For Changing Queens, Lessons in Talk of the Streets. “Now, at 85, he has embarked on his last great linguistic effort. His progress has been maddeningly slow; at one point, Mr. Sygal approached ‘dozens’ of Chinese people, he said, in a fruitless attempt to translate the word ‘ka-ching,’ a term he had seen in a headline in The New York Post and assumed to be Chinese. He hopes that he will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin by the time he is 95.”
(I suspect the comment about the forth tone is hyperbole, but I liked it nonetheless.)
