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Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic
"Charming anecdotes, witty sidebars, attractive illustrations.... Little’s strong sense of humor never overwhelms her love of languages in this fascinating yet educational introduction to linguistics for a wide, pop-savvy audience.” – Publishers Weekly “A delightful language scrapbook – the deliberately disjointed diary of a language lover.” – Chicago Tribune “A tour of all the quirk and queerness to be found among the world's many dialects ... her meandering, highly-readable riffs on Finnish prepositions and Incan counting systems manage to be funny, earnest, and not funny because of their earnestness – something of a feat for a book that could be used as a grammar primer.” – The Onion A.V. Club “A wrap-worthy language book. A multilingual voyage, exploring the ‘quirks, innovations, and implausibilities’ of the world's languages.” – Boston Globe "This is a fun book for grammar and pop-culture lovers alike. Little provides grammar basics and little-known facts by incorporating stories of her travels, Star Wars, Dr. Seuss and other familiar icons. It's both a breezy read and a useful resource.” – Pop Candy, USAToday.com “[A] quirky, funny, intelligent little book … complete with amusing illustrations. Little has packed her work chock-full of the world’s tantalizing linguistic nuggets.” – Newsday "It's clear that Elizabeth Little's omnivorous curiosity has suited her well... This short, neon-colored book walks readers through categories that on paper should seem dry, from pronouns to numbers, spicing everything up with cultural comparisons.” - The Newark Star-Ledger "[A] feisty romp through the world's languages.” - Rob Kyff, The Word Guy
“Witty, sassy, and laugh-out-loud funny. Little convincingly demonstrates that, as she puts it, 'language is nothing less than a great adventure.' So is her book.” – Kitty Burns Florey, author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog "If you like language, you'll love Biting the Wax Tadpole . Elizabeth Little has mused on, used, and even misused many of the planet's languages, and this fascinating and often hilarious book gives a full account of her adventures.” – Ben Greenman, author of A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both and Superbad
In a decidedly unstuffy look at the staid world of languages, Elizabeth Little uses her favorite examples from languages dead, difficult, and just plain made-up to reveal how language study is the ticket to traveling the world without leaving the comforts of home. Little’s exploration of “word travel” includes Shona, a language lacking distinct words for “blue” or “green,” why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural, which language is the only one lacking verbs, and just what, exactly, the Swedish names of IKEA products mean.
Fully illustrated with hilarious sidebars, Biting the Wax Tadpole also addresses classic cases of mistranslation. For example, when Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a phonetic written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose were pronounced “ke-kou ke-la.” It sounded right, but it translated literally as “bite the wax tadpole.” Not quite what Coke had in mind, but in this off-kilter ode to the words of the world, it’s just another example of language taking you someplace interesting.
Elizabeth Little is a writer and editor living in New York City. She has worked as a literary agent and as a writer and editor for the travel guide Let's China, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times. This is her first book.
“Witty, sassy, and laugh-out-loud funny. Little convincingly demonstrates that, as she puts it, 'language is nothing less than a great adventure.' So is her book.” – Kitty Burns Florey, author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog "If you like language, you'll love Biting the Wax Tadpole . Elizabeth Little has mused on, used, and even misused many of the planet's languages, and this fascinating and often hilarious book gives a full account of her adventures.” – Ben Greenman, author of A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both and Superbad
In a decidedly unstuffy look at the staid world of languages, Elizabeth Little uses her favorite examples from languages dead, difficult, and just plain made-up to reveal how language study is the ticket to traveling the world without leaving the comforts of home. Little’s exploration of “word travel” includes Shona, a language lacking distinct words for “blue” or “green,” why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural, which language is the only one lacking verbs, and just what, exactly, the Swedish names of IKEA products mean.
Fully illustrated with hilarious sidebars, Biting the Wax Tadpole also addresses classic cases of mistranslation. For example, when Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a phonetic written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose were pronounced “ke-kou ke-la.” It sounded right, but it translated literally as “bite the wax tadpole.” Not quite what Coke had in mind, but in this off-kilter ode to the words of the world, it’s just another example of language taking you someplace interesting.
