This day, 4 April, in 1985, Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom signed the Hong Kong Act 1985 to return the territory to Chinese sovereignty. The Act...
瓜子 (guazi) or “Melon Seed” is the name of an online used-car selling platform.
It’s an example of how brand conventions have evolved in China beyond fruits (Apple, Blackberry) to the names of dried food commodities (Xiaomi, Sesame, etc.) It’s also an example of a shift from branded physical products to services.
Actually, the subject of this month’s Strainer is not a tech startup or a financial service. It’s not even the humble melon seed itself (a fine Autumn snack); it’s a variety of green tea that is also named 瓜片...
The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word.
For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder.
This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...
It’s teenagers who enjoy it the most. It’s there in so many of the snacks they eat. It is a horrifying rottenness. They love it. They are wrong to love it.
Of course, many of these snacks of rottenness contain chilli; that fresh adventure for the young person. With alcohol, even coffee, still far on the horizon, the enjoyment of chilli carries an illicit charge and bragging rights.
And, of course, these snacks are heavily freighted with umami, the protein decoy. While adults somehow remain wary of this big-FMCG alchemy, the...
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...
