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Recycled bezoar

From Michael David Johnson: I found this sign (image below) on Queen's Road West near Exit A of the Sai Ying Pun MTR in Hong Kong. The shop was closed but I think it's a Chinese Medicine shop. Google gives me no results for "recycled bezoar" or "bezoar reciclado," so I seek your knowledge. Bad […]

Number taboos in a Chinese elevator

This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis: It's immediately obvious that floors 4, 14, and 24 are missing because: sì 4 || sǐ 死 ("death") The absence of 18 is not so easy.  It's because: 18 || shíbā céng dìyù 十八层地狱 ("eighteen levels of hell") Note that the word for "level [of hell]", viz., céng 层, is the same […]

"You scalar implicature!"

Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Oddly enough, the hard part was picking jargon NOT to use." The AfterComic: I'm always happy to see Linguistics singled out for praise, but in fairness, technical terminology works pretty well from whatever domain: Exocrine secretion! Weak anisotropic reflection! Torridonian alluvium! Conjugacy-closed subgroup! Homotopical nilpotency! Simplicial foliation! Hypersoft bijection! Facticious akataphasia! […]

Beamer

Someone recently wrote to tell me that he had: …constructed a linguistic theoretical framework based on the principle of "one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters or symbols and their semantics", aiming to explore the mathematical basis of language symbol structure, semantic relationships, and context adaptation. It was a longish communication and all in Chinese except for […]

The humanities as preparation for the End Times

The first four panels of today's SMBC: The rest of it: The mouseover title: "Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors." The aftercomic: PennSound isn't exactly a "poetry journal", but it's Facebook page has 4.5k followers, which is certainly more than the […]

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