Zippy has his favorite words, and ululate is one of them:
But how does Zippy pronounce the word? There are two possibilities: as if the word was spelled “ullulate” or as if it was spelled “yululate” (both with initial stress). I favor the second, as being more imitative of ululation, but who knows which way Zippy leans.
Caught in a television commercial for a medical supply firm:
I’m so tired of boiling every time I have to cath. (link to Flickr version)
That’s cath, a clipping of catheterize ‘use a catheter’. Both the full and the clipped version can be used transitively and intransitively (OED2 lists both uses for catheterize in its entry for catheterism). Here’s a transitive use of cath:
Our dog recently became paraplegic and we now have to cath him 3-4 times daily. (link)
The clipping provides a one-syllable version for a four-syllable technical term. It might also work to distance a speaker or writer from direct reference to catheters and the unpleasant business of catheterization.
From Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump:
My daughter’s first word was “no”, quickly followed by “dog” and “cat”. “Hippopotamus” would have been too much to expect.
[Update 16 April: my granddaughter’s first words were (in order) “hi”, “no”, and “uh-oh”. “Hi” was used to greet someone — and request that the addressee pick her up.]
I wrote a while ago
This blog is not suitable for viewing by anyone.
on a website, where it was intended as a warning of possible “adult” content, that is, intended to convey ‘not suitable for viewing by everyone’ or ‘not suitable for viewing by just anyone’. But the reading I got was the one with anyone as a “negative polarity” item, so that the warning conveys ‘suitable for no one’.
Several commenters (eventually the original blogger himself) said that it was just a joke, and that I should have recognized this, because the default reading is absurd in the context. (Another commenter thought it was a lot to expect that readers should not just treat it as an error, as I did.)
But one commenter went a bit further:
Boy, I though[t] _I_ overanalyzed stuff. Clearly you’ve never watched South Park. At the start of that program is the following warning.
ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS SHOW–EVEN THOSE BASED ON REAL PEOPLE–ARE ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. ALL CELEBRITY VOICES ARE IMPERSONATED…..POORLY. THE FOLLOWING PROGRAM CONTAINS COARSE LANGUAGE AND DUE TO ITS CONTENT IT SHOULD NOT BE VIEWED BY ANYONE
It’s supposed to be funny .. not to be taken literally. Though I haven’t gone to the site to see the context, I imagine that the item you’ve analyzed was meant to be taken in the same way.
That is, the commenter is saying that I should have recognized the blogger’s warning as a reference (even though the page the warning is on is not, unlike South Park, humorous in tone) and suggesting in addition that since there were cases of warnings where apparent scopings of universal quantification over negation are to be understood as the reverse, all such cases are to be understood that way.
I think of this reasoning as false Occamism, the idea that since some X are Y, it’s simpler to treat all X as Y: “do not multiply explanations beyond necessity”, or something like that.
This is just silliness, with very little linguistic content. You’ve been warned.
In the New York Times of 11 April, Gail Collins (p. A15) refers in passing to Winfield, Missouri’s “devastating 2008 flood, when a levee breach caused by a burrowing muskrat damaged about 100 homes.” (She mentions the town because it recently re-elected someone to a fourth term as mayor, even though he’d been dead a month.) The newspaper headlines, in a whole collection of papers, went: Burrowing Muskrat Causes Levee To Fail In Missouri.
The word muskrat by itself tickles me, and somehow burrowing muskrat is even better. Then the creature manages to cause a disaster. Disasters are not, of course, in themselves funny, but when they arise from inconsequential events that cascade, they can seem risible. Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents has a complex set piece about a Louisiana salt dome disaster that runs through several acts; unless you were there, it’s achingly funny. On a smaller scale, I have any number of tales of squirrels who shut down the electrical supply by gnawing on cables — frying themselves in the process, of course.
[Ok, a little bit of linguistics. Burrowing muskrat has at least two very different senses: one in which it refers to a type of creature (known — whether accurately or not, whether it is actually a muskrat or not — for its propensity to burrow), another in which the PRP burrowing is understood as conveying the progressive aspect of burrow: ‘a muskrat that was burrowing [at the time referred to]’. So far as I know, there is no creature conventionally known as a “burrowing muskrat”, so we go with the progressive reading.]
More snowclone fun! Found by David Fenton in a posting on DailyKos.com:
After weeks of talking tough about how they were too fiscally responsible to take stimulus money from the federal government, the cast of 2012 GOP governor-wannabes, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford, folded like cheap tents…
Fenton found the cheap tent version surprising and puzzling; he would have expected cheap suit instead. It turns out that both variants of the Fold Like a Cheap X ‘give up easily’ snowclone are reasonably frequent — and that there are variants with lots of other fillers for X.
The saga of the whole nine yards has been going on for some time now, focused on where the two parts of the idiom — nine and yards — come from; Michael Quinion has an article (last revised in 2005) on it here, and more recently Ben Zimmer has posted on Language Log on it, here and here (the latter with a cite for “all nine yards of goodies”). I’m going to suggest that this might be a fruitless search, akin to asking who the original Mac, Joe, Charlie, Stan, etc. was in vocatives addressed to men.
[Added 12 April: an update on the whole nine yards by Ben Zimmer is available here.]
What I’m suggesting is that THE WHOLE X ‘the entire matter, everything having to do with the matter’ is a formula with X filled in by various inventive expressions. Neutral expressions like the while thing/business/package might have been the model —
We had a blow-out celebration: champagne, ice sculptures, the whole thing/business/package.
but there are more colorful fillers for X.
Frédéric Dichtel asks, in a comment on a totally unrelated posting of mine (and also on Facebook):
Could you possibly devote one on the use of the unmodified quantifier many in affirmative statements?
The traditional rule states that this use belongs to formal style. But what about the following sentences extracted from the COCA American Corpus? Aren’t they neutral in style?
Cryptochromes were discovered in plants many years ago.
In many ways, my family’s story is universal.
There are many risks for any outside company.Could it be that the formality of many differs according to whether it is subject, object etc.?
Many readers will be unfamiliar with the “traditional rule” Dichtel refers to. It comes from usage advice in the ESL literature (so it’s significant that Dichtel is not a native speaker of English). In this literature, writers are told to use many (or much) when it’s modified by a degree adverbial (very, so, that, how, etc.); this is in effect a grammatical requirement, since the alternative a lot isn’t available in this context. Writers are advised to use many (and much) in questions and under negation (in preference to a lot) —
Were there many people at the party?
There weren’t many people at the party.
but otherwise (that is, in affirmative statements) writers are told that many and much are formal in style, while a lot is neutral.
The advice literature meant for native speakers tells a somewhat different story. This literature generally misses the connection with “negative polarity” contexts (questions and negation) — not surprisingly, because much of this literature maintains that a lot is informal in style, too informal for use in formal writing (a claim that might have been true at the turn of the 20th century, but is not true now).
The case of much vs. a lot is treated at some length (with links to Language Log postings and other literature) here; much of this carries over to many, though there are some differences. In particular, the “formality effect” seems stronger for much than for many, though for both there are contexts in which they can occur unmodified in affirmative statements without conveying formality of style, as in Dichtel’s examples from COCA. (I have speculated that there are indeed differences according to syntactic function (subject vs. object, in particular), and differences according to the verb in the sentence, but these speculations aren’t easy to investigate.)
Zippy in distress:
