Archive for 2012

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Bay to Breakers 1991

July 24, 2012

(Mostly not about language.)

When the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco (a race/walk from the Embarcadero to Ocean Beach, with lots and lots of costumes) came by a few months ago, I meant to post a photo of my man Jacques and me finishing the race in 1991 — an occasion that was both delightful and scary — but technical problems stood in the way. Now here’s the photo, and after it a bit of the story.

I’m #39497, the shorter, bearded one; J is #39262. (Lots of male friends have asked, hopefully, about the guy between us, but he was just an accident of the race lineup.)

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Posted in My life | Leave a Comment »

job(s) market

July 24, 2012

When I posted last week about plurals as the first elements of N + N compounds, Jon Lighter added the comment:

When I mentioned to my students in 2002 that “jobs market” had become the preferred cable-news form of “job market,” they seemed not to believe me.

I wonder what today’s reaction would be.

What I wondered about was the basis for Jon’s claim that jobs market was the preferred cable-news variant in 2002.

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Posted in Compounds, Morphology, Usage attitudes | 5 Comments »

Outlaws with puns

July 24, 2012

Yesterday’s Bizarro:

This particular pun has been made many times, as you can see by searching on {“if puns are outlawed”}.

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Posted in Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 8 Comments »

Today’s entertaining underwear

July 23, 2012

… from the Undergear people: the Andres Velasco® Jungle Trunk:

The advertising copy is about as amusing as the remarkable underwear:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Language of clothing, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

George Miller

July 23, 2012

The great psychologist George Armitage Miller died yesterday. It will take a few days for obituaries to appear in the newspapers, but here are some academic notes.

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Posted in Death notices | 10 Comments »

Annals of naming

July 23, 2012

From OUT magazine for August (pp. 13-4), a feature on the music world (“On a Mi(ssion): Cody Critcheloe has a high-concept queer art project with a beat” by Adam Rathe):

The name, copped from Boston post-punk pioneers Mission of Burma, sounds like shun, but bewilderment regarding how exactly to talk about the group – and people are talking — is just part of Critcheloe’s plan.

“I love the name, how it looks, and how it’s confusing for people,” he says. “I love that people can’t pronounce it or that they think it’s my name.”

Of course it’s confusing; it makes a name out of an unaccented syllable that isn’t in itself meaningful — but sounds like an existing English word. And it’s weirdly spelled.

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Posted in Derivation, Morphophonology, Names | Leave a Comment »

Knowing

July 22, 2012

In a comment on my recent Pogo posting, Bob Richmond gave a link to a posting of his (“Hum a few bars and I’ll fake it”) on the joke template that begins with the question “Do you know X?” and has some variant of the “Hum a few bars” reply as the punch line. (Several of these are from comic strips.) The joke turns on the ambiguity of the verb know, a use-mention ambiguity, and the speech-act ambiguity of Do you know? questions.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Implicature, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Use and mention | Leave a Comment »

Sporno again

July 22, 2012

From the August issue of OUT magazine, “The Sporno Guide to the Summer Olympics” by Mark Simpson (p. 49), with text concluding:

For 2012, it’s entirely appropriate … that a very prominent face of the Olympics is Mr. David Beckham, the athlete who became a global sporno star by flaunting his lunchbox on billboards for Armani and H&M. So, in keeping with the spirit, we present a spornographic guide to the Olympics, based shamelessly on aesthetics, rather than athletics.

with a set of photos and brief sketches about the visual pleasures of (men’s) gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, swimming, water polo, high dive, and obelisk climbing (at the U.S. Naval Academy: “shirtless cadets attempt to scale a giant phallic monument covered in Crisco” — not an Olympic event).

Sporno is Simpson’s portmanteau of sport and porno.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

More Alain Delon

July 21, 2012

(Homoerotic silliness for the weekend, thanks to Arne Adolfsen.)

A follow-up to “Hunks and their sacks” from 12/19/11, which featured Alain Delon and Victor Webster (separately, not together). Now we get a shot of Delon leaping and showing off his stuff:

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of clothing, Photography, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The sound in your head

July 21, 2012

Reported in the Sic! (errors) section of Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words #794 this morning:

A health report of 18 July on the BBC site about the risks of not taking physical exercise was spotted by Martin Wynne: “The public needed to be warned about the dangers of inactivity rather than just reminded of the benefits of it.”

Here, it at first appears to refer in inactivity, but a bit of thought will convince you that the writer intended it to refer to activity; but activity is inside the word inactivity, and so would (on many accounts) be unavailable as an antecedent for it. The relevant putative generalization is known as the Anaphoric Island Constraint (AIC): words are “islands” for anaphora; anaphora can’t “reach inside” words. (Brief discussion here; examples of AIC violations here and here.)

But things aren’t that simple.

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Posted in Anaphora, Errors, Writing | 4 Comments »

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