Sunday, January 25, 2009

I Fan Chai


Woke up way too early but found two things that made it all worthwhile:
  1. On my box of Tazo decaf chai it says: "DID YOU KNOW? The word 'chai' means both 'tea' in Hindi and 'living' in Hebrew. Mere coincidence or evidence of inscrutable grand design?" Oh, clearly the latter!
  2. Everybody knows you can friend somebody on Facebook. But tonight I learned that you can also "fan" someone - i.e. become a fan. Specifically, there's a blurb that says "World's Favorite Novelist - Let us know what you think. Fan his page and post on his wall." (It took me a while to figure it out but the world's favorite novelist is John Grisham. I like his stuff, but not enough to fan him.)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Verb Appreciation Club

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=49953791999&ref=ts

Mr. Verb said...

An appreciation club? Oh, how nice. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

Hold on one second here ... not to ruin a good joke, but the beverage is pronounced with [tʃ] and 'life' is with [x] (or maybe [ħ] or something). And even the orthographic point doesn't quite work – both forms are transliterated from other alphabets.

Sigh, maybe the Tazo people just don't care.

Anonymous said...

Yes, and if "chai" means "tea," then why does Starbucks insist on calling it "chai tea"?

Adam Ussishkin said...

Thanks for the clarification, Joe! Yes, in Hebrew the word for 'life' is pronounced with an initial (historical) pharyngeal (in most dialects of Modern Hebrew it's actually pronounced as the voiceless velar fricative [x]).

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Adam. This is one of those words where I've heard monolingual English speakers use a velar fricative pronunciation. It seems like, parallel to the proper name Bach.

The Ridger, FCD said...

Did you see Frank and Ernest yesterday? "Tai Chi with Chai Tea"!

Mr. Verb said...

Wow. Maybe that's living the high [xai]?