Ten Most Difficult Words to Translate Sometimes even the finest translators come up against words that defy translation. Many languages include words that don’t have a simple counterpart in another language. When translators come across such a word, they usually describe it so that it makes sense in the target language. But some words pose more difficulty than others due to interesting cultural differences. Here are ten words that are particularly difficult to translate: Mamihlapinatapei From Yagan, the indigenous language of the Tierra del Fuego region of South America. Jayus From Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh. Prozvonit In both Czech and Slovak language, this word means to call a mobile phone only to have it ring once so that the other person would call back, allowing the caller not to spend money on minutes. Kyoikumama In Japanese, this word refers to a mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement.
Orwell was wrong: doublethink is as clear as languag... Everyone remembers Newspeak, the straitjacketed version of English from George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949). In that dystopia, Newspeak was a language designed by ideological technicians to make politically incorrect thoughts literally inexpressible. Fewer people know that Orwell also worried about the poverty of our ordinary, unregimented vocabulary. Too often, he believed, we lack the words to say exactly what we mean, and so we say something else, something in the general neighbourhood, usually a lot less nuanced than what we had in mind; for example, he observed that ‘all likes and dislikes, all aesthetic feeling, all notions of right and wrong… spring from feelings which are generally admitted to be subtler than words’. His solution was ‘to invent new words as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor-car engine’. This, he suggested in an essay titled ‘New Words’ (1940), might be the occupation of ‘several thousands of… people.’ Get Aeon straight to your inbox Video
Hobo Two hobos walking along railroad tracks after being put off a train. One is carrying a bindle. Etymology[edit] Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but soon or late he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels. History[edit] Cutaway illustration of a hobo stove, an improvised portable heat-producing and cooking device, utilizing air convection It is unclear exactly when hobos first appeared on the American railroading scene. In 1906, Professor Layal Shafee, after an exhaustive study, put the number of tramps in the United States at about 500,000 (about 0.6% of the U.S. population). The number of hobos increased greatly during the Great Depression era of the 1930s.[6] With no work and no prospects at home, many decided to travel for free by freight train and try their luck elsewhere. Life as a hobo was dangerous. Books[edit]
American Red Cross FR150 Microlink Solar-Powered, Self-Powered AM/FM/Weatherband Portable Radio with Flashlight and Cell Phone Charger (Red): Electronics Mad Men: “Long Weekend” · TV Club “Long Weekend” (season 1, episode 10; originally aired 9/27/2007) In which I’m looking through you (Available on Netflix.) At numerous times in “Long Weekend,” characters refer to being able to see through another person. Roger points out that the skin of Eleanor, one half of a pair of identical twins whom he’s sleeping with, is translucent, which means “see through.” “Long Weekend” is one of Mad Men’s clunkier episodes, lurching around a bit and never finding another gear. It’s also entirely possible I’m just saying this because of the long break I took between “Babylon” and “Red In The Face.” Fortunately, there’s plenty of other good stuff in “Long Weekend” to make up for how disjointed the episode feels at times. Yet Joan is lying to herself as well. The Roger material in the episode is also good. One of the clever tricks of this first season is that the series sets up Don as not a particularly good man but also shows plenty of other men who just fall short of him in certain ways.
Online Etymology Dictionary Creating The World's Greatest Anagram "It's supposed to look unlabored." ~ poet Christian Bök on anagrams If the poem above brings you some holiday cheer, know this: Those 56 lines are an anagram of 'Twas The Night Before Christmas. Yes, if you take Clement Parke Moore's famed yuletide poem, pretend the title is "The Night Before Christmas" (it's actually called "A Visit From St. Anagrams have a certain mysticism. There's a reason people believed "Elvis Lives". But those are the short ones. Canadian avant-garde poet Christian Bök has published some of the Internet's favorite anagrams. "It should look inevitable," he says. Creation reaction Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid In February of 2007, in the front window of a nondescript New York bookstore, the text pictured above appeared. "It is nothing short of perfect," Lexier says. There could be other permutations of Lexier's initial text, but Bök added his own "subsidiary constraints", a practice for which he's become popular in the avant-garde poetry world. Lego ogle Stasis assist
Hoboglyphs: Secret Transient Symbols & Modern Nomad Codes Morse code Chart of the Morse code letters and numerals.[1] Morse code is a method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment. The International Morse Code[1] encodes the ISO basic Latin alphabet, some extra Latin letters, the Arabic numerals and a small set of punctuation and procedural signals as standardized sequences of short and long signals called "dots" and "dashes",[1] or "dits" and "dahs". Because many non-English natural languages use more than the 26 Roman letters, extensions to the Morse alphabet exist for those languages. Each character (letter or numeral) is represented by a unique sequence of dots and dashes. The duration of a dash is three times the duration of a dot. Morse code is most popular among amateur radio operators, although it is no longer required for licensing in most countries. Development and history A typical "straight key." User proficiency
The Ears of the Wolf - Asymptote Honey My sister is alone on this side of the fence, standing on the red earth, under the noonday light. I am looking at her from next to the columns on the porch. She has done something forbidden and without hesitating for a second she has walked right up to the fence in order to show everybody (me, the silence of the garden) her limitless strength and seriousness. My sister is four years old. I am six. Thousands of bees from the neighbors' gardens, from the honeycombs at the tops of the silk cotton trees, from the guava trees, head for my sister's body that stands as still as a totem pole, defying the sun and the clouds of smoke, defying the entire tropics with her stillness and her serious little-girl smile. Used by permission of Brutas Editoras.
Linguistic Geography of the United States Traditionally, dialectologists have listed three dialect groups in the United States: Northern, Midland, and Southern--although some scholars prefer a two-way classification of simply Northern and Southern, and one may also find significant difference on the boundaries of each area. The map shown above represents a synthesis of various independent field studies this century. These are in chronological order: the Linguistic Atlas fieldwork begun under the direction of Hans Kurath in the 1930's; the informal but extensive personal observations of Charles Thomas in the 1940's; the DARE fieldwork of the 1960's under Frederic Cassidy; and the Phonological Atlas fieldwork of William Labov during the 1990's. Although it may seem that a great amount of data has been collected over a short time span, the shifts in American dialects this century have been rapid enough to outpace the data collection. The New England Dialects The New York Dialects The Great Lakes Dialects The Upper Midwest Dialects
Words of 2015 round-up Word of the Year season has closed with the selections of the American Dialect Society this past weekend, so it’s time to reflect on the different words of the 2015. The refugee crisis and gender politics have featured prominently in selections around the globe as well as the influence of technology. In the English-speaking world: Collins Dictionary named “binge watch” as their Word of 2015. Oxford Dictionaries selected the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. Dennis Baron selected the gender-neutral singular “they” as his Word of the Year. Quartz’s (unofficial) nomination for Word of the Year is also the singular “they”. The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s Word of the Year is “sharing economy”. Dictionary.com selected “identity”. Merriam-Webster selected the suffix “-ism”. Cambridge Dictionaries selected “austerity”. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) selected “content marketing”. Global Language Monitor selected “microaggression”. In New Zealand, Public Address selected “quaxing”.
Flyby | The blog of The Harvard Crimson Hundreds of high school prefrosh will be coming to campus this weekend, phones in hand, thumbs at the ready. In high school, texting was all about the abbreviations and acronyms. Cool texters were the ones who could throw around g2g, LOL, and idk without a second thought. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.