Language Log

Frequent commentator AntC sent email about a transitive use of cooperate, used by Karen Friedman Agnifilo in an interview with Michael Popok about Walt Nauta's role in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case:

And so it makes sense why
uh they would want to cooperate him
and i- it also makes sense why they would reach out before indictment
and give him that opportunity.

I stopped short when I passed by this piece of gym equipment in a kindergarten playground near my home.

[line spacing was difficult with this one]

Chinese signs collected by Zeyao Wu:

本店/有/嬰兒被/賣 or 本店/有/嬰兒/被賣
běn diàn yǒu yīng'ér bèi                                  mài
this shop has baby   passive signifier; blanket for sale
"this shop has baby blankets for sale" or "this shop has had babies for sale"

Liwei Jiao sent in this photograph from a park in Hefei, China:

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

The Daily Mail explains that this viral video features "Marnie and Mylah, from Burnley, [who] hit out at the ice cream van for high prices":

Stunning report from Pinyin News:

"Chinese characters no longer required for Taiwan Aborigine names" (5/21/24)

Last week Taiwan’s legislature passed an amendment stating that members of Taiwan’s tribes will no longer be forced to adopt names written in Chinese characters. Instead, their names can be presented solely in romanization if so desired. Thus, at least in this specialized category, Chinese characters have been stripped of their primacy and romanization is officially allowed to stand on its own (not appear only in conjunction with Chinese characters).

Source: Lìyuàn tōngguò: yuánzhùmín shēnfen zhèngjiàn — kě zhǐ xiě pīnyīn zúmíng (立院通過：原住民身分證件 可只寫拼音族名), United Daily News, May 15, 2024

Avmeric Renou, "À VivaTech, la French Tech s’offre un nouveau coup de boost", Le Parisien 5/21/2024.

"la French Tech"? "un nouveau coup de boost"?

The obligatory screenshot:

This is a typical headline emanating from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC:

Furious mainland China slams Taiwanese leader’s ‘blatant’ call for independence

People’s Daily commentary blasts William Lai Ching-te’s inauguration speech for ‘inciting hatred against the Chinese people’
Beijing also objects to US secretary of state’s congratulations to Lai

Xinlu Liang in Beijing
Published: 2:05pm, 21 May 2024

During the last decade or so, the Chinese foreign ministry has developed such a distinctive, confrontational brand of diplomatic jargon that I thought it deserved a neologistic portmanteau designation of its own, though I think the expression could be used for different styles of diplomatic language that are quite different from the harsh rhetoric of the current Chinese approach.

Overall, contemporary Chinese diplomats are instructed by their government to adopt a "wolf warrior" approach.

Wolf warrior diplomacy is a form of public diplomacy involving compellence adopted by Chinese diplomats in the late 2010s. The term was coined from the title of the Chinese action film Wolf Warrior 2 (2017). This approach is in contrast to the prior diplomatic practices of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao, which had emphasized the use of cooperative rhetoric and the avoidance of controversy.

It's hard to believe they're serious about this:

China rolls out large language model based on Xi Jinping Thought

    Country’s top internet regulator promises ‘secure and reliable’ system that is not open-sourced
    Model is still undergoing internal testing and is not yet available for public use

Sylvie Zhuang in Beijing
Published: 7:57pm, 21 May 2024

It's the antithesis of open-sourced, i.e., it's close-sourced.  What are the implications of that for a vibrant, powerful system of thought?

From André Vítor Camargo De Toledo:

Original: "Ideia de Jerico" (An ass's idea)
Eggcorn: "Ideia de Girino" (A tadpole's idea)
Why it happened: "Jerico" is almost a fossil word, and, to most people, only ever shows up when used in that idiom. It's an old word for "ass", which, as an animal, is associated with intellectual dullness here, so the idiomatic expression translates to "a dumb idea." Its meaning is preserved in the misheard version, as one would suppose tadpole's aren't much brighter than asses.

Original: "internet discada" (dial-up internet)
Eggcorn: "internet de escada" ("staircase internet")
Why it happened: Millennials like me tend to use the term "dial up internet" to refer to any kind of bad internet connection. Younger generations, not knowing what dial-up internet is, interpret it as "staircase internet", which makes sense, as people are generally much slower walking up staircases than we normally walk.

Original: "Não é da minha alçada" (not of my jurisdiction)
Eggcorn: "Não é da minha ossada" (not from my skeleton)
Why it happened: just a misheard expression. It means "that trouble doesn't belong to me" in both cases; one is a legal analogy while the other is an anatomical analogy, perhaps influenced by the idea that Eve was originally one of Adam's bones.

In preparation for my run across Nebraska during the month of June, I'm boning up on the land, culture, and history of the state.  It wasn't long in my researches before I encountered the esteemed writer Marie Sandoz (1896-1966).  Hers is one of the most touching stories about a writer, nay, a human being, that I have ever read.  She has much to tell us about her language background and preferences, and how she had to struggle with her publishers to retain them in the face of standardization.

She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians.

Marie Susette Sandoz was born on May 11, 1896 near Hay Springs, Nebraska, the eldest of six children born to Swiss immigrants, Jules and Mary Elizabeth (Fehr) Sandoz. Until the age of 9, she spoke only German. Her father was said to be a violent and domineering man, who disapproved of her writing and reading. Her childhood was spent in hard labor on the home farm, and she developed snow blindness in one eye after a day spent digging the family's cattle out of a snowdrift.

Today's xkcd:

According to Wikipedia,

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]