Switzerland finished first<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I immediately (and perhaps typically of a Swiss) worried that we hade been treated to kindly.\u00c2\u00a0 Aren’t we one of the foremost lovers of big cars?\u00c2\u00a0 Aren’t we also sprawling around urban centers and building up the landscape?\u00c2\u00a0 Aren’t we guilty of investing far too little in slow, manpowered transportation, with the result that fewer and fewer (aren’t you proud, Janet) children now bike to school?\u00c2\u00a0 Might not our ranking be due to our lack of fishing grounds to overfish, oil and coal to burn, and minerals to mine?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\nThe reason I had the time to read Newsweek lies in my being early at the Taoyuan Airport in Taiwan, getting on an earlier Cathay flight to Hong Kong on standby (a first for me, and fun to try out without being under pressure), and getting into the lounge here because my next flight is with Star Alliance (Cathay belongs to OneWorld).\u00c2\u00a0 My other options after a morning that consisted of receiving a gift of tea from our partners,\u00c2\u00a0of a demonstration that the customer said he loved and I thought was pretty terrible, and\u00c2\u00a0of a quick retrieval of my umbrella at the tailor’s would have been to loaf around Taipei for the unattractive time span of a few hours or sit at the Taoyuan Airport Starbucks for six hours…\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
But back to the turtles: all three options are correct.\u00c2\u00a0 The first is simplified Chinese, the second Japanese, and the third traditional Chinese.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s interesting to see how simplification in this case means an increased distance from accurate pictorial representation.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although the Kungfu Panda paragraph in the post before last was facetious, it spawned a question that stuck with me: Why do we call the animal “panda,” when the Chinese have an easy-to-transliterate word which could have given us “bearcat” and which doesn’t sound at all like “panda?” (It sounds like “xi\u00c3\u00b3ngm\u00c4\u0081o,” whatever that sounds like.) Merriam-Webster’s blames the French: “Etymology: French, perhaps from a language of the southeast Himalayas; Date: 1835.” I hate this unreliable free wireless.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I lose posts *because* I try to save intermediate steps.\u00c2\u00a0 Boo Cathay Pacific.\u00c2\u00a0 The loss allows me to restructure and stay on the language theme before switching to greener matters.\u00c2\u00a0 Which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}