Archive for November, 2011

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Turkey improvisations

November 24, 2011

Many people are not great fans of roast turkey; see, for example, this video (“Just Put the F*cking Turkey in the Oven”) from Tante Marie’s Cooking School in San Francisco, in which Aunt Mary [Risley] deprecates roast turkey, but tells you to forge ahead insouciantly and gives tips on how to turn out something that won’t be too bad. But suppose you’ve gone ahead and roasted that turkey.

Then think of it as a source of turkey-based dishes that are more satisfactory. Basically, anything you can do with chicken you can do with turkey, especially if the preparation supplies moisture and some piquancy: turkey salad (with mayonnaise and seasonings), turkey curry, turkey pot pie, turkey enchiladas or tacos, turkey hash (the turkey gravy is important), turkey captain (like Southern chicken captain — a.k.a. Country Captain chicken — again with curry), and so on. Or one of my favorites from my life with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, turkey Tetrazzini.

Then there’s the Hot Brown Sandwich.

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Posted in Compounds, Language and food | 2 Comments »

Thanksgiving meals

November 24, 2011

Today is the U.S. national food-and-family holiday, known as Thanksgiving (or, sometimes, the Day Before Black Friday). I’ve already posted about Adam Gopnik’s suggestion that the centerpiece dish for the holiday should be turkey with pesto and Calvin Trillin’s opinion that it should be spaghetti carbonara.

For some years, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I usually had some kind of roast for Thanksgiving (but mostly chicken, lamb, pork, beef, or veal, rather than turkey, which we cooked at other times of the year). Then when it was just Jacques and me, I branched out — a couple years, a smoked turkey by mail, then a variety of experiments, eventually settling on my new favorite, posole (pork and hominy stew — more on this below). Then it was just me and cooking was physically very difficult for me, so I took to celebrating the holiday at the excellent local Hong Kong restaurant, Tai Pan, with its dim sum lunch and substantial menu in addition. Sometimes by myself, sometimes (as today) with a friend (or two). (Tai Pan is also my place for Christmas Day, when the local Chinese, many Jews, and a few oddballs like me gather to celebrate the occasion.) My new tradition.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and food | 3 Comments »

Product satire

November 24, 2011

Yesterday’s Zippy, on product satire:

A festival of mangled product names.

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Posted in Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics | 4 Comments »

The Seidlitz elf

November 23, 2011

Back in “The rumor mill”, Dingburgers gossipped about American advertising icons — Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, the Seidlitz Elf, Cap’n Crunch. Of those, the Seidlitz Elf is by far the most obscure. But here, from Warren Dotz and Jim Morton, What a Character! 20th Century American Advertising Icons (1996), is the elf itself, along with three friends (including the Jolly Green Giant):

More celebrated ad elves are Snap!, Crackle!, and Pop! (for Rice Krispies) and the Keebler Elves.

Posted in Language in advertising, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Punctuating relatives

November 23, 2011

The beginning of the Wikipedia entry on hair:

(1) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, that grows from follicles found in the dermis.

At first this looks like that as a non-restrictive relativizer, but in fact which is not really an improvement:

(2) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, which grows from follicles found in the dermis.

The intended reading is surely restrictive — corresponding to either of the alternatives:

(3a) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial that grows from follicles found in the dermis.

(3b) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial which grows from follicles found in the dermis.

Instead, (1) has the that from (3a) together with the punctuation of (2). How could that happen?

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Posted in Relativization, Syntax, Usage advice | 3 Comments »

Annals of masculinity studies: the face

November 22, 2011

In the October 2011 issue of Psychological Science, the article “A Face Only an Investor Could Love: CEOs’ Facial Structure Predicts Their Firms’ Financial Performance” (by Elaine M. Wong, Margaret E. Ormiston, and Michael P. Haselhuhn). The abstract:

Researchers have theorized that innate personal traits are related to leadership success. Although links between psychological characteristics and leadership success have been well established, research has yet to identify any objective physical traits of leaders that predict organizational performance. In the research reported here, we identified leaders’ facial structure as a specific physical trait that correlates with organizational performance. Specifically, we found that firms whose male CEOs have wider faces (relative to facial height) achieve superior financial performance. Decision-making dynamics within a firm’s leadership team moderate this effect, such that the relationship between a given CEO’s facial measurements and his firm’s financial performance is stronger in firms with cognitively simple leadership teams.

I’ll append some of the article to this posting (Appendix 1), but two salient topics first: the association of certain facial traits with masculinity, and in fact with masculine aggression; and the technical term zygion that turns up in the definition of the facial trait in question.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

The goofy joke

November 22, 2011

An old but still entertaining Mickey Mouse joke, told to me by an acquaintance last night:

The judge says to Mickey, “I can’t grant you a divorce because you think Minnie is crazy.”

“I didn’t say she was crazy,” says Mickey, “I said she was fucking Goofy!”

Two interlocked ambiguities here: the expressive adverb fucking ‘exceedingly’ vs. the literal verb fucking ‘having sexual intercourse with’, and the adjective goofy ‘foolish’ vs. the proper name Goofy.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language play, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »

Allentown riff

November 22, 2011

Today’s Zippy has our Pinhead riffing on Billy Joel’s song “Allentown”:

Another contribution to the Zippy song-burlesque oeuvre, following on “Somewhere Over My Poncho” (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), “My Funny Serpentine” (“My Funny Valentine”), and “Everything Works Out for Me” (“Everything Happens to Me”). This one diverges pretty far from the original, but the model is unmistakable from the first line.

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pop culture | 3 Comments »

Saint Cecilia

November 21, 2011

Tomorrow (the 22nd) is St. Cecilia’s Day — Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians. A day to sing and play. And, for me, to appreciate the music of Handel and Purcell. Hail! Bright Cecilia!

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Posted in Art/lit/music/film, Music | 3 Comments »

Drifting as far as

November 21, 2011

This comment from musician Les Claypool caught my ear on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday:

(1) It’s a wonderful place to be, as far as a creative person.

This is an instance of verbless topic-restricting as far as (AsFarAs for short, labeled “prepositional as far as” in MWDEU), but one drifting some from its earlier uses and now serving as a more general restrictor — in (1), with as far as a creative person roughly paraphrasable as for a creative person, restricting the applicability of the assertion in it’s a wonderful place to be.
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Posted in Discourse, Idioms, Lexical semantics, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

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