A couple days ago, Matthew Gordon posted on ADS-L with the following example:
Mr. Schwartz feels badly for the lost bear and, having first hand experienced the trauma of loss, desires to emote his empathy for bears the world over, and Hope in particular. (link)
The use of emote is notable, but Gordon focused on the phrase first hand experienced — not a back-formation, but maybe some sort of compound.
A follow-up to active bottoms (here), on the Big Boy Fashion site:
(Hat tip to Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook.)
Now out in paperback, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass (2009), an engaging mystery novel with lexicographers Billy Webb and Mona Minot as its protagonists.
Billy and Mona, who work for the dictionary firm Samuelson in Claxton, Massachusetts (a thinly concealed Merriam in Springfield, Massachusetts), discover a series of puzzling citations in the Samuelson slip files — unnecessarily long passages marked as being from the book The Broken Teaglass (which they cannot trace), which appears to be a pulp murder mystery set at Samuelson.
So: a lexicographic mystery (there can’t be a lot of those) with snappy repartee between the principals as a bonus. I’m only partway through, but enjoying it so far.
Sunday was Hangul Day. Yesterday was Columbus Day (U.S.) and Thanksgiving Day (Canada). And today is National Coming Out Day (now celebrated internationally), one of the days of my people. The Keith Haring poster:
It’s also the day Jacques and I chose to celebrate as our anniversary (when you can’t get married, you get to pick a day; I know that things have changed, but all that was too late for us). This would be #35.
Our last certificate of domestic partnership, from the city of Palo Alto, came on Valentine’s Day 1996, a couple of years before he moved to the dementia care facility where he died seven years later. Terrible times, but I still miss him.
Like many of my friends, I have trouble thinking of anyone these days that I’m not out to. But I can still be encouraging, so I’m wearing my It Gets Better t-shirt.
Over on Language Log, Victor Mair ignited some passionate discussion with a posting about the tattoos on the face of a young man (in a mug shot). The largest tattoo was on his forehead:
A reporter for the Daily Mail interpreted this as a misspelling of Genius, with a J instead of a G. Victor countered by saying that the letter was “a nicely formed cursive capital” G. Commenters in the U.K. were generally baffled by this claim.
David Leonhardt in the NYT Sunday Review on October 9th, in “The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good”:
Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends — which is to say, between short-term fluctuations and long-term changes in the basic structure of the economy. No decade points to the difference quite like the 1930s: cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best.
The cyclical/secular contrast is nice phonologically — though it’s always dangerous to have opposed technical terms that are phonologically similar and semantically related.
This use of secular was new to me, but then I’m not trained in economics. It seems it’s been around for over a century.
Thomas L. Friedman in his op-ed piece on Steve Jobs (October 9th) reports the satirical newspaper The Onion as having characterized Jobs as
the only American in the country who had any clue what he was doing
That’s not quite what The Onion said, which was:
the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing
This under the headline
Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies
The modest Times does not of course quote the head, and circumvents the fuck in the text by careful punctuation.
In my mail this morning, two advertising portmanteaus back to back:
Woot.com’s Shirtoberfest has shirt substituting for the first syllable of Octoberfest. Beautorium is a bit more interesting, since it’s a telescoping portmanteau of the compound beauty emporium.
Ad writers are fond indeed of portmanteaus.
For years, some of the ADS-Lers have been collecting examples of ancestor ‘descendant’. By 2004 Jon Lighter and Jesse Sheidlower had a dozen of so examples of this reversal from the earlier argument structure
EARLIER-KIN be ancestor of LATER-KIN
to
LATER-KIN be ancestor of EARLIER-KIN
Here I’ll note the examples from my files. In a later posting I’ll write about other semantic reversals.
Seven more papers added to my website this weekend:
Auxiliary reduction in English. Linguistic Inquiry 1.3.323-36 (1970). [on website: “Auxiliary Reduction in English” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1970).]
More on Nez Perce: On alternative analyses. IJAL 37.2.122-6 (1971). [on website: “More on Nez Perce: On alternative analyses” (IJAL, 1971).]
Across the channel and across the Atlantic. Linguistic Inquiry 9.4.725-8 (1978). [on website: “Across the channel and across the Atlantic” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1978).]
(AMZ & N. S. Levin). You don’t have tó. Linguistic Inquiry 11.3.631-7 (1980). [on website: Arnold Zwicky & Nancy Levin, “You don’t have tó“ (Linguistic Inquiry, 1980).]
(AMZ & G. K. Pullum) Phonology in syntax: the Somali optional agreement rule. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1.3.385-402 (1983). [on website: Zwicky & Pullum, “Phonology in syntax: the Somali optional agreement rule” (Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1983).]
Rules of allomorphy and syntax-phonology interactions. Journal of Linguistics 21.2.431-6 (1985). [on website: “Rules of allomorphy and syntax-phonology interactions” (Journal of Linguistics, 1985).]
(AMZ & J. M. Sadock) A non-test for ambiguity. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17.1.185-8 (1987). [on website: Arnold Zwicky & Jerrold Sadock on “A non-test for ambiguity” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1987).]
Another big pile of papers is in the scanning process.