Labovian Sociolinguists take up carpeting after retiring.

[I took this photo while in Edinburgh last week. Unfortunately I think it has more to do with the shop being near the river Forth than anything to do with experiments about sociolinguistic variation.]

I thought I’d share this one while en route home. I took this photo at a town with good mountain views that attract a lot of tourist traffic. The slogan looked too well crafted to be an accident of poor English, so I wasn’t surprised when a quick bit of googling tuned up that it’s actually the slogan of Hooters bars in the USA… makes one even less inclined to eat there!

Here are, as promised, some baby goats.

The recent visit to the villages where Lamjung Yolmo is spoken was a great success. I spent a day learning how to make baskets, discovered than an empty corn cob is called a pìŋgu and got to see some great sunsets. There are a few more things I got up to that I’ll share over the next few weeks. 

Every time I see these chips in a shop I have to giggle - and wonder what ‘style cream’ is supposed to taste like. I finally got around to buying a packet just for the photograph.

It may look like a very simple type setting error, but there’s actually a reason why it would happen. There are a few flavours to chose from, and all of them are named for a country. So, off the top of my head, there’s also ‘Italian Tomato’ and ‘Indian Marsala.’ Only the ‘American’ flavour is a ‘style,’ that is, ‘in the manner of.’ Therefore it’s no surprise that someone parsing these packets would assume that ‘style’ is modifying “cream” and not ‘American.”

Even understanding the reason for the error doesn’t stop me from being amused every time. I’m sad to report that the chips do taste like sour cream and onion in American style, and not style cream, which I imagine would be a bit like eating hair product.

[Lauren’s currently in off in the hills of Nepal for field work. This post originally appeared on Lozguistics.]

I was browsing through photos of my last field trip and found this snap of a Lakeside restaurant in Pokhora. It’s a lovely example of a ‘sweet tooth fairy’ - where the middle word acts as a hinge for two separate phrases.

Thanks to Superlinguo buddy Speech Path. Annie for this one!