In the Lives of the Artists series, from the NYT on July 6, Randy Kennedy’s obituary for Cy Twombly:
Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.
Now deleted, but entertaining in its sentiment and remarkable in its form, this morning’s prime comment spam on my “Star-spangled banners and my country” posting for the 4th of July:
I am American,and i l0ove my country such songs and updating verses are incredible that always enhance my patriot love passionate to my homeland.
(This from a site hawking concert tickets.) Hard to believe that such strangled syntax happened inadvertently.
(Mostly about my life.)
In the mail from Steven Levine, a book he picked up for me at a flea market a while back (Steven collects things from flea markets, estate sales, and garage sales):
Farm Weeds of Canada (George H. Clark & James Fletcher, Dominion of Canada Department of Agriculture, 2nd ed., 1923 [1st ed. 1909])
Steven wrote that he had had
plans to have Plate 19 (Purple Cockle or Corn Cockle) framed as a gift. But the book was so beautiful I couldn’t bear to deface it… The plates are so painfully beautiful to me that I do sometimes think they could be better appreciated removed and framed, though.
… note — this seems to have been deaccessed from the Edison High School Library [in Minneapolis] — a huge inner-city school in an immigrant area (even in the 20s when this book was acquired). Of what use is the Canadian Government farmers guide to such a school? Which could explain why it escaped damage. I hope it brings you many hours of pleasure.
From Ann Burlingham on July 4 (slightly edited):
I’m plowing through the second season of “Bones” when a character explains his familiarity with a topless college woman site by saying “I clicked on a pop-up and got caught in a pornado”.
Naturally, I love the word “pornado” [porn + tornado]. I wasn’t surprised to find it wasn’t new: the Urban Dictionary entry (here) gave me a smile.
Of course I wondered about other pornmanteaus (not my invention; see, for example, the site Pornmanteau – The Word Combo Dicktionary).
(Only a little bit about language.)
It starts with this image, provided on Facebook by Cliff Johnson:
(#1)
A photo of a shirtless hot guy, with a caption challenging the viewer’s heterosexuality, using a familiar pun on straight — as in “I can’t even think straight” on this t-shirt (from CafePress):
(#2)
But wait, there’s more!
From the NYT‘s “Metropolitan Diary” of July 4:
DEAR DIARY:
Even though I wear a hearing aid, I live in a somewhat skewed world because of my poor hearing.
On the morning after Osama bin Laden was killed, I woke up in my daughter’s Upper West Side apartment during a pre-Mother’s Day visit. I turned on the radio in the middle of a news announcement.
What I heard was, “A group of highly trained baby seals were brought in by helicopter. They entered the compound and killed Bin Laden.”
Lynn Johnson
So: Navy Seals heard as baby seals.
As background for another discussion, I give an outline survey (originally prepared for introductory syntax classes) of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI) in English.
Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman looks at a recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon (also passed on to me by Paul Armstrong), in which a high school teacher, faced by thesaurisizing students, puckishly creates a fake thesaurus, only to have the students pick up her fancy-sounding inventions.
And a while back, Bruce Webster passed on to me a query about a recent book, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, full of (generally bad) “Don’t say that, Instead say this” advice.
A combination of two things: telephonoscopy (also telephonotomy) on this blog, here; and a recent card to me from Chris Ambidge, reporting a friend (observing him putting shirts and towels into the automatic washing machine) saying jocularly, “Ah, you’re committing laundricide”.
The common factor is “combining forms”, learnèd elements that are mostly like compound elements but somewhat like derivational affixes: -(o)scopy (and -(o)tomy) and –(i)cide.
On my X blog, in the midst of material about BFF Tibor Wolfe (no, not what you think, but something much more startling), brief discussion of the verbing dildo (with incidentally, examples of the verbing fist).
Not for the kiddies or the faint-hearted.