"You do it your way, and I'll do it mine"

   

"Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs" goes the song, and recently a new sign popped up at the Louvre Museum in France. The sign, written only in Chinese, "forbids people from urinating or defecating wherever they want.”

     Why was this sign put in place? There doesn't seem to have been a particular incident related to this sign, but one reason may be that some Chinese don't have the same views on their bodily functions as many in the west do. For example, many Chinese parents don't put their babies in diapers, something that, if you were to do in Europe or the US, would get you stares at the least, or visits from the police at worst. Instead, they prefer to put their children in split pants, a type of pants that have an open crotch, and let them relieve themselves in any open area they can find. Also, to many Chinese, it is perfectly normal to spit just about anywhere. Because of this, some tried to curb public spitting before the Olympics started in 2008, so as not to damage China's image to those visiting from abroad.

     These differences in cultural issues, and the problems they have caused, have not gone unnoticed by Chinese officials. Recently China passed a new tourism law. The law will give travel agencies the authority to penalize tourists who violate social ethics. Wang Yang, a deputy prime minister from China, said that while many countries had welcomed tourists from his country, the quality of some of them left something to be desired. Yang said: "They speak loudly in public, carve characters on tourist attractions, cross the road when the traffic lights are still red, spit anywhere and some other uncivilized behavior. It damages the image of the Chinese people and has a very bad impact."

    While the Chinese are working on the image problem their tourists have caused as they travel, they weren't the first nation to have a negative association with their tourists. For a large portion of the recent past, Americans have been seen as the ignorant tourists. There must be something about gaining superpower status that signals the worst behaving members of that society to go out into the world.





1. http://qz.com/88334/china-is-starting-to-get-embarrassed-about-its-tourists-obnoxious-behavior-abroad/
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1f5ry9/china_is_starting_to_get_embarrassed_about_its/
3. http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-embarrassed-by-its-tourists-2013-5
4. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-starting-embarrassed-tourists-obnoxious-194019907.html
5. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51379838/how-pg-brought-the-diaper-revolution-to-china/
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/world/asia/17manners.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&em&;ei=5087%0A=;en=95c25c162ed63e15;ex=1177041600
7. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2j9P9gh0ML3Y6GUJVh59KT8y5GAFgaOEYWwv0_V4hkJ_JrtrvEDyfr5nGpdVfd5NZ8vvtelKmqvEDtZknWHTKUgePjerJge1jGQsbE-yodoJs32onylyXixthuifQVsmeiteEbzmAZK-/s1600/road-signs-and-traffic-light.png

It's a question of instinct

     I saw this on reddit the other day and couldn't help but share. One of my major problems when it comes to English is that I can't remember all of the rules most of the time. Which is embarrassing because I am a native speaker and, other than a few snippets of Spanish, it is the only language I know.

    However, not all my grammatical hope is lost. Sometimes I can tell just by looking sometimes that I have made an error somewhere. It doesn't work all the time, and thank God I have spell check, or it would be infinitely worse. I couldn't tell you why something may be wrong, but a lot of the time, it will just look off. When I saw the picture below, I took a little bit of solace in the fact that I may not be the only one whose brain works like that.

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1dl2nt/this_is_english_basically/

"Yo yo-yo"

     One of the problems with the English language is that it does not have a gender neutral pronoun. Over the years, many have tried to come up with something to use instead of the standard him or her. Back in the 1880s, lawyer Charles Converse proposed "thon", a mix of the words "that" and "one". Other words put forward to fill the gap have been "nee", "heesh", "huh". While none of these ever caught on, a new contender for the gender neutral crown has come from some children in Baltimore. These children have begun using the word "yo" in the place of "he" or "she" to fill the gender neutral gap.

      Margaret Troyer, a former teacher, published a paper showing that "yo" was replacing "he" and "she" in every day usage for many of her students. Troyer first noticed the change while she was teaching children in a Baltimore-area middle school. From the NPR article on the story:

"Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example."
So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them to fill in the captions — many of the cartoon characters were androgynous.
Troyer found the kids used "yo" instead of "he" or "she" when they didn't know the gender of the character. But they also used "yo" as a substitute even when they did know the gender.
"They said things like, 'Yo put his foot on the desk.' So it was clear from this that they knew it was a male person, but they were just using 'yo' to refer to the person," says Troyer. "And then in other sentences they would use 'yo' to refer to a female as well."

     While the adoption of a new gender neutral pronoun is unusual, Christine Mallinson, a sociolinguist at the University of Maryland, isn't quite sure if it will stick around. "It'll be interesting to see whether they keep that usage as they become adults. Do they keep that in the workplace? If that's the case, it might persist," says Mallinson. "But sometimes slang or linguistic innovations in middle or high school get dropped out as people become adult users of English."

     What do you think? Do you think "yo" is here to stay? Did you have any slang or made up words that you or your friends came up with in school that you don't use anymore? Let us know in the comments!





1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/25/178788893/yo-said-what
2. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/Us_yoyo_national_2a.jpg

Well, that's to the point

     The German language continues to amaze me with the words they can come up with. They seem to have a knack for combining sometimes complex or long ideas in to just one word, see my previous post about the German word Kummerspeck. Recently, I discovered another interesting German word whose meaning, unlike Kummerspeck, can be very easily deduced, even by a non German speaker.

     The English phrase "birth control pill" directly translates directly to the German word Antibabypille. It would seem that who ever came up with the word wanted to make sure there was no miscommunication about what you were being given.











1. http://en.bab.la/dictionary/german-english/antibabypille
2. http://www.dict.cc/deutsch-englisch/Antibabypille.html
3. http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bxr7p/til_the_german_word_for_birth_control_pill_is/
4. http://translate.google.com/#en/de/birth%20control%20pill
5. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibabypille

"Mother may I..."

     In modern English, most people phrase the request for permission to to have or do something by saying "Can I have...?" or "Can I do...?". While this is the generally accepted method, there are those who would say that it is incorrect. For them, the only way to correctly ask if you have permission for a certain action is to say, "May I...?". Which of these is correct?

     For many, from a strict grammatical point of view the correct way to ask if you have permission is to say "May I...". Technically, when you ask using the "Can" form, you are not asking for someone else's permission, but wither or not you have the ability to have a certain item or perform a particular action. For example, when you ask, "Can I go to the bathroom", what you are actually asking is if you have the ability to go to the bathroom, not if you have permission to go.

     However, as the language has evolved, it is becoming more and more accepted to use "Can I...?" in place or "May I...?". According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, you are fine in using "Can I...?" in normal everyday speech. However, if you wish to appear more formal or polite, the older "May I...?" should be used.




1. http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/can-or-may
2. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/can-versus-may2.aspx