Elizabeth Little is a writer and editor living in New York City. She has worked as a literary agent and as a writer and editor for the travel guide Let's China, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times. This is her first book.
184 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2007
7 people are currently reading
521 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Little
5 books421 followersElizabeth Little is the bestselling author of Dear Daughter, Pretty as a Picture, and two works of nonfiction. Her crime fiction has been nominated for the Barry, Macavity, and CWA John Creasey Debut dagger awards, and she received the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel. Her latest novel, Pretty as a Picture, was a Barnes and Noble monthly pick and a Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Her next novel will be published by Bantam in 2025.
Elizabeth lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Elizabeth lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
March 28, 2008
It's time for the annual sheap-shearing contest in the Aberfan Valley. You're there, checking your flock before entering. How do you count?
Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick, yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit, yanabum, tanabum, tetherabum, metherabum, jigget.
This vestigial vigesimal counting system is just one of the many delights to be found in Elizabeth Little's completely enchanting book of musings on language. As she puts it, the words are "utterly charming, sounding like nothing so much as the names a young Will Shakespeare might have conjured up for a litter of adorable kittens." She's right -- I have no words to describe how much joy that little sequence "yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit" brings me, except to say that when I first read it, I literally squealed with delight . And how often does one get to do that these days?
Though the chapter names are sober: "NOUNS, VERBS, NUMBERS, MODIFIERS, SPEECH", this is a book which romps, gambols, and frolics along the highways and byways of language, unearthing fascinating nuggets along the way. Little claims no formal qualification for writing on linguistic topics, other than a lifelong enthusiasm for language. In writing such a wonderful book, she has demonstrated that no other qualification is needed.
If you are a language geek (like me), this book gets 5 stars hands down. The only reason I give it only 4 stars in my review is in acknowledgement of the (baffling) reality that not everyone out there shares my passion. Though it seems hard to believe, not everyone will stare transfixed by the beauty of the declension table specifying all 18 Hungarian case endings that Little includes in the book.
But for those of you who find such matters eerily fascinating (and you know who you are!), "Biting the Wax Tadpole" will be a garden of earthly delights.
Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick, yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit, yanabum, tanabum, tetherabum, metherabum, jigget.
This vestigial vigesimal counting system is just one of the many delights to be found in Elizabeth Little's completely enchanting book of musings on language. As she puts it, the words are "utterly charming, sounding like nothing so much as the names a young Will Shakespeare might have conjured up for a litter of adorable kittens." She's right -- I have no words to describe how much joy that little sequence "yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit" brings me, except to say that when I first read it, I literally squealed with delight . And how often does one get to do that these days?
Though the chapter names are sober: "NOUNS, VERBS, NUMBERS, MODIFIERS, SPEECH", this is a book which romps, gambols, and frolics along the highways and byways of language, unearthing fascinating nuggets along the way. Little claims no formal qualification for writing on linguistic topics, other than a lifelong enthusiasm for language. In writing such a wonderful book, she has demonstrated that no other qualification is needed.
If you are a language geek (like me), this book gets 5 stars hands down. The only reason I give it only 4 stars in my review is in acknowledgement of the (baffling) reality that not everyone out there shares my passion. Though it seems hard to believe, not everyone will stare transfixed by the beauty of the declension table specifying all 18 Hungarian case endings that Little includes in the book.
But for those of you who find such matters eerily fascinating (and you know who you are!), "Biting the Wax Tadpole" will be a garden of earthly delights.
October 17, 2020
I enjoyed this book a lot but I will warn you that their are parts of this book that is slow. Once, you get past the slow spots, the book is enjoyable.
November 5, 2024
i liked the chapter on numbers
July 5, 2011
I will confess I was a little skeptical of this book because I have run into far too many efforts by non-linguists who obviously did not have the background, training and expertise to know what they were writing about.
In this case, the author, Elizabeth Little, graduated in political science and "language citations in Mandarin and Classical Chinese" (whatever that means). Self effacing (the introduction centers on her inability to communicate in order to get some food in a city in Southeastern China), but obviously also very able to actually do the research, she clearly loves language and languages.
