To inaugurate the weekend, a little pun package from Hilary Price:
This is a species of pun in which the parts of an idiom are unpacked and interpreted literally (or at least in non-idiomatic senses available for the parts). And, in this case, with an unlikely juxtaposition of ideas.
Introducing a new feature on this blog: Short Shots, brief items with little comment. This inaugural posting has five items in it.
In the NYT Week in Review section on 16 August, Jeffrey Gettleman reported on the U.S. Secretary of State’s African trip (“Hillary Clinton and the Diplomacy of Folksy”). There are points of linguistic interest.
Among the events on the seven-country tour were town hall meetings, called “townterviews”. Townterview is a portmanteau of town hall and interview — portmanteaus are very much in fashion — and, from what I can find on the web, seems to be associated only with Hillary Clinton, in the past few years.
Gettleman goes on:
These trips have their own lingo, I learned, as part of the traveling press corps assigned to chronicle every speech, handshake and hug. [doesn’t sound like much fun] “Bi-lats” are bilateral meetings. “Meet-n-greets” are visits to American embassies. “Camera sprays” are essentially photo opportunities, usually staged and no questions allowed, and “spray” can be used as a noun, as in, “there’s a camera spray at 2 p.m. with President X” or as a verb — “come on guys, time to spray the lunch.” [ick] The secret service on her plane refer [note plural agreement] to their M-4 assault rifles as their “sticks.” The secretary of state is called “the package.”
Some of these expressions were familiar to me. Meet-n-greet is used for all sorts of social events (not just visits to American embassies). And bi-lat as a clipping of bilateral is pretty frequent, especially in medical contexts, referring to bilateral mastectomy, bilateral cochlear implants, bilateral hip replacement, bilateral pneumonia, and so on.
Brevity and playfulness.
Bill Griffith misfires on his Yiddish/Yinglish, and has Zippy producing SCHW-reduplication rather than the normative SCHM-reduplication:
I somehow missed this in my comics feed, but got it in e-mail from Danny Bloom, who posted it in his blog. Bloom wrote Griffith, who understood immediately, saying in reply, “BLOOM! SCHMOOM!”
One of the incidental pleasures (for a linguist) of spending time with small children is being reminded (or actually discovering) things about the language(s) you share with them.
Case in point: at breakfast with my daughter (Elizabeth) and her daughter (Opal) a little while ago, we got into a discussion of paintings. One of us observed that lots of paintings were of people, and Elizabeth volunteered that such paintings were called portraits. (Middle-class parents are given to commenting explicitly to their children on vocabulary.) I concurred, and Opal was happy with that.
Getting into the spirit of the thing, I went on to say that many people painted food, in particular fruits and vegetables.
Opal made her EWW face, at which point Elizabeth and I realized she was thinking we were saying that some people applied paint to fruits and vegetables — which would, of course, in most cases make them entirely inedible. The sense of the verb paint she got was that of painting buildings, walls, faces (facepainting children is a popular event at community festivals), and the like.
Obviously, she had more than one sense of the verb, since she used paint as ‘make a painting of’ in other contexts. The trick is in selecting the appropriate sense in this particular context, and that requires knowing not just the meanings of the verbs but also knowing a good bit about cultural practices (for instance, that artists generally do not apply paint to foodstuffs).
Oh yes, Elizabeth and I took the occasion to introduce the expression still life.
The world is full of word play based on particular expressions, and some of the literature on snowclones tries to disentangle this phenomenon from snowclones; see the “playful allusion” postings in the inventory here. Every so often I’m tickled by a particular playful allusion, as I was this morning by the first sentence of Noam Cohen’s “Care to Write Army Doctrine? If You Have ID, Log Right On” on the front page of the New York Times:
Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.
What makes this noticeable is, first of all, that it takes some thought to interpret. Next, of course, you have to be familiar with the U.S. Army recruiting slogan “Be all that you can be”. Then you get it.
Without this backing, “X all you can X” might just be understood as a literal exhortation. It’s not entirely clear, for example, whether the following involves any allusion, however distant, to the recruiting slogan:
Join me in Valhalla, drink all that you can drink, eat all that you can eat, and fight all that you can fight! (link)
A nightmare scene from Bizarro: initialism run amok:
Rob Balder’s Partially Clips shows a stereotypical grammarian in action:
Geoff Pullum considered posting the strip on Language Log (Balder is a fan), but decided that that would just “contribute to strengthening the image of grammarians as pettifogging correctness quibblers” (as he said in e-mail). On Balder’s site, he put it this way:
I never miss reading PartiallyClips, and enjoy it enormously. And yet I hang back from pointing people to this strip. Do grammarians such as me (sorry, grammarians such as I) really have to live with this image (cold-looking tie-wearing dude at desk with Hitler mustache and photochromic specs) forever? I guess it’s true that I do own a pair of photochromic eyeglasses and several ties, but let’s try not to reduce everything to cultural stereotypes here. We grammarians are not the party-pooping, nitpicking, thin-lipped, stern-gazed, disapproving syntactic Nazis of myth and legend. We are fun and sexy guys. Really we are.
But here I’m taking the risk (with Balder) of holding the stereotype up to mockery.
By the way, the strip also illustrates another common feature of the way ordinary people talk about language: “grammar” used to refer to everything in language that is regulated (posters on Language Log have complained a number of times about the It’s All Grammar attitude): spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, word choice, etc. In the strip, the protector of “usage and grammar” is correcting a mistake in word choice (mistake in the sense that the ad’s word choice is not the norm for the intended meaning) — of a type (the “classical malapropism”) that has been fairly well studied, but primarily by psycholinguists rather than grammarians. (I myself have a foot in each of these camps, but the study of mistakes and the study of grammatical structure are two very different activities.)