The new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Bookshop|Amazon) is a fascinating history about the colorful characters who attempted to reinvent the complicated Chinese script to adapt it for use with modern technology. It’s by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale University. This is part of a complete episode.
Whitney from Providence, Rhode Island, shares a funny story about her toddler’s misunderstanding of the word Shoo, as in Shoo it away. It has nothing to do with the shoe you wear on your foot! This is part of a complete episode.
A Dallas, Texas, woman and her friends often use the expression All the things to mean something like and whatnot or as a way to signal a kind of mutual understanding, suggesting something similar to the phrase you know. This sense probably comes...
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