Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, Pu'Er (aka Pu-Erh, although the H is superfluous [in Pinyin it is just Er so I don't know who added it] and adds no information regarding pronunciation) is not pronounced Poo-Air, but rather Poo-Ar (like the letter R) in Chinese ( Read more... )

( I'm a sucker for this type of thing )

I learned two new French words from Monica last night, both of which mean roughly the same thing: truc and machin. They both mean something like "thing" or "thingy".

It came up because we were talking about the cedille and nobody knew what it was called except me. Monica (who speaks fluent French because her family is Belgian) said she always ( Read more... )

There's a whole Wikipedia article! Still can't find the part about slippers, though.  Apparently the sound, "tuo1xie2", is bad.  I'll investigate later.

I was listening to the Lagaan soundtrack for the first time in a really long while, and I decided to look up who was singing in "Radha Kaise Na Jale". Turns out it is Asha Bhosle, which is kind of crazy because the girl she is depicting is supposed to be maybe 20 years old, and she totally sounds 20, but Bhosle was 67 when the song was recorded. ( Read more... )

I learned this on the World in Words podcast the other day: Grass Mud Horse. Fuckin' awesome.

I'm re-reading The Dispossessed and it is fucking awesome. I don't often re-read books anymore ( Read more... )

There are also some Israeli relatives staying at Adam's mom's house. They are from Tel Aviv. I've learned some more words in Hebrew ( Read more... )

I've been trying to think of regional expressions that are Canadian or Vancouverian or Pacific Northwest-ian. (Other than "hoser" and "take off, eh", neither of which I ever said unless I was quoting Bob and Doug.) I found an interesting list of Canadian slang. (Also here.) I didn't know some of these words were specifically Canadian, like ( Read more... )

A lady named 水平 (Shui Ping, which means "Water Peace") came in today. Chinese names are cool. Shui Ping asked if I had a Chinese name, so I asked my boss what my name sounds like in Mandarin, and she said when she first heard it, what immediately came into her head was "马脑" ("ma3 nao3"), which means "Horse Brains". LOLOLOL AWESOME ( Read more... )