The book title, incidentally, comes from the translation of Coca Cola into Chinese when the product was introduced in 1928. However, it turns out that the American company did things right in naming the product, coming up with a phrase that would translate as "delicious happiness>" However, since the marketing materials were not ready to present, the local merchants came up with their own symbols to represent the concept which in Shanghai would translate as "bit the wax tadpole" (remember, there are multiple Chinese dialects, and the symbols represent concepts, not letters). The shopkeepers figured that the consumers, seeing such an absurd phrase, would see it as simply a transliteration of delicious happiness.
The author's writing style is informal and very witty. I dated girls with that kind of sense of humor in college, and they were always fun to be around. This is as amusing an introduction to the nature of language as you will find, and fortunately (at least from my viewpoint) it is linguistically and academically sound.
In this case, the author, Elizabeth Little, graduated in political science and "language citations in Mandarin and Classical Chinese" (whatever that means). Self effacing (the introduction centers on her inability to communicate in order to get some food in a city in Southeastern China), but obviously also very able to actually do the research, she clearly loves language and languages.
The book title, incidentally, comes from the translation of Coca Cola into Chinese when the product was introduced in 1928. However, it turns out that the American company did things right in naming the product, coming up with a phrase that would translate as "delicious happiness>" However, since the marketing materials were not ready to present, the local merchants came up with their own symbols to represent the concept which in Shanghai would translate as "bit the wax tadpole" (remember, there are multiple Chinese dialects, and the symbols represent concepts, not letters). The shopkeepers figured that the consumers, seeing such an absurd phrase, would see it as simply a transliteration of delicious happiness.
The author's writing style is informal and very witty. I dated girls with that kind of sense of humor in college, and they were always fun to be around. This is as amusing an introduction to the nature of language as you will find, and fortunately (at least from my viewpoint) it is linguistically and academically sound.
April 1, 2010
Parts of this book bored me to tears, but other parts were so intriguing and eye-opening that they made up for the mind-numbing sentences like "The accusative is used for the direct object of the verb, while the dative is used for, among other things, the indirect object" (p. 27, picked at random. There were worse sentences).
The fun stuff (for me, anyway) was the trivia on language structure in vastly different languages. Nez Perce colors, Finnish verb structure, counting in French and Japanese, names in Iceland, Polynesian pronunciation....it's a fun book to browse, and you can always just glide past the sections talking about pluperfect and other things you don't really remember from English class.
The fun stuff (for me, anyway) was the trivia on language structure in vastly different languages. Nez Perce colors, Finnish verb structure, counting in French and Japanese, names in Iceland, Polynesian pronunciation....it's a fun book to browse, and you can always just glide past the sections talking about pluperfect and other things you don't really remember from English class.
May 16, 2013
A hardcore look at the grammars, underlying structures and idiosyncrasies of the world's languages, enlivened by a cheerful and intimate voice.
October 6, 2019
I'm a linguist by profession, so just a few facts in this book were new to me, but it was quite an entertaining read nonetheless. It would probably be really enjoyable for someone who's interested in languages but doesn't know much about the different features that make languages around the world so weird and wonderful.
October 18, 2014
In its favor, this book does present a fair amount of information about the different ways different languages are organized. A lot of it, we've heard before, but that's okay because it wouldn't make sense to leave it out just because it's familiar. The title, "Biting the Wax Tadpole," refers to a phonetic rendering of the name "Coca-Cola" by Chinese shopkeepers -- an anecdote new to me -- and the author debunks the idea that it was Coke's own marketing people who came up with this infelicitous phrase.
At 180 pages with very wide margins to accommodate sidebars and illos, this is not a hefty tome, so it delivers approximately what it promises. Nouns, Verbs, Numbers, Modifiers, Speech: Those are the chapter titles, so we expect to get to some nuts and bolts of grammar. Ms. Little tries to keep the tone light -- tries to be a little bit funny and a little bit wry -- and succeeds to the extent that she gets us through the material without the book being thrown down in disgust. Sample: "Today, the vast majority of the world's people have adopted Hindu-Arabic numerals, a useful turn of events if you happen to be a tourist looking for an address abroad or a mathematician seeking world dominance." I can't tell if she's not as funny as she thinks she is or if she simply feels obliged to pretend to think she's funny.
