From the website of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (in Nijmegen, the Netherlands) on November 2:
Researchers and staff at MPI were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Melissa Bowerman, senior scientist emerita of MPI’s Language Acquisition Department. Melissa passed away unexpectedly on October 31, after a brief illness.
Yesterday’s Bizarro:
This is really about the power of intonation; punctuation comes into it only insofar as it can be recruited to convey the intonation of these two utterances. The first has the intonation of a declarative, the second the intonation of a type of interrogative (with a final rise) — in fact, a type of reclamatory question, used to seek a repetition of something you haven’t understood or an explanation of something you understood but can’t accept.
The exclamation point (!) is used to indicate emphasis (associated with greater intensity and/or higher pitch), the interrobang (?!) to indicate a combination of interrogativity (rising final) and emphasis.
(Not about language.)
Via George “It’s OK to be Takei” Takei on Facebook, this sexuality test (meant for men only):
Comments were all over the map, picking out almost every detail of the photo, including the radiator, the soccer ball, and the lack of decoration on the wall.
Note assumption that gay men in general have fashion sense. And expectation that only gay men would notice how cute the guy is. Both are false, the latter spectacularly so: straight men notice attractiveness in other men — other men are, after all, both possible models and possible competitors — but they’d be unlikely to frame their judgments in terms of cuteness, hotness, etc.
For the record, I think he’s cute (the smile is a big thing for me) and I think the chair is regrettable. But then I’m gay.
From Articulate Matter:
One of a great many plays on “Occupy Wall Street” with octopi / octopuses / octopodes, but the pun only works with the plural octopi. (Please don’t write to argue about the “correct” plural form of octopus.)
Today’s Zits:
Jeremy’s dad is startled to see flying pigs. But then he finds out that Jeremy cleaned his bathroom without being threatened. So he reasons: for Jeremy to do this, pigs will have to fly; Jeremy has done this; therefore, pigs must be flying. The flying pigs are explained.
When pigs fly is a formula conveying ‘never’, given that pigs don’t fly: if you say that X will happen when pigs fly, you’re saying that pigs flying is a precondition for X happening, so if that precondition can’t ever be satisfied, then X won’t ever happen. Any precondition that the speaker believes won’t ever happen could serve in this reasoning, but pigs flying has been conventionalized for this purpose.
A message from Margaret Panofsky to Chris Ambidge, who inquired about rumors that our friend David W. Fenton had died:
Alas, David’s death is not a rumor. He was my dear, close friend and colleague, and a member of the viol consort The Teares of the Muses [the NYU Collegium Viol Consort] that I direct. He died last night; he had been in poor health in recent months, but the cause of his death has not been determined. I’m comforted that he saw the release [on October 12] of the Teares of the Muses’ CD, “Ein Lämmlein,” something that he can be proud of. [The album can be downloaded from iTunes here] He was a driving force behind the project; he performed on the CD, and also created the edition that we used from the facsimile of the Capricornus work of the same title. I will miss him more than even I can know at this moment.
Story from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky about her 7-year-old daughter Opal (reported here with Opal’s permission):
She had carefully divided her library books into “read” and “unread”. I brought the book bag, which contained the unread book, in from the car. She woke up in the morning and demanded to know where her library books were, so I told her. She threw herself to the floor, sobbing, and said “But I had my heart set on reading my library books! I wanted Garfield as soon as I woke up!” I said, reasonably, “Then why don’t you get them out of the car?” She got up, bravely dried her tears, took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and said “Then why don’t you give me the fuckin’ car keys?”
Tom Toles’s political cartoon of 9/29/11, about the Republican Party’s attempts to entice New Jersey governor Chris Christie to run for President:
A somewhat labored phrasal portmanteau, based on the name of the tv show Dancing With the Stars, with starving substituted for stars.
(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)