From a post from Language Log (actually from the day before yesterday, but I didn’t see it till this morning):
As with many of The New Yorker‘s crochets, avoidance of singular they is a rationalist innovation masquerading as linguistic conservatism.
Spotted on Wikipedia:
Saturday Review reached its maximum circulation of 660,000 in 1971. Ironically, its decline began in the same year.
What an ironic coincidence!
From the Chambers Dictionary, definition 3 for the noun potato:
Someone who sits or lies about by the hour in vegetable-like inertia, as in couch potato, beach potato (slang)
There are a whole bunch of good Chinese-English dictionaries for the iPhone, but as far as I know we don’t have one with a decent way of looking for a character by its radical. (A radical is a component of the character.) I can look up a character on any of my iPhone Chinese dictionaries by its English meaning, or by its pinyin transliteration, or I can draw it. But if I see an unfamiliar character on a sign, say, then I don’t know what it means or how to say it, and when I draw it I’m such a beginner that it can take me several tries to get the right stroke order, and that’s crucial to the recognition software.
So it would be great if I could look it up on the iPhone by radical and number of strokes, as I can in most of the dictionaries I have at home.
But so far the only iPhone Chinese dictionary that has that feature is the Oxford Beginner’s, and that one is very poorly implemented and has a limited number of characters anyway, being meant for beginners.
From today’s Contra Costa Times:
The Chinese language does not have a word for “puzzle”. The characters for “enhancing”, “intelligence”, and “games” must be fitted together in a specific order to create a close translation.
Um, that means the Chinese language has a word for “puzzle”, and it’s made up of three characters. That’s how Chinese works. It would make equally good sense to say
The English language has no word for “tablespoon”; instead, the words “table” and “spoon” must be fitted together in a specific order to create a close translation.
Come on.
According to Wikipedia,
The German version of Microsoft Windows XP will inform the user of the fact that it is currently downloading updates with the words:
Updates werden gedownloadet: 16%
But shouldn’t that be downgeloadet?
Scratchings 