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.
Archive for April, 2012
Another -kini
April 14, 2012Rejection
April 14, 2012On 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.
Alongside the big reveal
April 14, 2012rebuttal, the verb
April 13, 2012Heard 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?
Autistic literalism
April 12, 2012In 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.
Innovative EDM
April 12, 2012Over 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.
Sandwich portmanteaus: lepicdary
April 11, 2012From 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.
Body language
April 10, 2012Today’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.
fugues
April 10, 2012Today’s Bizarro, with a pun on fugue:
(with an accompanying pun on minor). There’s a musical and a medical sense of fugue; from NOAD2:
Music a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
Psychiatry a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.
Remarkably, these two words share an etymology, going back to Latin fuga ‘flight’, related to the verb fugere ‘to flee’ — with metaphorical extensions of flee in two different directions, in two different domains. (Because of the common etymology, the two words are listed in dictionaries in a single entry, though the relationship between the two will not be obvious to any ordinary speaker of the language.)
In tandem with this ambiguity, there’s a parallel ambiguity in minor: a musical sense, referring to a scale or to an interval within that scale; and an older general sense, meaning ‘lesser in importance, seriousness, or significance’. The first is a metaphorical development from the second, and both are contrasted with major. So: a minor fugue, a contrapuntal composition in a minor key or a psychiatric condition of lesser importance.
(Bonus: the Latin fug- ‘flee’ root crops up in other English words: fugitive, refuge, refugee, and the rarer fugacious ‘passing away quickly, evanescent’.)
almost not
April 10, 2012Yesterday’s Zits, featuring Jeremy and his dad:
First, Jeremy steps back from saying that what his father said was not uncool (which isn’t all the way to saying that it was cool — so, sort of cool), but moderates this already modest assertion with almost; so Jeremy sees it as not quite sort of cool, but in the right direction. Then his father picks up on the almost not, and uses it to say that what Jeremy said almost didn’t make him feel insulted; that is, he felt insulted, but just barely.