旧記事(kotoba news)
kotobaに関する気になるトピックを短期連載で紹介していきます。
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- 2020年06月26日 『Hamburger』
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Hamburgers— we might vaguely sense there was Hamburg, a town in Germany, and then there was hamburger and nowadays there are fish burger, sawdust burger, eggplant burger. Burger is a patty of something and that’s what we think. The word used to be hamburger steak. The idea was that this brown, chopped-up, unhealthy meat that tastes good was something that had been come up with in Hamburg which was hamburger steak. So here is a whole new noun.
By John McWhorter, Ph.D., Columbia University
The Great Courses Daily
June 24, 2020
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- 2020年06月23日 『macho』
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「(筋肉・体型等で)男らしさを誇示する」
広告の言葉とジェンダーとの関わりについて、私たちはさらに理解を深めていく必要がありそうです。
Job ad cuts macho words to flush out female recruits
Are you a confident sewage champion who can see off the competition to land your dream job? If the answer is yes, you are probably a man.
When Thames Water used combination of the words "confident", "competition", and "champion" in a job posting, it found that an overwhelming number of applicants were male.
This, the company concluded, was nothing to do with the responsibilities of the role advertised including treating sludge and sampling effluent but more to do with the language used in recruitment.
Women, they found, were just as keen to work with sewage as men. However, when the advertisements were posted last year seeking maintenance staff for sewage plants, only 8 per cent of respondents were women.
THE TIMES (June 23 2020)
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- 2020年06月18日 『evolutionary roots』
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「進化のルーツ」
叫び声や笑い声、またそのほかの声を発することで、人間以外の哺乳類生物の感情をどのくらい理解できるでしょうか。
Charles Darwin wrote in 1872 that screams, laughter and other vocal expressions have evolutionary roots making them common to different species of mammals (Adam Sage writes).
A Dutch study published yesterday suggests that he was probably right and that people can understand much of what other primates are saying.
Researchers asked 3,450 people to listen to 155 sounds made by 66 chimpanzees in varying contexts, such as having sex, fighting or finding food. They had to say whether the vocalisations signalled positive or negative feelings, and to evaluate whether the apes were worked up or not. On the whole they got it right, suggesting that people understand what chimpanzees mean when they hoot at the discovery of a large food source or scream at being attacked by a rival.
THE TIMES (June 18 2020)
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- 2020年06月15日 『Pets』
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「ペット、愛玩動物」
自宅で犬や猫を飼っている方も多いと思いますが、この"pet(s)"という語そのものはどこからやってきたのでしょうか。
My children frequently laugh at my interest in etymology. "Yes, yes, Dad," goes up the cry. "I'm sure it came from the Latin for something." Another parenting failure. Yet the understanding of where a word comes from helps me to make sense of the world; it is like cracking a little bit of the code that surrounds us.
Still, a mystery can be a happy event, too. So I am here to tell you that we do not know where the word "pet" comes from, even though the idea of a domesticated animal seems to have been around for millennia. The word existed in a dialect in Scotland and northern England in the 16th century, but before that, nobody knows. (The use in northern England of the term "pet" to mean "darling" is similarly obscure.)
THE SUNDAY TIMES (June 14 2020, by Stig Abell)
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- 2020年06月11日 『stardom』
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「スターダム、スターの地位」
日本では将棋の藤井聡太七段が数年前に登場し、最年少でのタイトル挑戦で話題になっていますが、チェスの世界でも未来のスターが早くも頭角を表したようです。
In a flat on Manhattan's Lower East Side yesterday, a nine-year-old boy stepped away briefly from an online chess game to field a question about his career.
"I want to be a grandmaster by the age of 11 or 12," said Tanitoluwa Adewumi, the youngest child of a family of refugees who fled Nigeria three years ago after they were targeted by the jihadist group Boko Haram.
Landing in New York City just over two years ago, Tanitoluwa began learning to play chess. Last year he won the New York State chess championship in his age division, lugging the trophy to the homeless shelter in Manhattan where the family were living at the time.
The child refugee had triumphed over children from New York's most elite private schools, players with lengthy records and private tutors.
THE TIMES (June 10 2020)
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- 2020年06月04日 『haunts』
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「たまり場」
17世紀(1600年〜)にはすでにロンドンにもコーヒーショップがありました。しかし、当時はコーヒーよりもアルコールやタバコなどがよく売れていたとの分析が出ているそうです。
They were the haunts of great thinkers such as Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke and gave birth to the London stock market and Lloyd's of London.
Yet, contrary to popular assumptions, it wasn't caffeine that fuelled the buzz of London's Restoration-era coffee houses. Analysis reveals that coffee itself made up a small part of sales, compared with alcohol, tobacco and food.
THE TIMES (June 4 2020)
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- 2020年06月01日 『Zoom fatigue』
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Zoomによるオンライン会議が日本でも話題ですが、いわゆる「Zoom疲れ」はイギリスでも課題になっているようです。
You can't look someone in the eye on Zoom. And yet at the same time, all eyes are continuously on you arrayed in a gallery like a low resolution University Challenge team. Worse, among that gallery, delayed by the same millisecond lag, is a video of yourself.
Is it any wonder, then, that people find telemeeting more socially exhausting than real meeting?
Or, as Linda Kaye, senior lecturer in psychology at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, puts it, "The term 'Zoom fatigue' is the buzzword."
THE TIMES (June 1 2020)
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- 2020年05月28日 『precursor』
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先駆者;(生物)先駆体
イギリスのPG Tips社の広告に登場するチンパンジーの舌鼓には、「紅茶がおいしい」という意味ではなく、人間の言語に通じる秘密がある…という話題です。
When the PG Tips chimps smacked their lips, viewers might have thought they were merely appreciating the tea (Tom Whipple writes).
