This day, 17 March, in 2017, the concept of “building a community with a shared future for mankind” was written into a United Nations Security Council resolution...
If there’s one food that’s emblematic of everyday indulgence, that’s chocolate.
Delicious for most of us yet inextricably connected with fat, sugar (and caffeine, if you’re worried about that).
When my 4-year old daughter went for her second tooth-filling last month, the obvious culprit was chocolate. Yes, we are raising her in Shanghai, the saccharine city. And, yes, I should have instilled and enforced better brushing. But, rightly or wrongly, it was her fondness for chocolate that received the headline blame.
Dear readers, there may among you be some attempting to quit...
They call it “herbal medicine”. And in this house, this week, it’s everywhere.
I call it “horrible medicine”. But I actually quite like it.
It smells of fragrant-soil and it tastes like fragrant-soil-with-brown-sugar.
Apparently, it has an English name; Isatis Tinctoria. But, like the names for all those things popular only in China, that’s not really an English name.
The brew hasn’t caught on elsewhere; what Americans call root-beer is a completely different thing. But here it’s enormous. As I write, your local pharmacy is selling fast out.
There’s no scientific evidence that...
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...
Let me state that The Nanjinger has not paid for me to be here. Nanjing is far too far away and the expenses for such a glamorous patch could easily spiral beyond control. I write from Juan Les Pines on the French Riviera. You can almost skip a stone to Cannes in the west and Monaco to the East. Every town along here has significance to the grand tour, the lost generation or the jet set, but also to a contented local populace. This is still more French than...
