“Verbs are verbing” and nonlinguistic uses of part-of-speech terms
Some time ago I came across a short video on YouTube featuring the TV celebrity Jason Silva, who passionately talked about the underlying dynamicity of the u...
vocabulary
“Can I copy your ppt to my mp3?” On letter words in contemporary Chinese (Part 2)
In my previous post I wrote about the letter word phenomenon prevalent in contemporary Chinese. I discussed their classification and semantics with some comm...
“Can I copy your ppt to my mp3?” On letter words in contemporary Chinese (Part 1)
The sentence in the title of this post may sound awkward to an English speaker’s ears—How can one copy a filename extension to another?—but it turns out to b...
Why are apples so beloved (linguistically)?
Many years ago, probably when I was in grade six or seven, I accidentally overheard the following snippet from a family conversation. The speaker was the wif...