A gift from my friend Ellen Evans: Matthew Gasteier’s 2009 book F**k You, Penguin: Telling Cute Animals What’s What — combining my first totem animal (the penguin), taboo vocabulary, and taboo avoidance, all in one package.
Archive for September, 2011
F**k You, Penguin
September 14, 2011Methodology, argumentation, evidence
September 13, 2011A bibliography of (most of) my published papers on methodology, argumentation, and evidence (in syntax, morphology, and phonology). Most of them are not yet available on my website; I hope that eventually they will all be, but it’s a slow process getting them on-line.
Comic pronouns
September 13, 2011A Bizarro with a pun on pronoun:
Still wondering what amateur behavior would be for he, him, you, it, etc.
Annals of truncation: truncated rather
September 13, 2011Over on ADS-L we’ve been looking at various truncations of rather, as in the idiom sooner than later for sooner rather than later. More on these cases later, but here’s yesterday’s find:
“I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too – than live without you.” (Jacqueline Kennedy to John Kennedy in October 1962, as reported in a 1964 interview with Jacqueline Kennedy, quoted in Janny Scott, “In Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow”, NYT 9/12/11, p. 1)
(with stand-alone than serving for rather than).
Collages on AZBlogX
September 12, 2011A pile of recent XBlog postings with (comic homoerotic) XXX-rated collages:
9/10/11: Collages: the dog series (link): 6 dog-centered collages
9/11/11: Collages: two snapshots (Eric and Bud) (link)
9/12/11: Snapshot collages: a dirty dozen (link)
9/12/11: Eight more snapshot collages (link)
9/12/11: Collages: a few favorites (link): 8 favorites
A moment of silence
September 11, 2011Awoke this morning to the sound of light static on my clock radio. Thought that maybe KQED had gone dead — that sort of thing happens every so often — but then the announcer’s voice came on, explaining that we were “listening to a moment of silence”, at the 9/11 commemoration in New York City.
Odd thought, listening to silence. Well, I’ve listened to John Cage’s 4’33” a number of times (see “The 4:33 project”, here), and that’s more than a moment of silence.
(Googling on {“listening to a moment of silence”} seems to pull up nothing but references to people listening to songs called “A Moment of Silence”, which is something quite different.)
The ceremonies went on, and I fled to my iTunes, eventually getting caught up in listening to music about Babylon (for reasons I’ll explain in another posting). Oh yes, and adding some more XXX-rated collages to my XBlog (“Collages: the dog series”, here, and “Collages: two snapshots (Eric and Bud)”, here). Life goes on.
Keeping clean
September 10, 2011(Mostly not about language — gender and sexuality, gay stuff, art and photography, including collages — though a couple portmanteaus sneak in.)
From Chris Ambidge recently, this poster from the 40s urging daily bathing:
What struck me about the poster was the stylistic similarity between the art work (with its affection for the male body) and the cover drawings for gay male pulp fiction of the period.
R!
September 10, 2011As Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th) approaches, CafePress is advertising a ton of pirate products, including the “Dark R!” t-shirt below (available in a number of colors, shown here in cardinal):
For a summary of TLAPD postings on Language Log, see Mark Liberman’s posting “R” (on the day itself in 2008), here (plus a piratical posting of mine in 2010, here).
noodling
September 9, 2011In the NYT Magazine on Sunday, a photo feature on noodling, specifically the Okie Noodling Tournament. I’d been aware of catfish noodling (that’s ‘noodling for catfish’, not ‘noodling by catfish’), but I don’t recall having seen pictures of noodlers before. Of course, my interest was piqued by the term noodling — where did it come from? — and by other non-obvious uses of a verb noodle, such as the one in “I wasn’t really playing the piano, I was just noodling around”. As I should have expected, these musings quickly took me into murky waters (of the sort where catfish live).
-uzzle
September 9, 2011Silliness for the weekend: today’s Zippy plays with -uzzle:
Muzzle nuzzling has a great sound to it.
Fenwood Spacebag looks like one of Bill Griffith’s absurd invented names, combining a brand name (in this case, Space Bag vacuum-seal storage packs) with a personal name that he finds entertaining.