From the gay porn flick Born To Be Bad (seen in a segment of the compilation The Best of Rod Barry), a pornstar to his sex partner Rod Barry, who’s jacking himself off and is close to coming:
You wanna fuck your shooting load! You wanna shoot your fuckin’ load!
Rather than, um, re-shoot the scene, the director just left the spoonerism in. Well, the guy got it right on the second try.
From Lisa Cohen’s LiveJournal, chanelling Lewis Carroll:
tis the voice of the pedant,
i heard them declare,
you have spelled this word wrong,
i expect you to care
Ah, “I expect you to care”: the voice of the pedant indeed.
(Passed on to me by Chris Ambidge.)
Heard last night on a radio show about food:
… mixing beef with pork to make something called bork
Yes, a somewhat unsavory-sounding portmanteau.
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
At issue here is what features are criterial for classifying a creature as a mammal.
From Jon Lighter on ADS-L this morning cited, “This is Obamageddon! It’s Barackalypse now!”
This is a report of Rush Limbaugh’s frothing on his radio show on the 8th, quoted on Fox and Friends yesterday:
Obamageddon. That’s what we have witnessed since Friday. Obamageddon. Barackalypse Now. The only silver lining I can find is that as far as 2012 goes, Obama’s a Debt Man Walking.
-mageddon and -pocalyse again, now available as related libfixes.
Recently, the WordPress software for this blog has started producing a page of information every time I post something. Among other things, it tells me how many postings I’ve made so far, adds an exclamation of congratulation (“Awesome!” and the like), suggests topics that I might want to blog on (basically, topics for generic school themes), tells me what categories and tags I used, and adds some more I might want to consider. So, for my recent “as would’ve” posting, on categories and tags I got:
You used the following categories and tags: Constructions, Ellipsis, Morphology, Phonology, Style and register, and Syntax.
Add a couple more to make your post easier for others to discover. Some suggestions: cowboys and indians, word sequences, intergalactic battle, cliticization, and unpublished version.
The first is just a straightforward reproduction of the categories I chose. The second is an immensely entertaining gleaning of short phrases from my posting, including the quotations in it (that’s where cowboys and indians and intergalactic battle come from); only cliticization would be genuinely useful to someone searching for content.
Though it would be intriguing to try to weave the full set of phrases into a story.
A little while ago Geoff Pullum wrote me with what he thought might be a counterexample to our treatment of Auxiliary Reduction in English (in “Cliticization vs. inflection” and in the longer, still unpublished version of “Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to Auxiliary Reduction”). The relevant bit is the third instance of would’ve in this passage from a review in Slate (all three instances boldfaced here):
It’s fun to think about what Cowboys & Aliens might have been if any creativity had crept past the title page. Instead of bonding over their shared humanity, it would’ve been fascinating to see the cowboys and Indians take opposite sides in the movie’s climactic intergalactic battle. Cowboys & Aliens vs. Indians would’ve been a far superior film, as would’ve Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians. Or Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians & Predator. What we’re left with instead is a dumb movie that thinks it’s smart. (link)
[extracted from this] (1) Cowboys & Aliens vs. Indians would’ve been a far superior film, as would’ve Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians.
The crucial fact is that the third instance seems to be in an occurrence of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI); the other two are instances of Subject+VP (SVP), which (while they might set the scene for the third would’ve) doesn’t involve inversion. The problem is that SAI inverts a single auxiliary, while on the Z&P analysis of reduced auxiliaries, would’ve is, from a syntactic point of view, a sequence of two auxiliaries.
Mike Hale, “Like Ross, Rachel and Company, but With Faster Hook-Ups” (on the tv show Friends With Benefits), NYT Arts section, August 8:
… it combines a single-camera, mildly absurdist style and raunchy humor with stock sitcom situations. It’s the kind of show in which a lamely suggestive joke about a vajazzled woman – one with a bejeweled genital area – giving birth (“The kid came out looking like a disco ball!:) is followed by reaction shots of everyone in the scene laughing.
That’s the verb vajazzle, a portmanteau of either vagina or the euphemism vajayjay with bedazzle.
From Federico Escobar on the 6th, this screen shot from the Washington Post:
(I’d give you a link, but the story seems to have been substantially rewritten, and this passage is gone.) The problem lies in the highlighted part, repeated below, in which the intended reading of the sentence is likely to be overshadowed by a more easily available, but (on reflection) preposterous reading:
NATO says those killed in the downed NATO copter in Afghanistan included 20 members of an elite counterrorism [that is, counterterrorism — nice orthographic haplology] unit that carried out the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, seven Afghan commandos and a civilian interpreter.
A Bizarro with unlikely language changes:
We all have our peeves and pleasures. Apparently, the Devil appreciates awesome and That being said.