This day, 3 April, in 1949, the First Congress of Chinese Women held in Beijing officially announced the establishment of the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation, with He...
Nanjing isn’t an English verb. It probably never will be.
Like Darjeeling or Wyoming, our brains probably have to work hard to stop thinking of these proper nouns as verbs. That “ing” ending is a red herring we all know better than to actually hear.
Shanghai, of course, is a verb. It’s a bit like “press-ganged”. If you’ve forgotten the meaning, go and check out the Charlie Chaplin film ‘Shanghaied’.
Japan is an English verb as well. If an object is japanned, it has been finished with a thick shiny lacquer;...
You’re familiar with the rule by now. Do not carry your own liquids allowed into the airport departure lounge.
… except that I was drinking an awesome green tea I’d brought with me from China. And no one was asking me to surrender my cup. How long, I wondered, could I keep this up?
Right up to the boarding gate, it turns out.
Actually, it’s quite the comfort to have tea, especially green, in one’s hand while being herded through an airport.
But why haven’t any of the other liquids in my...
We had just 1 hour minutes to fill four baskets. Any less, we were told, and the local tea master would reject the batch as a waste of effort.
So off we went to work on a hillside overlooking a road on the edge of Qiandaohu in neighbouring Zhejiang Province. With baskets attached to our bellies, our job was to pick those leaves from the bushes which were big enough to be called leaves but small enough to retain the desired pale green shade and moist texture.
It didn’t take...
The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.
It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists.
There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.
Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.
Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...
