by one of the most successful boycotts in U.S. history and don’t you forget it for a nanosecond! The Coors family is, as the say, to the right of [...]
Kevin Hayden at the American Street, asks: And what will become of the 5,936,237,541 political blogs AFTER the election? If Bush wins, I figure it’s three years in Gitmo for half of us, for ‘re-education’ and make-pretend-non-torture. If Kerry wins, it’ll just be drunken orgies, mandatory abortions, and lesbians marrying Middle America’s cornfed daughters, then [...]
Two posts over at LanguageLog discuss research showing that “gaydar,” or the ability to detect who is gay and who is straight (in this case using only information conveyed by speech) is a real, observable phenomena. In one study, listeners were able to get some information about speakers’ sexual orientation from neutral laboratory-setting readings of [...]