The Guardian story I’m posting (by Kate Connolly) is adequately represented by its headline: Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of German apartments turns out to be a slug. Here are the paragraphs of Hattic interest: At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths. Ding dong ditch, […]| languagehat.com
I’m very fond of this poem by Michael Symmons Roberts from the new TLS (which has gone over to a biweekly schedule, shock horror!), but the reason I’m posting it here is that — despite the titular reference to Mandelstam — it reminds me strongly of one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Опять весна [Spring […]| languagehat.com
Matthew Scarborough has featured at LH many times (see, e.g., here), and he has now posted The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset (Scientific Data 12. 1541): This is somewhat old news since the dataset (v1.0) has already been available since the publication of the analysis paper in Science two years ago, but since that paper was […]| languagehat.com
Two letters from the latest LRB column (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived): Colin Kidd, writing about Stefan Collini’s history of English studies in Britain, mentions that ‘Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it’ (LRB, 14 August). In […]| languagehat.com
Here’s a beautiful example of a garden-path sentence that needed additional context to disentangle. I was wondering how the cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw pronounced her name, and as is my wont I tried to find a video in which someone said it aloud (ideally her, but I’ll take a well-informed interviewer). No luck so far, […]| languagehat.com
Barbara Newman reviews two Boccaccio books for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 14 · 14 August 2025; archived): Histories of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of […]| languagehat.com
Back in June I posted to Facebook as follows: OK, I need to know what to make of what appears to be a meaningless sentence in Paige Williams’ article on Green-Wood Cemetery at the New Yorker [archived]. Here’s the context: A hundred and eighty-seven years after its founding, Green-Wood resembles a sculpture garden. There are […]| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
The indefatigable Bathrobe has sent me a couple of good links I hereby share with you: 1) Arthur Waley’s “Notes on Translation” (The Atlantic, November 1958; archived) has lots of discussion of translations, both his and others; some samples: Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and […]| languagehat.com
Some interesting words I’ve run across recently: 1) I was watching Jia Zhangke’s movie Ash Is Purest White, about a couple involved in the (pretty petty) underworld milieu of Datong, and was intrigued to note that the subtitles didn’t translate the word jianghu (e.g., “You’re no longer in the jianghu”). I paused the movie to […]| languagehat.com
Jonathan Law writes about misprints in editions of poetry; he is either way too fond of such typos or is pretending to be for the purposes of pleasing his audience, but it’s a fun read. After reporting on Frank Key’s (frankly silly) suggestion that Sylvia Plath’s “a bag full of God” (from “Daddy”) is a […]| languagehat.com
maraow| languagehat.com
1) From Hua Hsu’s New Yorker piece “The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang” (archived): As [Rebecca] Kuang stirred a pot of pasta, I asked Eckert-Kuang [Kuang’s husband] about his dissertation. He paused, with a look familiar to any academic: Do you really want to know, or are you just asking out of politeness? Kuang […]| languagehat.com
Michael Idov (“a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter”) has a NY Times piece (archived) on a subject that has often exercised me: the terrible names English-speaking authors come up with for foreign protagonists. […] Spy stories remain one of the most popular windows onto the way the world works. Too bad the glass in that […]| languagehat.com
Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post decided to investigate the question What are the most American and most British words? (archived). After a long thumb-sucking introduction (“And for columnists with more curiosity than sense, Google offer lists of millions of words, sorted by year, language and (sometimes) country of publication”) and a fairly tedious […]| languagehat.com
This morning our local paper had a headline “City bans sale of synthetic kratom” that set my wife and me back on our heels: what the hell was “kratom”? A quick googling took me to the Wiktionary page, which explained that it was: 1. A tree, Mitragyna speciosa, endemic to Southeast Asia. 2. The dried […]| languagehat.com
Hitch.| languagehat.com
Victoria Livingstone writes about the ever-more-pressing issue of using machine-translated texts to save money: I lived in Latin America for several years and I speak Spanish fluently, but I am not a native speaker. I proofread translations into English and my co-worker, who was a native speaker of Spanish, proofread Spanish. Together we were in […]| languagehat.com
Some items I’ve run across lately:| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
My wife and I always enjoy Bill Danielson’s weekly nature columns in our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette; he usually writes about birds, but this week it was an oddly specialized topic and an unusual word I didn’t remember encountering before:| languagehat.com
Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics.| languagehat.com
jack morava| languagehat.com