Maybe this is after-dinner-speech humor. I don't know. On the printed page it does not generate an actual laugh in 180 pages. But if you're interested in the subject, it won't keep you from turning the pages.
At 180 pages with very wide margins to accommodate sidebars and illos, this is not a hefty tome, so it delivers approximately what it promises. Nouns, Verbs, Numbers, Modifiers, Speech: Those are the chapter titles, so we expect to get to some nuts and bolts of grammar. Ms. Little tries to keep the tone light -- tries to be a little bit funny and a little bit wry -- and succeeds to the extent that she gets us through the material without the book being thrown down in disgust. Sample: "Today, the vast majority of the world's people have adopted Hindu-Arabic numerals, a useful turn of events if you happen to be a tourist looking for an address abroad or a mathematician seeking world dominance." I can't tell if she's not as funny as she thinks she is or if she simply feels obliged to pretend to think she's funny.
Maybe this is after-dinner-speech humor. I don't know. On the printed page it does not generate an actual laugh in 180 pages. But if you're interested in the subject, it won't keep you from turning the pages.
April 23, 2008
I majored in Linguistics in college (Nickname "WordNerd")so I really get the authors love of languages. Not necessarily to master them;just to experience the romance and adventure of one of the key things that humans do--communicate with words. This is an enjoyable book that is well written and definitely shows love for languages. Anecdotal bits and more scholarly (I use 'scholarly' very loosely, as the style is very conversational) sections are organized in chapters that deal with specific grammatical functions. My only criticism is that sometimes the author's humor comes across as too cute by half. This is still a good read.
January 12, 2011
I really wanted to like this book. I was hoping for a bit of light reading that wasn’t total junk snippets of where the oddities of language come from or the weird things about language that maybe I’d never thought of. Instead I got a book about conjugating verbs and declining nouns. About parts of speech I barely remember learning about in school. If you truly love not just words, but grammar pick this up and enjoy. If you can’t remember what a participle is, walk away. If you don’t remember what past imperfect tense is, walk away. If the thought of verb conjugation makes you break out in hives, walk away.
June 17, 2012
I enjoy this book a lot. I love reading interesting language tidbits, like the fact that the words "nine" and "new" are very similar in many, many languages, for some reason, or that "orange" is the same in a lot of languages, and is a relatively new word in them.
I did think the book would be more of a memoir, based on the title---more about the author's own life and language learning. It isn't---it's like a sampling of trivia about languages around the world, divided into categories like nouns, verbs and number and color words.
Certainly worth a read if you enjoy learning about the similarities and differences between languages!
I did think the book would be more of a memoir, based on the title---more about the author's own life and language learning. It isn't---it's like a sampling of trivia about languages around the world, divided into categories like nouns, verbs and number and color words.
Certainly worth a read if you enjoy learning about the similarities and differences between languages!
May 24, 2015
My favorite thing is when an author describes a sensation, experience or thought process that I thought I was alone in and does it so eloquently it leaves me shaking my head. Anna Quindlen's "Imagined London: a tour of the world's greatest fictional city" was one such book. This one is another. I loved it!
January 15, 2018
This book is a compilation of interesting facts about languages. It is more a book for dipping into and reading interesting trivia. I did enjoy reading about some of the quirkiness of translations into Chinese, tonal languages slang, pronunciation and the oddities of grammars of different languages. I bought this book secondhand and the title certainly appealed to me.
September 28, 2021
I enjoyed Elizabeth Little's sense of humor and all the fascinating details she has picked up about different languages. If I tried to read too much at once, I started getting a bit overwhelmed by all the details, but it was fun to read a little at a time and consider how languages are the same and different.
May 14, 2008
A fun book and an easy read. It made me want to learn more languages, and helped me decide which ones to definitely avoid.
