In a comment on my little posting on idioms this morning, Season Taylor linked to this t-shirt:
This is from the mental_floss store: Where knowledge junkies get their fix. They offer a wide variety of linguistically playful shirts and note cards, for example
HOMONYMS are a reel waist of thyme
and
Ambiguity: What happens in Vagueness stays in Vagueness
(with the Happens In, Stays In snowclone).
There’s a vein of language play, much mined by cartoonists, in which idioms are taken literally. Here from Cafe Press is an example that brightened my morning, because it plays on a convention of cartooning as well as a convention of language:
(Design by Stick figure t-shirts.) It comes in a variety of colors; here it is in (Stanford) cardinal.
In the NYT on July 16, two obits for artists: T. Lux Feininger (painter and photographer), at 101, and Josef Suk (violinist, sometime violist, and founder of several chamber music groups), at 81. (Obits by William Grimes and Allan Kozinn, respectively.)
Feininger, the younger brother of the photographer Andreas Feininger and the son of the painter Lyonel Feininger, was associated especially with the Bauhaus and with Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.
Suk, the grandson of the violinist and composer Josef Suk and great-grandson of the composer Antonín Dvořák, had a life grounded in Prague and in chamber music.
In yesterday’s NYT, “For a Night Each Year, the Airwaves Buzz With Morse Code” by Jessie McKinley, about Morse code, which brings back memories for me.
In the vein of the Multiverse “Antisocial Network” cartoon, two more images in the social media backlash, both from Google+ (and passed along through several hands):
GTFO ‘get the fuck out’ has the icons for Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Orkut.
The title says it all, in a portmanteau about this otter couple:
(Photo passed on by Chris Ambidge.)
Something sweet and silly for the weekend.
(No ghits for ottergether, by the way.)
It starts with a link Jon Lighter supplied on ADS-L to a story about the Olive Garden restaurant chain faking Italian words to be “culinary forward”:
Olive Garden tries getting back to basics
By Sandra Pedicini, Orlando Sentinel [7/11/11]So you didn’t know what soffatelli and pastachetti were when you saw them on the Olive Garden menu recently? Don’t feel badly. Neither, it appears, do Italian chefs — or even Italians in general, for that matter.
The dishes with made-up names were too unfamiliar and fell flat, contributing to two quarters of disappointing sales at the chain.
We stand on the eve of the weekend closing of 10 miles of the I-405 freeway in Los Angeles (for construction), an event — often referred to now in the media as (the) Carmageddon — that has thrown Angelenos into dread and confusion.
The portmanteau carmageddon (with the element –mageddon rapidly gaining libfix status) got a mention on this blog back in February, in connection with a Zippy cartoon. And now Barry Popik, on his blog, has given a fuller treatment of it, along with carpocalypse.
But there’s more: karmageddon (karma + armageddon).
The latest Scenes From a Multiverse:
A play on Google+ and The Social Network.