Two recent objects of slur avoidance: illegitimate and retarded.
Archive for March, 2012
On the avoidance watch
March 4, 2012The news for penguins
March 4, 2012For some reason, penguiniana has been piling up. Here are three items from the past few days.
anyways etc.
March 3, 2012From Wilson Gray in ADS-L yesterday, referring to the ZDNet site about Windows 8:
You click on “Show Anyways?” and deleted posts from Below threshold are displayed.
This is Show anyways? for standard Show anyway? — anyways with an “excrescent -s” (well attested in non-standard English), here in an “official” (as Gray put it) document.
lady-wave
March 2, 2012The Thursday Zits cartoon has Jeremy using the wrong greeting gesture for the context (where a fist bump would be appropriate, matching Jorge’s offered fist bump):
Here we get the N + V compound V to lady-wave, which appears to be an invention; at least I can find no evidence of it on the net. But what does it mean? Something like ‘wave like a lady, wave the way a woman does’? Or like ‘wave as one does to a woman (rather than to a man)’? Either makes sense in the context, and either would be mortifying to Jeremy. The first has a possible model in the attested to queen-wave ‘to wave like the Queen’, while the second has no obvious model I can think of — but either is a possible innovation.
Maybe the cartoonists had one sense in mind, but the question is how the characters would understand the expression and how the readers of the strip do. Maybe we should just be satisfied saying that Jeremy messed the greeting up.
Take a leek
March 1, 2012It’s March 1st, St. David’s Day — the Welsh national holiday. A memorable day in several ways, and one dear to me.
The Metafortress
March 1, 2012It’s time for the Linguist List’s annual appeal for financial support (which started on Monday). Go to the main site and follow the instructions there; even small contributions help to maintain this valuable resource in linguistics.
As usual, the staff have prepared all sorts of entertainments. Starting tomorrow, there will be weekly installments in the “LingQuest” saga (modeled roughly on quest games, and ultimately, on The Lord of the Rings). This week,
the Adventure begins at The Metafortress!
Yes, a portmanteau of metaphor and fortress.
Aphasia
March 1, 2012Two things coming together: my reading Diane Ackerman’s moving book One Hundred Names for Love (2011), about her husband’s aphasia following on a stroke; and a Stanford Report piece on Mark Applebaum’s performance piece Aphasia. Both stress the expressive deficits characteristic of aphasias and the distress these deficits produce in the aphasic.
OUT in Linguistics
March 1, 2012The old OUT in Linguistics mailing list seems to have died, so I’ve created a Facebook group for this purpose:
The group is open to lesbian, gay, bisexual, dyke, queer, homosexual, trans, etc. linguists and their friends. The only requirement is that you be willing to be out to everyone on the list as lgbt(-friendly); it’s sort of like wearing a pink triangle.
It’s a “closed” group: anyone can see the group, but only members can post and see the postings.
I’m in charge of adding people to the group; mail to me at zwicky@stanford.edu.
(Yes, you need to have a Facebook account.)