June 18, 2022
It's an okay book. I like the original idea (present curious bits of different languages, how they express things, ways to describe various concepts, etc.), but I'm not sure it's implemented as well as it could be done. The coverage seemed quite limited--in terms of both languages (with special focus on Mandarin Chinese) and language aspects discussed, and by the second half of the book I was bored. There are bits of memoirs and author's personal experiences learning and using languages that are supposed to be funny but mostly they aren't (sorry).
Still, the book presents some interesting facts and may enhance your view on the different ways languages are structured and used. Read if you are an aspiring polyglot, but don't expect too much.
Still, the book presents some interesting facts and may enhance your view on the different ways languages are structured and used. Read if you are an aspiring polyglot, but don't expect too much.
May 27, 2019
This book is an authorial jeu d’esprit. At first Little’s breezy style annoyed me, but ultimately I found much to enjoy in this short work. (I still think trying to sound über-hip puts a book on the fast track to obsolescence.) In contrast to Little’s style, her outline is quite conservative: five chapters between the introduction and conclusion titled “Nouns,” “Verbs,” “Numbers,” “Modifiers,” and “Speech.” Nevertheless, even beyond the sassy approach to the text itself, sidebars and accompanying cartoon illustrations reflect Little’s lighter treatment of the unexpected in language.
January 15, 2025
That was a nice little book written by a passionate language lover.
What I didn't like : I can't say I didn't like, just that some grammatical terms were too numerous for me - I'm not crazy about grammer per se.
What I did like :
- the author has the sense of humour
- she's a real fanatic and you can feel it (it's a good thing !)
- I learned some really interesting tidbits about languages all around the world, what they have in common and how they differ
- I was even interested in the chapter about numbers - and I'm not crazy about mathematics either.
What I didn't like : I can't say I didn't like, just that some grammatical terms were too numerous for me - I'm not crazy about grammer per se.
What I did like :
- the author has the sense of humour
- she's a real fanatic and you can feel it (it's a good thing !)
- I learned some really interesting tidbits about languages all around the world, what they have in common and how they differ
- I was even interested in the chapter about numbers - and I'm not crazy about mathematics either.
July 23, 2017
A light read on a dense subject. Very accessible and at times hilarious. The author is very clever.
I recommend this book for the budding linguist or anyone interested in language. It goes through a lot of the basics and more interesting facts but doesn't delve too deeply into any one matter.
I really had fun reading this.
I recommend this book for the budding linguist or anyone interested in language. It goes through a lot of the basics and more interesting facts but doesn't delve too deeply into any one matter.
I really had fun reading this.
February 13, 2018
Two and half stars. I liked it well enough but It didn't engage me as much as I hoped.
July 30, 2018
Easy to read, well researched, well written, but in the end more than I wanted to know about noun declensions etc.
August 7, 2018
Most of the guides to foreign languages focus on vocabulary. For a change this one focuses on grammar. Unfortunately it does mean it can be a bit technical. Entertaining and interesting despite this.
February 9, 2015
“Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic” by Elizabeth Little, published in 2007, is a fun tour through a few basic aspects of human language. Five chapters deal with the constituents of language: nouns, verbs, numbers, modifiers, and speech, and these chapters are surrounded by an introduction and a conclusion.
Many tidbits in the book will catch the eye of people who, like me, enjoy reading about languages. In Hungarian, a Uralic not Indo-European language, many nouns are declined for 18 grammatical cases; in Turkish there are two forms of the past tense for verbs, the definite past (where the speaker or writer knows for sure something happened) and the inferential past (where the speaker or writer alleges or infers something happened). A section of the book looks at how color is demarcated in different languages.
We learn that the Hawaiian language has only eight consonant sounds and its consonants are not clustered (like br-, str-, gl-, -rst, etc. in English). Hawaiian words never end in a consonant. Thus, Little writes that “there are an extremely limited number of possible sound combinations,” and only 162 possible syllables in Hawaiian. Another source puts the number at 225. Contrast this with English which, depending on whom you read, has about 92,000 possible syllables.
