Posts Tagged ‘language’

The Kyrgyzstan Revolt Is What Happens When Citizens Are Denied Vowels

The explosion in tensions in Kyrgyzstan this week showed how susceptible governments are if they oppress citizens and command a weak police presence. We have all learned that you can’t keep citizens from the vowels they deserve. I’m not exactly sure where Kyrgyzstan is located. I tried searching for it on Google Maps, but instead [...]

Share

Do Foreign Umbrella Salesmen in New York Always Yell At You Because They Don’t Have a Word for Umbrella?

Whenever it rains in New York, the street vendors come out in full force to hawk umbrellas, but I could never figure out why they were more aggressive with their sales pitch than any other person along Times Square. The knockoff wallet dude is always chill, sitting along the sidewalk playing dominoes with cell phone [...]

Share

Angry Girls Are Like Mandarin Because The Inflection Gives the Same Words Different Meanings

People knock Mandarin for being a tricky language because the emphasis on a certain syllable can make a word’s meaning be either “I love you,” or, “Your mother’s a whore” (although I don’t know what the Chinese is for, “I love your whore mother”). It’s a tonal language with a lot of sounds and vocal [...]

Share

Grammatically Correct Arguments

I’ve found that it’s very difficult to be in fight with someone where you’re yelling at him/her in a pure rage of fury and at the same time sustain correct grammar and syntax. It’s an art, really. Either you’re going to sound intelligent and lose the anger, or you’re going to sustain being mad, but [...]

Share

Wii's Japanese Translation

I was watching a baseball game with a Japanese hitter at the bat and the advertisement behind home plate switched to one for Nintendo Wii. Thing was, the Japanese translation required four Japanese characters to express Wii. This is beyond me, because it takes one Japanese character to spell out an entire sentence for the [...]

Share

Don't Place Foreign Objects in Toilet

I flew from L.A. back home to New York yesterday (as a side note words don’t exist for me to begin trying to describe how perfect, content and comfortable I feel in this real city versus the bland nothingness of the west coast). But that has little to do with this post. I went into [...]

Share

Water Polo

Surely water polo is the most inaccurately-named sport in existence. If the game wasn’t in the water it would not be polo, which is what the name implies. If anything it would be handball, so just call it water handball. For that matter, why not just call it waterball? It kind of sounds like the [...]

Share

Fearful Mascots

I was thinking about the MLS team San Jose Earthquakes and the NHL Colorado Avalanche, and it really bothered me that these mascots are things that are actually very terrifying to the local fans and residents. I’m all in favor of having a mascot be something local, especially when it’s tied into local lore. The [...]

Share

The Word "Priceless"

I’ve always had a problem with the word Priceless. I don’t feel it should be the word to describe something of extraordinary value, but rather should be a synonym for worthless. Take the word tasteless, for example. When you say that a joke is tasteless, you’re saying it’s bad. You’re not saying that it’s so [...]

Share