Writing about things that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky did in her life led me to several pieces of academic writing that I hadn’t mentioned on this blog — most notably, her engaging piece “Styles”, which I’ve now scanned and put on my website.
Archive for January, 2012
What she wrote
January 23, 2012Happy Penguin Awareness Day
January 23, 2012More flying penguins for the Year of the Dragon, from Tim McDaniel:
Another memetic contribution from the I Can Has Cheezburger folks (who brought us LOLcats).
Fiction rule of thumb
January 23, 2012One more cartoon, and then I have to get on with the rest of my life. This xkcd is from a comment by Army1987 on the Language Log posting “Create a language, go to jail” (here):
A lot of invented vocabulary is certainly a barrier to literary appreciation — and so is a lot of foreign-language vocabulary. Conlang or natural language, lots of unfamiliar vocabulary puts readers off.
(I’m not sure about Randall Munroe’s attitude towards the inflected comparative awesomer; it’s easy to find examples, but many of them are jocular and Munroe might be treating them as non-standard innovations.)
Fucking ambiguity
January 23, 2012I’ve been inventorying cartoons on my blog and on Language Log — a daunting project; there are so many — and am pulling up links from comments (like the one I just posted about). Here’s an xkcd from a comment by Boris on Victor Mair’s LLog posting “Not just any sale, it’s a #$&@^’ sale” (here):
The joke turns on the ambiguity of fucking, between the expressive adjective fucking ’(god)damn’ vs. the literal noun fucking ‘having sexual intercourse with’ (compare the adverb-verb ambiguity in fucking goofy, here).
In this case the two interpretations differ prosodically: on the expressive reading, the noun jacket has primary accent (the default for Adj + N combinations), while on the literal reading (‘jacket for fucking (in)’), the noun fucking has primary accent (the default for N + N compounds).
Dinosaur Grammar
January 23, 2012In a comment by The Ridger on my “sneak peak” posting, a link to this excellent Dinosaur Comic:
Three things: case-marking with than; the dangers of correcting people’s grammar (this is why The Ridger linked to the cartoon — for Utahraptor’s criticism and T-Rex’s response); and the mixed clichés (“out of the box” and “push the envelope”).
When penguins fly
January 23, 2012Via Tim McDaniel, a piece of penguin silliness to kick off the Year of the Dragon (I am a Dragon):
The image comes from today’s Telegraph, where it has the caption:
Tiny Adelie penguins burst out of the freezing ocean, clearing heights of up to two metres. The two-foot flightless birds build up speed underwater before propelling themselves onto the ice.
So penguins sometimes do fly, sort of, but only for short distances.
nauseous
January 22, 2012Yesterday’s Zippy:
“Contentlessness is the 14th level of Japanese humor” is nice, but here I’m after Griffy’s peeve about nauseous (rather than nauseated). Griffy has lots of company in his peeving, but the facts are against him.
sneak peak
January 21, 2012From Tim Wilson on Facebook, a link to this piece by John Swansburg on Slate yesterday:
Stealth Mountain (@StealthMountain) is a Twitter bot with a single, simple purpose: It searches for tweets in which a person has typed the words “sneak peak” when they meant to type “sneak peek,” then publishes a reply informing the author of his error. The account went live in November, and as of this morning has issued 16,900 such corrections.
… Many recipients of @StealthMountain’s tweets do not appreciate being scolded, even gently. The owner of Stealth Mountain stars the nastiest responses, which allows the visitor to his Favorites page to see for himself the thanklessness [you might say quixotism] of this work, and to be reminded of the delightfully varied surliness of the Twitterverse.
Christians
January 20, 2012On television, an ad for ChristianMingle.com begins “Single Christian? Good news!” and promises to “Find God’s match for you”. What does the noun Christian mean in this context? Not, I am sure, what NOAD2 says:
a person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings.
and certainly not the very broad sense in this quote from Anita Loos’s A Girl Like I (NY: Viking, 1966), pp. 195-6:
This small bouquet of words is quite insufficient to express the fondness and gratitude I shall always feel for Joe [Schenk]; it often strikes me that one of the best Christians I’ve ever known was a Jew.
Loos’s noun sense is the one related to a use of the adjective Christian that NOAD2 characterizes as informal:
having or showing qualities associated with Christians, esp. those of decency, kindness, and fairness.
Instead, Christian dating and matchmaking sites are using a much narrower sense of Christian, roughly ‘evangelical Christian’, with a specific sense of evangelical that excludes much of mainstream Christianity.
Creative misreading
January 20, 2012In Wednesday’s New York Times (Tom Friedman’s column, “Trust, But Verify”), a sentence with:
… a news article about the Jan. 11 meeting in Cairo between Bill Burns, …
My eyes picked up Ca…ro and then Burn… (in the pair of proper names), and my brain combined these to yield Carol Burnett (the comedian). A moment of puzzlement as to what Carol Burnett had to do with Islamist parties in the Middle East, and then I realized my error.
As far as I can recall, Carol Burnett (or television or comedy) hadn’t been on my mind — misreadings and mishearings are often triggered by things you’re thinking about — so the error remains puzzling, though entertaining.