Archive for 2012

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More unfortunate names

April 15, 2012

From Victor Steinbok on ADS-L, a link to this Daily Meal piece on “7 Most Inappropriate Restaurant Names” by Sarah Fuss:

Leonardo DiCaprio and Blake Lively were spotted this week, according to Page 6, eating lunch side by side at Pink Taco, an upscale Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. The thing that sucks about Pink Taco, aside from its somehow chauvinist name, is that they recently painted a donkey pink in a publicity stunt that got them a lot of negative attention from animal lovers. But what do you expect from a restaurant with a title like that?

Fuss goes on to list 7 further dubious restaurant names, in the spirit of the posting on this blog on:

Plumed Serpent for a gay bar; Pink Taco for a restaurant; and Tube Steak for a hot-dog stand

(more…)

Posted in Names | 5 Comments »

The news for pet rodents

April 15, 2012

From Nick Fitch on Facebook, this item from BBC News:

Guinea pig ‘explosion’ causes chaos for Cambridgeshire charity
15 April 2012, CAMBRIDGESHIRE

The item is entertaining on its own, but then as a bonus there comes a list of recent related stories:

Hamster stuck to cage with magnet 12 APRIL 2012, NORTHAMPTON

Guinea pig in world record leap 15 MARCH 2012, EDINBURGH, FIFE & EAST SCOTLAND

Clearly, BBC News is firmly on the pet rodent beat. Recently, just hamsters and guinea pigs, but we can hope for gerbils, chinchillas, rats, and mice to come.

Then, for linguistic interest, there’s the puzzling name guinea pig (and the use of the expression to refer to experimental subjects)

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Lexical semantics, Names, Silliness, Verbing | 1 Comment »

Another -kini

April 14, 2012

From Victor Steinbok, this New York Daily News piece on Kate Upton in the new Three Stooges movie, with this photo:

It’s all about her nun-kini.

(more…)

Posted in Libfixes | 4 Comments »

Rejection

April 14, 2012

On Facebook, Serene Vannoy has reminded her readers of this 1981 Peanuts cartoon, featuring Snoopy as an aspiring writer:

This cartoon is a favorite on writers’ websites, for obvious reasons: every writer has been rejected, usually many times (goodness knows I have), and it hurts. So it’s entertaining to see Snoopy’s childlike assumption that his intentions and desires should rule and his bafflement that other people don’t recognize this.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Writing | 1 Comment »

Alongside the big reveal

April 14, 2012

… is the big conceal. With the nouning conceal ‘act of concealing’, used in contexts where neither concealing nor concealment will quite do. (On the big reveal, see here.)

(more…)

Posted in Language play, Nouning, Puns | Leave a Comment »

rebuttal, the verb

April 13, 2012

Heard from a guy in the restaurant Gordon Biersch on 3/24/12:

Then I rebuttaled with …

This is the verbing rebuttal, instead of the verb rebut. The question is, how/why did it arise?

(more…)

Posted in Conversion, Verbing | 3 Comments »

Autistic literalism

April 12, 2012

In the April 7th New Scientist, an interview with Michael Barton (“Mapping the language minefield for kids with autism” by Alison George), leading with:

Why do people with autism, like yourself, find the English language so confusing?
Autistic people think in black and white and therefore interpret everything literally. Ordinary people seem to love using idioms, metaphors and figurative speech, whether to aid communication or simply to make life more interesting, whereas for autistic people they simply make no sense.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Figurative language, Idioms, Psychology of language | 1 Comment »

Innovative EDM

April 12, 2012

Over on ADS-L, Jon Lighter reported an occurrence, in fluent speech, of the definitely non-standard:

not that good a looking guys ‘guys who are not that good-looking’

There are three notable features here: the PL guys with not that Adj (compare not that good-looking guys ‘guys who are not that good-looking’, which is also non-standard); the indefinite article a in combination with the PL (compare not that good-looking a guys, which is even more peculiar than not that good-looking guys); and the splitting of the compound Adj good-looking by the indefinite article.

You might think that Lighter’s example was just a complex speech error, and that’s possible. But the example wasn’t corrected, and all three of the notable features are attested, separately, in other examples.

(more…)

Posted in Modification, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Sandwich portmanteaus: lepicdary

April 11, 2012

From Eleanor Houck, this link to a New Nitro Circus video with the description:

Travis Pastrana and the whole Nitro Circus crew are back together in a truly LEPICDARY (epic n’ legendary) action packed 3D film. Expect the impossible, ridiculous, insane, hysterical, and purely awesome!

That’s a sandwich portmanteau lepicdary.

(more…)

Posted in Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »

Body language

April 10, 2012

Today’s Zippy has some very specific gestures:

This is one step beyond the gestures in this Zippy strip from last year, in which body language mostly communicates feelings. Here, a single gesture conveys an entire specific text. That is, Zippy’s “body language” seems to be non-compositional — like a codebook, rather than an actual language.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Nonverbal communication | 3 Comments »

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