Language
Love - ING
Over at Pinyin.info Mark Swofford notices a new trend of inserting “ING” at the end of Chinese verbs. When I twittered about this, Zonble pointed me to the above song by MayDay, the title of which is 戀愛ing (Lianai - ING), meaning “loving” or “romancing.” Interestingly, if you listen to the song they don’t pronounce […]
Understatement
It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article:
When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision […]
陸克文
I would like to congratulate Australia on finally ridding itself of John Howard. In 2002 I wrote about ““Howard’s openly racist policies” and more recently we’ve had some excellent discussion on Savage Minds about his use of the “Little Children are Sacred” report to undo decades of progress on Aborigine autonomy. I’d really begun to […]
KUSO
If you walk around Taipei these days you’ll be sure to see the word KUSO written in big letters all over the place. For instance, this summer there was a city-sponsored cultural festival in Ximending called “KUSO Ximending.”
But what does “KUSO” mean? Luckily, Wikipedia is there to help us out:
Kuso is the term used in […]
Ivory Tower vs. Real World
[Cross-posted at Savage Minds]
In our discussions about anthropologists in the military the term “ivory tower” has come up again and again, as has its antipode, “the real world.” These terms work rhetorically to oppose academic elitism and detachment against the difficult moral choices one must make in everyday life. A couple of things really bother […]
Asynchronicity
I never liked team sports, I never liked playing the dozens, I never liked being put on the spot … Its not that I’m introverted - I’m not. I’m just not “quick-witted” (or at least not as quick as I’d like to be). Some people love talking on the phone, love chat rooms, love instant […]
Acronym
Worst name for a political party, ever.
A newspaper headline from last year.
{india}
Bhojpuri
It is already old news, having been reported in the BBC over a year ago, but I just learned that Hindi movies are on the way out. With is focus on big budget (”multi crore“) spectaculars aimed at the transnational Indian audience (NRIs), Bollywood seems to have lost its way with viewers in India’s heartland. […]
XMas & (C)han(n)uk(k)a(h)
One of my students asked why Christmas was spelled X-mas? Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in the […]
Casualty of War
On December 12th, Stephen Colbert’s “Word” was ” Casualty of War.” You can watch it online here, but Colbert’s impeccable logic is so well crafted that I wanted to share this transcript (the text in brackets represent the text which appears in the on-screen box):
Now I was burning the Iraq Study Group report the other […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