Articles (a/an and the) are a commonplace in English – “the” is the most common word in English – and native speakers and writers seldom think about when to use them or not. Recently, a few of my copy-editing friends and I had a reason to think about articles when we discussed a question-and-answer transportation column in the San Jose Mercury News called Roadshow. One column looked at the tendency of many people in Southern California to use a definite article in front of numbered highways, such as saying, “I drove on the 101” or “the 295 is crowded” instead of saying, “I drove on 101” or “295 is crowded.”
In languages such as Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, or Latin, you couldn’t say “the 101” even if you wanted to because those languages have no articles. Little points out in her book that Arabic has a definite article (al-) but no indefinite one. In Portuguese, the definite article may appear before names of countries (for example, the Somalia). In Romanian, Albanian, and Bulgarian, the definite article is a suffix added to the end of nouns.
This book is not a systematic look at world languages by a linguist, although the book is well-researched and seven pages of notes conclude the book. But writers, editors, and amateur linguists will enjoy, I think, this short book by a fellow writer and editor, full of first-person experiences and acute observations.
By the way, the title of the book comes from an early phonetic equivalent of the word Coca-Cola in Chinese. The Chinese often translate proper names from English and other languages into words that sound similar. But these words also have separate literal meanings: Jimmy Carter in Chinese becomes 吉米・卡特 (in pinyin: ji-mi ka-te) Those four characters literally mean: lucky rice, card special). Coke was available in China from the 1920s into the 1940s, and was reintroduced to China in 1978 after a 30-year absence. One shopkeeper translated Coca-Cola as ke-kou ke-la, which means “bite the wax tadpole.” Officially in China, Coca-Cola is 可口可乐 (ke-kou ke-le), which Little says can be translated loosely as “delicious happiness.”
However, a story on theworldofchina.com on June 7, 2013, says that Coca-Cola has replaced that name for its popular drink and now labels bottles with popular internet slang.
Many tidbits in the book will catch the eye of people who, like me, enjoy reading about languages. In Hungarian, a Uralic not Indo-European language, many nouns are declined for 18 grammatical cases; in Turkish there are two forms of the past tense for verbs, the definite past (where the speaker or writer knows for sure something happened) and the inferential past (where the speaker or writer alleges or infers something happened). A section of the book looks at how color is demarcated in different languages.
We learn that the Hawaiian language has only eight consonant sounds and its consonants are not clustered (like br-, str-, gl-, -rst, etc. in English). Hawaiian words never end in a consonant. Thus, Little writes that “there are an extremely limited number of possible sound combinations,” and only 162 possible syllables in Hawaiian. Another source puts the number at 225. Contrast this with English which, depending on whom you read, has about 92,000 possible syllables.
Articles (a/an and the) are a commonplace in English – “the” is the most common word in English – and native speakers and writers seldom think about when to use them or not. Recently, a few of my copy-editing friends and I had a reason to think about articles when we discussed a question-and-answer transportation column in the San Jose Mercury News called Roadshow. One column looked at the tendency of many people in Southern California to use a definite article in front of numbered highways, such as saying, “I drove on the 101” or “the 295 is crowded” instead of saying, “I drove on 101” or “295 is crowded.”
In languages such as Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, or Latin, you couldn’t say “the 101” even if you wanted to because those languages have no articles. Little points out in her book that Arabic has a definite article (al-) but no indefinite one. In Portuguese, the definite article may appear before names of countries (for example, the Somalia). In Romanian, Albanian, and Bulgarian, the definite article is a suffix added to the end of nouns.
This book is not a systematic look at world languages by a linguist, although the book is well-researched and seven pages of notes conclude the book. But writers, editors, and amateur linguists will enjoy, I think, this short book by a fellow writer and editor, full of first-person experiences and acute observations.
By the way, the title of the book comes from an early phonetic equivalent of the word Coca-Cola in Chinese. The Chinese often translate proper names from English and other languages into words that sound similar. But these words also have separate literal meanings: Jimmy Carter in Chinese becomes 吉米・卡特 (in pinyin: ji-mi ka-te) Those four characters literally mean: lucky rice, card special). Coke was available in China from the 1920s into the 1940s, and was reintroduced to China in 1978 after a 30-year absence. One shopkeeper translated Coca-Cola as ke-kou ke-la, which means “bite the wax tadpole.” Officially in China, Coca-Cola is 可口可乐 (ke-kou ke-le), which Little says can be translated loosely as “delicious happiness.”
