I was surfing Youtube, and I came across this video, which summarizes what I said previously about the word fuck. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIejs55TL1A] My favourite line from the video – “out of all of the English words that begin with the letter F, fuck is the only word that is referred to as “the F word”.” (Grins)…
It’s certainly heartening to see a two-year-old grasp the concept of transitive verbs, particularly one that involves animate agent and undergoer. Here’s what happened: Me : (nibble on niece’s chubby arm) Who bite mei-mei? (dimunitive for younger sister; which technically is an endearment for my niece.) Niece: Yi-yi (endearment for aunt) Me: Yi-yi bite who?…
Recently I was told to not swear so much, particularly using certain “four-lettered words”. I don’t see why we can’t use profanities. Does it change who we fundamentally are? Does spouting fuck and shit make us bad people? From a linguistic point of view, for the lack of a better word, that’s bollocks. Words in…
That day I was trying to irritate my friends by speaking to them in entirely deictic terms. So I did you know, then. They were like, what? And I sort of “that” and “this” and kinda did things. I love deictic terms; they are so ambiguous. They can refer to all things (i.e. no fixed…
That day I was in Semantics in Generative Grammar tutorial, and one group was presenting their answers to the class, and a girl blurted out, “sorry, I can’t read this in English.” Which was quite funny considering we were analyzing an English sentence. However that comment made me feel like Charles Eppes from Numb3rs, how…
So I’m writing this 2800-word essay on “The Chinese Obsession with Innards: An NSM approach to Chinese set phrases”. I picked out 3 set phrases (chengyu) to analyze, all involving the innards, such as the intestines or the liver or both. The one above is a gloss of 肝肠寸断, which literally means the liver and…
And what does leh mean anyway? Trying to coerce the addressee to agree/empathize? A (playcheat) NSM approach: I think this: It is good if you think like me It is good if you think like what I say So I say this I say this so you will think like what I say -brainburn- Oh…
(backdated post, I know) because I saw subject-verb agreement on a graffiti on a bus. It’s so heartening to see grammatical young people after all. (And since this was a graffiti placed on a public transport, I don’t see why I can’t take a picture of it and place it on the net, since it’s…
I saw this sign in the university a couple days ago and I went “What?! Right under the noses of the grammar sticklers in Arts?!” Seriously, someone explain to me the function of the hyphen in this case. Is it some norm I do not know about? PS: The sign has been removed today, although…
That day I came home and when I entered the house, my mother, who was in the kitchen and couldn’t see me, asked, “who’s there?”. To that I responded, “me”. Then it dawned on me how this interaction would have looked entirely odd on paper, without a given context. It will look as though I…
