The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the Mandarin Chinese language. The study is: “Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a),” Shuang […]
“Definitions of nonsense vary widely and often pay little attention to cultural context or the phenomenology of reading.” – explains Professor Alan Levinovitz of James Madison University, US in a Sept. 2017 article for the journal Comparative Literature. “After surveying the problems with these definitions, the article then redefines nonsense experientially, that is, as the […]
And now, the traditional Chinese translation that you may have been waiting for: The Ig Nobel Prizes, by Marc Abrahams, ISBN 9789869189781.
It was somewhere around the 4th century BC that Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou raised the idea of ‘The Usefulness of Uselessness’. Master Zhuang pointed out that objects (or information) which appear at first sight to be quite useless, can, on further investigation (and/or at a later date, and/or at another place) sometimes turn out to […]