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Today at work: the military guy who has quite good English told me that he was very busy as our school is being observed next week by administrators. He then told me, “I’m busy to die.”

While I originally thought he might have mispronounced “today,” he obviously knows that word… I believe he was trying to say “我忙死了,” a Mandarin resultative construction which could be translated “I’m busy to the extent that I will die.” Obviously this is not literal… V+死了 compounds are a common form of exaggeration. It was a neat instance of grammatical transfer, though.

An email from Bailey:

I heard Steven Pinker on NPR! Remind me to tell you about it (unless my excitement is not mutual). I wanted to call in and say “thanks so much for making linguistics accessible and interesting to us laypeople, I love the work that you do; my boyfriend recently received his Master’s in linguistics, but the stuff he works on is syntax in Mandarin Chinese, and it’s completely impenetrable.” But I didn’t. <3

Alas, this is the life I live.