If so they would have missed the most significant fact: that the chimps were smacking at a frequency of 2-7Hz, using an orofacial precursor to human speech.
Scientists have shown that the speed which our nearest evolutionary relatives engage in lip-smacking matches that of human mouth movements during conversation. "It is exactly the signature you see if you looked at my lips open and close right now", Adriano Lameira, from the University of Warwick, said. "This is exciting."
THE TIMES (May 28 2020)
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- 2020年05月21日 『downgrade』
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動詞として、「格下げをする」。イギリスの公共放送、BBC 4(ニュース、ドラマ、コメディ、科学、歴史等幅広い内容の番組を提供するチャンネル)が「格下げ」して定期購読用チャンネルになるかもしれない、という報道です。
BBC Four could be transformed into a "Netflix for the arts" subscription service for international viewers while being mothballed in the UK.
The BBC said that it was "exploring potential commercial opportunities" for the culture channel abroad, despite confirming plans to downgrade it into a repeats station in Britain to save money.
THE TIMES (May 21 2020)
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- 2020年05月18日 『plot』
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(小説、劇などの)筋、構想。またはその構想をたてること(動詞形もある)。
世界的に著名な作家のアガサ・クリスティーですが、ある有名なノルウェーの作家からplotを借用したのではないかという疑惑が指摘されたようです。
Agatha Christie may have borrowed heavily from a famous Norwegian author in the plotting of one of her best-known murder mysteries.
Lucy Moffatt, a British translator living in Norway, has noted the striking similarity between the plot device used in Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and that used in an early English magazine translation of Stein Riverton's story Jernvognen (The Iron Chariot).
THE TIMES (May 18 2020)
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- 2020年05月14日 『"X Æ A-12"』
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It was announced this week that Elon Musk's new baby was to be called X Æ A-12; X for the unknown variable, Æ (ai) meaning love in the fictional Elvish language or artificial intelligence, and A-12 being Musk's favourite aircraft that has great speed but is non-violent. No idea how it's pronounced, but I'm going with "Zaya Twelve".
THE TIMES (May 12 2020, by Sara Tor (from Notebook))
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- 2020年02月24日 『‘Last Whispers’』
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Dying Languages Cry Out in ‘Last Whispers’
Lena Herzog’s mixture of enigmatic film and immersive sound evokes a global crisis of linguistic disappearance. She calls her work “Last Whispers” “an oratorio for vanishing voices, collapsing universes and a falling tree.”
NY Times
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- 2020年02月16日 『The Coptic Magical Papyri』
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Our goal is to advance the study of the corpus of Coptic “magical texts” – manuscripts written on papyrus, as well as parchment, paper, ostraca and other materials, and attesting to private religious practices designed to cope with the crises of daily life in Egypt. There are about five hundred of these texts which survive, dating to between the third and twelfth centuries of the common era. The largest published collection to-date, Ancient Christian Magic (Marvin Meyer & Richard Smith, 1994), contains only about one hundred of these texts – about a fifth of the total number – while the remainder of those published are scattered in over a hundred books and articles, accessible to and known by only a few specialists.
http://www.coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/
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- 2020年02月13日 『 Crackdown on Foreign Funding』
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Harvard and Yale Ensnared in Education Dept. Crackdown on Foreign Funding
The department told the Ivy League universities to hand over records on millions of dollars in gifts, grants and contracts from foreign countries, including China, Iran and Russia.
NY Times Wednesday,Feb.12,2020
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- 2020年02月10日 『Reaches Bleak Milestone』
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The coronavirus epidemic in China surpassed a grim milestone on Sunday with a death toll that exceeds that of the SARS outbreak 17 years ago.
NY Times Feb.9,2020
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- 2020年02月09日 『Trumpification』
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On Friday, the White House announced that it was transferring Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified during the House impeachment hearings, out of the National Security Council. The move is unsettling, petty and vindictive. But it’s not a surprise: The dismissal is just one part of a campaign by the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to trumpify one of the most powerful and important institutions in government.
NY Times opinion Feb.7,2020
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- 2020年01月27日 『the most commonly spoken language in every US state』
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What is the most common language in every state excluding English and Spanish?
The US Census Bureau's American Community Survey annually asks more than 1 million Americans questions about their lives, families, and backgrounds. One question asks respondents what language they mainly speak in their homes.
a wide variety of languages. German is the most commonly spoken non-English, non-Spanish language in nine states, with French most common in six states and D.C. Vietnamese was the most common language in six states.
Busines Insider tabluations of 2017 American Community Survey IPUMS data
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-the-most-common-language-in-every-state-map-2019-6?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sf-bi-science&fbclid=IwAR1JumBArk_Wo3QUj3CzIPeF0IevaIZ-zQ0gFXk34LI1URTMGR0lnzNWiVU
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- 2020年01月23日 『佩戴口罩的控制措施(Pèidài kǒuzhào de kòngzhì cuòshī)』
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武漢市政府 決定在公共場所實施佩戴口罩的控制措施.實施範圍包括飯館、酒店、影劇院、體育場、商場等.
https://twitter.com/PDChinese
qing goumai Miànmó ba
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- 2020年01月19日 『 “(my) pronouns” “they”』
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The American Dialect Society voted for “(my) pronouns” as its Word of the Year (2019) and singular “they” as its Word of the Decade (2010-2019).
Pronouns, along with conjunctions and prepositions, are generally considered a “closed class” – a group of words whose number rarely grows and whose meanings rarely change.
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- 2020年01月18日 『se couchent en signe de protestation』
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Arrivés devant le palais de justice de #Strasbourg, où ils ont déposé un cercueil, les #pompiers se couchent en signe de protestation.
--Service d'alertes des DNA - Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace.