Asian English; Apple Origin; ELI; MacAurthur Grants

Bapopik at AOL.COM Bapopik at AOL.COM
Wed Sep 25 11:15:47 UTC 2002


   Greetings from Hong Kong.
   I have one day tomorrow (Thursday) before I leave for the airport at 7 p.m....A response from Hong Kong University is attached.  Maybe I'll just try the local library here and see if they have anything there.

APPLE ORIGIN--Dr. Barrie Juniper, reader of plant sciences at Oxford University, is lecturing at 7 p.m. here on the origin of the apple.  Juniper says a small berrylike plant originated in China 10,000 years ago.  A little blurb is in today's SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST.  Does Juniper have a magazine article or a book on this?

WORD OF THE DAY--From the Sept. 25 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST:
_IDD_ (pronounced eye-dee-dee) _verb_, _anagram_: I D-rink and D-ial.  As in: "Jeeze, where do all your wages go?"  "Oh, you know I have this English boyfriend and well, IDD."

ELI--The same newspaper, business section, has "Equity-linked instruments, known as ELIs."  Just thought OED and you Yale Elis out there would be interested.  Check the usual databases.  The headline for this story is "ELTs offer route to profits in stable environment."  Yep, EL_T_.  DOES ANY NEWSPAPER, ANYWHERE, HAVE SOMEONE TO READ OVER STORIES BEFORE THEY ARE PRINTED??

ASIAN ENGLISH--THE ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL, 25 September 2002, pg. 1:
_Taiwan's Trash Haulers_
_Deliver English Lessons_
_While Making the Rounds_
   _Across Asia, a Desire for English_
   _Spawns Unusual Teaching Methods_
(...)
   In South Korea and China, some have opted for surgery to give their children an edge in learning English.  Plastic surgeons in Seoul and Shanghai have on some occasions agreed to snip the tissue under young tongues, in hopes of making them more limber and better able to pronounce tricky English consonants.  Reports that the practice is becoming more widespread can't be confirmed, but word has traveled anyway.  "We've received several calls from people who've read about this surgery and want us to do it," says Dr. Chang Shyue-yih, chief of the ear, nose and throat department in Taipei Veterans General Hospital.  "But we won't do it.  The only way to improve pronunciation is to practice."
(Yikes!  Check the Dow Jones database for the entire article--ed.)

HYPHENATION HORRORS--From the airport in Lhasa, Tibet:
ATTENTION
PASSENGERS ARE NOT ALL
OWED TO POCK SOME ARTI
CLES IN CHECKED BAGGAG
E, SUCH AS CASH, VALUABL
E NEGOTIABLE SECURITIE
S, JEWELRY AND OTHER VA
LUABLES.  THE CARRIERS W
ILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR
THE LOSS OF THEM.

MACARTHUR GRANTS--Boy, my letter to the MacArthur people was well received.  The MacArthur winners were announced in today's newspaper.  For the entire history of the awards program, no member of the American Dialect Society or American Name Society has won.  They've given money to other people who deal with language--poets, novelists, critics, reporters.  But screw those ADS people!  They take home too much!
   If MacArthur wants some personal statistics--in my entire life, I haven't made enough money to even buy a computer.  I make money when people who love me die.  I judge parking tickets for a living.  Round trips to Chicago to solve the "Windy City" and trips across the country and the world (to record cuisine and English words) are not free.  And I think I lost everything in the stock market this week.
   If I'd gotten anything I'd share it with the ADS, but that's never going to happen.



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