Two cases of portmanteaus with aviation fly- as the first element in the news: flytilla and flyjin. And then, as a bonus, Flyzilla, with fly the insect. (more…)
Archive for April, 2012
flymanteaus
April 17, 2012Transylvania
April 17, 2012This morning I came across the Signspotting site, with amusing signs of all sorts: signs with entertaining names of places, streets, etc., error-ridden signs, puzzling signs, defaced signs, and so on. Among them was this one:
Transylvania University in Lexington KY. The caption:
I Vant Y’all Blood
A play on Dracula’s Transylvania and the location of Lexington in the South, where y’all serves as a 2pl pronoun.
Anaphora in the park
April 17, 2012From Victor Steinbok (who found it on Google+), this entertaining sign (from Randwick, NSW, Australia):
The sign allows for two readings, according to whether it refers to the dog or the dog poo. The sign writer intended the second, but the person who took the picture set things up to make the first reading salient.
Lexicon Valley
April 16, 2012I’ll start by letting Neal Whitman talk. From his blog posting “Podcast Linkfest” of March 20th:
I’ve been enjoying listening to a couple of language-related podcasts recently. First is one from Slate, called Lexicon Valley, hosted by Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield. In their six episodes to date, they have talked about:
- The history of the proscription against ending a sentence with a preposition
- The development of faggot as a slur against male homosexuals, with commentary by Arnold Zwicky
- Whether between you and I is a case of hypercorrection, or if another rule can describe its distribution.
- Black English, with commentary from Walt Wolfram (which they pronounce as “Wolf-Ram”)
- What a controversy the publication of Webster’s Third caused in 1961
- What insights Scrabble can and cannot give into the nature of English
The episodes are all about half an hour long, and even the ones I didn’t think I’d be too interested in (the dictionary, Scrabble) have turned out to be quite interesting after all. Furthermore, they’re linguistically sound. With all the complaints at Language Log and other places about how news media just can’t be bothered to fact-check anything related to language, I have yet to hear a piece of bad information here.
I’ve been impressed myself, and I’ve gotten great comments on “my” piece.
I really enjoyed working on this. Mike Vuolo interviewed me for about an hour on the phone — we’d set this up ahead of time, so I was prepared with pieces of background information, not just thinking on my feet, so to speak — and then he edited this material down, skillfully.
I’m working on a couple of postings with my faggot material in them, and hope to have some more things to say about between you and I as well.
Using a racial slur
April 16, 2012From “3 Tulsa Strangers, Familiar With Struggle, Met One Fate” (by Manny Fernandez) in the New York Times on April 14th:
The shootings unfolded the day after Mr. England used a racial slur on Facebook to describe the man he believed had killed his father, Carl, in April 2010.
The slur in question was of course nigger, but the Times avoids the word, even in quotes where it would be an indication of a speaker’s mindset (as in this case).
The Gray Lady avoids
April 16, 2012Just out on Language Log: a piece (“Larkin v. the Gray Lady”) by Mark Liberman on taboo avoidance in the New York Times, specifically on Michio Kakutani quoting Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” as beginning:
They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But what Larkin actually wrote (about 40 years ago) began
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
So the NYT has daintily avoided the offensive word — and also eliminated much of the effect of the line.
Mark concludes his posting with an inventory of LLog postings on taboo avoidance in the Times; below, I’ll expand on this some.
Notes from school
April 15, 2012Last week’s notes from my grand-daughter’s school included this report from a student in the middle school:
In L.A [Language Arts — what used to be called English] we had a lesson on how to organize a story with a follow-up question: Do people make decisions with his head or her heart.
Now, people is plural, used for generic reference, so the standard pronoun anaphoric to it is they (their in the possessive): with their head or (with) their heart. Why go with singular his or her instead?
Two possible factors. One, people doesn’t look plural; it doesn’t have a plural suffix. And two, peevish objections to “singular they“, even with generic antecedents — Everybody thinks either with their head or (with) their heart — have led people to be suspicious of anaphoric they with generic antecedents, even when these are in fact plural. The proscription against singular they has contaminated ordinary anaphoric usage. (For other cases of proscriptions contaminating perfectly innocent constructions, see here.)
Cartoon matters
April 15, 2012Late on Thursday, a notification that Elizabeth Traugott and I have been provided a summer intern for our project on “Linguistics in the Comics”; I posted our proposal here last month. Buoyed by this news, I talked enthusiastically about the project with the staff at Three Seasons, where I was having dinner. That got me into giving examples of cartoons illustrating some of the topics we are exploring (language play of various kinds, social dialects, errors, new and spreading usages; the conventions of the comics; the narrative structure of comics).
I happen to have brought the most recent issue (April 16th) of The New Yorker with me, so our conversation turned to the excellent cartoons in the magazine, and how varied they are, in both content and visual style. I noted the range of content and tone, from social commentary at one end to gag cartoons at the other, bringing up Bob Mankoff (the cartoon editor of the magazine) as one of the cartoonists who specializes in gags. I then looked at the issue and found that the second cartoon in it was by Mankoff:
The cartoon depends on all sorts of background knowledge: what scythes are, how Death, the Grim Reaper, is conventionally represented, etc. And, crucially, the story of Trayvon Martin in his black hoodie. This last factor makes the cartoon highly topical — but also likely to lose much of its punch as years go by and the story of Martin and Zimmerman recedes into history.
More unfortunate names
April 15, 2012From 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
The news for pet rodents
April 15, 2012From 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)