F.A.N.Y.P.A.C.K.E.

[SORRY for previously writing "the Economist" instead of "the Guardian" "-)…] Steven Collins' January 9 cartoon from the Guardian starts with a man's sudden displacement after he places a simple fast-food order: He ends up in a secret war room  — because simply failing to use an available Americanism is enough to enlist him in […]

"We shall fight on the Bloombergs"

Paul Krugman's latest Substack echoes Winston Churchill's famous 1940 speech: President Trump's remark about military intervention in the bond markets actually happened — here's a transcription in context: Q: Did you direct Secretary Bessent to intervene in the bond market? A: No. Not at all. No, he's a very capable man, he wanted to do […]

Caveman linguistics

Today's SMBC: The mouseover title: "I was trying to figure out why cavemen sometimes do and sometimes don't drop prepositions. Anyone have a theory?" The Aftercomic: If "cavemen" were early members of our species, and if their languages were like those of recent hunter-gatherer peoples, linguists' hypothesis about those languages would be somewhere between "just […]

Transliteration mystification

From the Wikipedia page on Pafnuty Chebyshev: The surname Chebyshev has been transliterated in several different ways, including Tchebichef, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev, Tschebyschef, Tschebyscheff, Čebyčev, Čebyšev, Chebysheff, Chebychov and Chebyshov (which provides the closest pronunciation in English to the correct pronunciation in old Russian). Chebychev is an erroneous mixture between English and French transliterations. In […]

"See me after class"?

Prescriptivist peeving has faded from public discourse, but UK politics recently brought us a blast from the past: @Conservatives red-penciled two incomplete sentences ("(I am) Absolutely thrilled…" and "(There is) lots to do…), which is a bit hypocritical since it's trivial to find similar things in xeets from Tory politicians, e.g. "(Do you) Want a better […]

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