Joel B. Levin writes (on Facebook) to wonder about the PSP bit:
… using “bit” for “bitten” (past participle of bite): is that a legitimate colloquial form (used say out here in Arizona and the wild west)? Web sites say only “bitten” is “correct”, but I ran across a news story that uses “bit” instead of “bitten” four times (following “was” or “were”).
Just seems wrong to me.
On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro posted:
With the demise of the much-lamented “On Language” columns in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune [I think that modifier got displaced: “the much-lamented demise of the…”], what are remaining language columns in major newspapers or other media such as magazines, radio shows, or major blogs? Some that I know of include Boston Globe (Jan Freeman [and Erin McKean]), Visual Thesaurus (Ben Zimmer), and “A Way With Words” radio show ([Martha Barnette and] Grant Barrett).
… against Griffy’s objections:
OED2 has fuddy-duddy from early in the 20th century on, but my impression (like Zippy’s) is that it’s declining in use, especially among the young.
While struggling through the climax of deconstruction and demolition in my kitchen and laundry closet (after weeks of lead-up work) — vast replacement of crumbling pipes from the condo above mine (but running through my walls and under the concrete slab that makes my floor) — I’ve been posting playful sexy stuff on my X blog:
5/11/11: Mel Roberts boys (link). Photographs of Southern California boys from the 60s and 70s.
5/11/11: FWA (link). Jeff Dauber in 1996 and now.
5/12/11: Dick decorating (link). Jewels and a bungee cord.
5/12/11: On the moose-knuckle watch (link). Two notable photos.
5/13/11: Gladiators and centurians (link). Naked porn actors with Roman headgear, plus material about the 1981 porn flick Centurians (sic) of Rome.
5/13/11: Cumrades (link). Comic erotic photography/digital art by Harald Siewert.
5/13/11: The Flandrin pose (link). An 1836 painting that’s inspired a vein of homoerotic artworks.
5/13/11: Sam Carson (link). Male photography by Carson, mostly of cute All-American young men, mostly in their underwear. Erotically charged but charming.
With luck, the deconstruction will be over tomorrow; then no more jackhammering, sawing through kitchen tiles, and drilling. Reconstruction to follow.
… still very much alive and entertaining, as we can read in today’s NYT:
At 100 years old, Ms. Kaufman [author of Up the Down Staircase (1965)] is still shpritzing jokes, Jewish and otherwise, which is in her genes. Her grandfather was the great Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem, a writer who was able to squeeze heartbreaking humor out of the most threadbare deprivation and wove the bittersweet Tevye stories that became the source for “Fiddler on the Roof.”
This year, Ms. Kaufman did something more than tell jokes. She became one of the few adjunct professors in her age cohort and taught a course on Jewish humor at Hunter College, her alma mater. One of the jokes the class dissected:
“The Frenchman says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have wine.’ The German says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have beer.’ The Jew says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes.’ ”
Nice play on the ambiguity of must and of have, but also for me a wonderful recollection of my stepmother, Ruth A. Power, who many years ago wrote Kaufman an appreciative letter about Up the Down Staircase, starting a correspondence between the two of them, became her friend, and eventually visited her (from California’s Central Coast) in New York.
A Zippy with a distressed — defective, damaged, rejected, and in fact delusional — statue:
In this I hear the echo of Isaiah 53:3, as we hear it in Handel’s Messiah:
He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.
But I have a question about the artwork. Bill Griffith is scrupulous about such things, so the work depicted in the strip is almost surely a real sculpture. Anyone recognize it?
(On art and sexuality, rather than language.)
Following up on my Caravaggio posting (which looked at Amor Vincit Omnia, Boy With a Basket of Fruit, and Bacchino Malato as instances of homoeroticism in art), I turn now to the interpretations of these works by Amsterdam photographer and digital artist Harald Seiwert in his Inspired photoset.
(Nothing of linguistic or socially redeeming value here. Just silliness and sexiness. Probably not for the kiddies, though not actually unWordPressable.)
A pairing of some Monty Glover photos with some Chinese cookie fortunes:
From the back-cover description of Monty’s Private Pictures: Thirty One Postcards from A Class Apart:
Montague Glover was born in 1897. A decorated Army Officer and a successful architect, he was also a keen amateur photographer. His pictures from the twenties and thirties chronicle the three great loves of his life: rough trade, men in uniform and a handsome young blond called Ralph Hall, his lover for over fifty years until Monty’s death in 1983. Their story is told in A Class Apart [by James Gardiner].
(Linguistically interesting material boldfaced.)