However, a story on theworldofchina.com on June 7, 2013, says that Coca-Cola has replaced that name for its popular drink and now labels bottles with popular internet slang.
April 24, 2009
I thought this book was an entertaining guided tour through various linguistic anecdotes, with an eye towards highlighting things that English speakers might find amusing, odd, or startling. I enjoyed her first-person experiences and the exuberance and enthusiasm that she put into it. I'm always fascinated by the multitude of ways in which different languages "discretize" the space of human experience into grammatical and lexical components, which aspects are marked, which ones are elided, etc.
The only thing that held me back from a higher rating is that I felt a little uncertain about some of the simplifications that I saw. Most of the examples seemed very plausible. But the Hungarian declensions table (which some other reviewers called out as something that made a big impression on them) was fundamentally oversimplified, since words in Hungarian typically can take suffixes from only one of the three rows. (See for instance http://www.hungarianreference.com/Nouns/ ). This shook my confidence rather fundamentally, since I rely entirely on her descriptions for any languages that I do not have any experience with. Thus, I felt a bit uneasy about taking all the examples at face value. I realize that in most cases, the details would be too technical for a popular book of this nature, though.
In all, a very entertaining read, but the reader should probably go in knowing that there may be some inevitable glossing-over of details.
The only thing that held me back from a higher rating is that I felt a little uncertain about some of the simplifications that I saw. Most of the examples seemed very plausible. But the Hungarian declensions table (which some other reviewers called out as something that made a big impression on them) was fundamentally oversimplified, since words in Hungarian typically can take suffixes from only one of the three rows. (See for instance http://www.hungarianreference.com/Nouns/ ). This shook my confidence rather fundamentally, since I rely entirely on her descriptions for any languages that I do not have any experience with. Thus, I felt a bit uneasy about taking all the examples at face value. I realize that in most cases, the details would be too technical for a popular book of this nature, though.
In all, a very entertaining read, but the reader should probably go in knowing that there may be some inevitable glossing-over of details.
September 7, 2012
Here's what I liked:
1) finding out the origins of our words, numbers, etc.--why we don't use the metric system, where "eleven" and "twelve" came from--in a fun, modern, relatively easy-to-understand way. Relatively.
2) witty sidebars that were actually more fun than the book itself.
Here's what I had issues with and why it only got 3 stars from me:
1) It did get a little technical for me--I can hardly remember which are adverbs and which are adjectives, let alone how to conjugate verbs or what a participle or article is--I felt like I was back in 7th grade language arts, minus the textbook to help me out. There were many things she didn't explain and expected you to know because I guess she figured you'd be as much of a language geek as she was.
2) crude expressions--honestly, for a girl so brilliant at languages, I was really disappointed with how many swear words and crude terms she fell back on. Is that the best she could come up with, given the millions of words in our language? Sheesh. It could have been so much better.
So I would recommend those with tough skin and a passion for verbiage. And no small children who might pick it up and read those witty but crude sidebars . . . like mine did. Pretty embarrassing.
1) finding out the origins of our words, numbers, etc.--why we don't use the metric system, where "eleven" and "twelve" came from--in a fun, modern, relatively easy-to-understand way. Relatively.
2) witty sidebars that were actually more fun than the book itself.
Here's what I had issues with and why it only got 3 stars from me:
1) It did get a little technical for me--I can hardly remember which are adverbs and which are adjectives, let alone how to conjugate verbs or what a participle or article is--I felt like I was back in 7th grade language arts, minus the textbook to help me out. There were many things she didn't explain and expected you to know because I guess she figured you'd be as much of a language geek as she was.
2) crude expressions--honestly, for a girl so brilliant at languages, I was really disappointed with how many swear words and crude terms she fell back on. Is that the best she could come up with, given the millions of words in our language? Sheesh. It could have been so much better.
