George > Recent Status Updates

恭喜发财！春节快乐！

"Yes, the character he'd written meant 'beautiful', but when Mrs. Wedderburn had embroidered it, she'd done it upside down, and the 'beautiful' now looked like the three characters 'big', 'king' and 'eight' - the 'big' standing in its head - which together mean 'big bastard'. [Mr. Ma] burst out laughing. "

Reading this and seeing how similar an experience they are having in London as I have had in Beijing is interesting. Like being stared at, registering at the police station... I'm sure I'll find more similarities the more I read.

"If one knows in one's heart something to be good or not, then that is quite sufficient! What's the point in saying it out loud? "

Aw man they're gonna use the old Wade-Giles romanisation for Chinese names. So I'm gonna stare at a name like Li Tzu-Jung and wonder what it would be in the modern Pinyin.

First time in a while reading a real book, instead of an ebook. Tally ho! #2017 #newyear#newme

"I've been working on it most of the afternoon (I told you wordplay is addictive) and the best I can come up with is 'Am I as stupid as you are?' which reads backwards as well as forwards but, alas, keeps the same sense in both directions. " :-(

"Often the names we know places by are nothing like the names the locals use. In Italian, it's not Florence but Firenze..." What! Well I'll be damned. A non English speaking country doesn't use the English form to spell their city names. Next you'll be telling me french people don't say Parissss and Germans don't say Munich.

"To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the Mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post."

Northern Ireland comes up a pleasing amount in these language books I've been reading lately. This one has the shibboleth of the northern Irish dialect that is: mate how do u say the letter 'h'?

It's definitely got the tone of 'man English is such a good language. Everyone should be speaking it. Not like Chinese where one syllable like yi can mean 215 different things. So confusing, right?? Or french and it's genders. A table is feminine? Haha what!' I find the oversimplification frustrating in parts.

Read some bad reviews of this book from actual linguists, due to a lot of errors in it. However I'll take this book as what not to do and enjoy it nonetheless.

Read some bad reviews of this book from actual linguists, due to a lot of errors in it. However I'll take this book as what not to do and enjoy it nonetheless.

"...[They] pioneered the linguistic study of of social networks with a study of three communities in Belfast. " Oh here we go. "When one youth tried to show off by talking in a somewhat affected way, his friend punched him and shouted:'Come on, you're not on television now, you know. '"