The travails of etymology

March 7, 2026

Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:

Add items until your shopper checks out

by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense

To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]

but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:

4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Movies and tv, Toys and games | 7 Comments »

Stripes

March 6, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 3/5, in which the effusive Cat in the Hat of Dr. Seuss / Theodor Geisel meets the elusive Waldo of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? Under the sign of red stripes, in two styles (Wayno’s title: “Stylistic Differences”):


The Cat stands out, Waldo blends in (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Night life

March 6, 2026

About the night of  3/4-5, last night, different from all other nights in my experience, in its schedule and in the content of my dreams, suggesting that I spent the night in the grip of feel-good hormones rather than stress hormones. And awoke in calm delight.

First, some background, about earlier nights. Then about the schedule of last night’s sleep; about the content of last night’s dreams; and an appended note about feel-good hormones and stress hormones.

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Posted in Dreams, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Sleep | Leave a Comment »

Checking out

March 6, 2026

A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket:

You’ve still got time to shop
Add items until your shopper checks out

The intent is to convey the oldest intransitive phrasal verb check out: you can add items until your shopper has completed their search for items, informed the service of this, and left the store — 1b in the OED list below. But there are three other readings for check out, and the one that came to my twisted mind first was 4c ‘to die’. Evoking images of the fatal grocery order, which will never get delivered because the shopper dropped dead. (Presumably, the 4c reading had recently come by me in some other context, so it was somehow salient to me; my imagination is not normally so dark.)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Intention, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Salience | 4 Comments »

Remarkable sinecures

March 6, 2026

From NOAD:

noun sinecure: a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit: political sinecures for the supporters of ministers. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from Latin sine cura ‘without care’.

And now a juicy bit of political news as it appeared on Facebook today (4/6):

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Posted in Academic life, Administration, Language and politics, Naming | 5 Comments »

The fabulously successful idiot plot

March 5, 2026

I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.

But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).

Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.

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Posted in Culture, Dance, Dancers, Formulaic language, Movies and tv, Music, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Three nights on the hormonal rollercoaster

March 4, 2026

A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.

Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).

The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language disorders, Memory, My life | 1 Comment »

You just don’t know that you don’t know

March 3, 2026

The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.

As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.

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Posted in Academic life, Cognitive Science, Psychology | 3 Comments »

Hung with drugs

March 2, 2026

(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste)

From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland area as a CBS affiliate — covering news, weather, sports, and a ton of racy / raunchy content): a report on a guy whose impressive genital package turned out to be a huge stash of narcotics, inspiring me to some musical silliness on Facebook.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

My hedge is a blood-headed beautiful man

March 1, 2026

Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.

Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).

There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:


The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )

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Posted in Fijiian, Gay porn, Language and plants, Language of sex, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

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