So I would recommend those with tough skin and a passion for verbiage. And no small children who might pick it up and read those witty but crude sidebars . . . like mine did. Pretty embarrassing.
April 2, 2015
I had been lusting after this book after listening to possibly my all-time favorite episode of TTBOOK. And it was great for those of us who can get geeked-out on language. I find that I appreciate some of the same linguistic idiosyncrasies as Little, which is always heartening, and her discussion of Semitic languages has convinced me to add one to my list of languages I'd like to learn someday. This is thoroughly a trivia book that, I think, is best geared toward anyone with a background in foreign language study as I could imagine all the grammar-speak might leave more than a few lost. Although, to her credit, Little goes the extra mile in explaining all the crazy terms and linking them to pop culture to make her passion more accessible. For me, the overabundance of pop culture references began to bore me...made her out to be a sort of linguistic Chuck Klostermann--maybe a little cutesier. That sort of in-crowd snarkiness I generally only tolerate in discussions with my friends (my double standard: coming from us it's OK, from others--they're an asshole). But that's just my beef.
March 25, 2010
Contrary to what the author insists, we are NOT all language people; I certainly am not. I am fine within the familiar contours of my native American English, and have a reasonable facility (possibly better than Ms. Little's, if I can believe her self-deprecating statements on the subject) with pronunciation and accent. And I have a more than reasonably good memory for vocabulary. But I have never been able to adjust to a foreign grammatical structure; I've made two attempts to learn German, and one to learn French, and in each case, grammatical structure and word order did me in. I seem to be hard-wired for the English take on this aspect of language.
In spite of this, however, the author managed to convey her enthusiasm for the subject so thoroughly, and in such a charming manner, that I couldn't help but find it contagious. I may yet have to make another attempt to learn another language. If I could be guaranteed of finding a teacher as knowledgeable, as enthusiastic, and as entertaining as Ms. Little, I almost certainly would.
In spite of this, however, the author managed to convey her enthusiasm for the subject so thoroughly, and in such a charming manner, that I couldn't help but find it contagious. I may yet have to make another attempt to learn another language. If I could be guaranteed of finding a teacher as knowledgeable, as enthusiastic, and as entertaining as Ms. Little, I almost certainly would.
July 5, 2008
This was an interesting look at the great variety of languages, sound and structures that exist in the world, but really, it was way too technical for me. I never had grammar lessons in school, apart from whether the comma goes inside or outside of quotation marks. So works like "declension" were Greek to me. The concepts came across ok, but I would have gotten a lot more out of it if I had the proper background.
I'm not entirely sure the point of the book. It had some humor it it, but a dry, ironic forced kind of humor. I couldn't tell if the book was showing off this woman's amazing knowledge of language, or if she was trying to connect with word nerds as big as herself, or if she really was trying to educate the public. If that was the case, she could have done it through the sidebars alone, which were the best part of the book.
I'm not entirely sure the point of the book. It had some humor it it, but a dry, ironic forced kind of humor. I couldn't tell if the book was showing off this woman's amazing knowledge of language, or if she was trying to connect with word nerds as big as herself, or if she really was trying to educate the public. If that was the case, she could have done it through the sidebars alone, which were the best part of the book.
March 29, 2008
The only thing I really didn't like about this book on languages is that I didn't write it myself. I would recommend this for anyone who's interested in language - you don't need a linguistics background to read and enjoy. The book is divided into chapters like "Nouns" "Verbs" and "Adjectives," and each chapter surveys all the things other languages do with those categories. Her tone is light-hearted and she throws in little wry observations or literary jokes here and there. One small thing I didn't care for was the use of sidebars - not too many of them, not as bad as a "for Dummies" book, but still, I find sidebars so distracting.
December 28, 2007
this book is super nerdy which is why i loved it so much. it is eats shoots and leaves for language instead of punctuation. peppered with interesting sidenotes and illustrations, little compares languages and how each ones addresses different linguistic problems. i learned so many random tidbits about foreign languages and the origins of some english words (like 'eleven' and 'twelve'). i've probably forgotten most of them, but it was pretty fascinating. and despite the cerebral and academic subject matter, emminently readable.
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