Archive for May, 2012

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Manly superlatives

May 17, 2012

Posted by Kirk Phillips on his BrandSTOKE site on April 26th,”Is Mr. Peanut man enough?”:

Let’s say you want to sell more nuts to men.

Let’s say you obtained a rare Men’s Health endorsement.

Let’s say you are Planters.

What do you do with your fop of a spokes-character? You know, that cane-twirling, white-gloved, top-hatted dandy?

What Planters did was introduce him to a rough crowd (a pistachio and an almond) to toughen up his image. The three comprise Planters NUT-rition Men’s Health Recommended Mix, “the  manliest mix we’ve ever assembled.”

The tv ad can be viewed here. A sample:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Inflection, Language in advertising, Language play, Morphology | 1 Comment »

English the borrower

May 16, 2012

Via Paul Armstrong, this wry observation on the way English takes things from other languages:

Where does this come from?, you ask. It’s a variant of a longer version that Mark Liberman discussed on Language Log in 2005 (and quoted again in 2007), a version that dates to 1990.

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Posted in Language change, Silliness | 1 Comment »

like you and I

May 16, 2012

Caught this morning on public radio station KALW, during its beg-a-thon:

… because listeners like you and I agree that …

It’s the nominative case of I that’s the issue, and the example illustrates two different points of usage:

(a) pronoun case in combinations with like (and as, beside(s), including, and than); and

(b) pronoun case in coordination.

Collecting examples of people like you and I — there’s a huge number of them — then led me to blogger Melanie Spiller, puzzling over such examples in 2006 and concluding (via tortured grammatical reasoning) that I was the correct pronoun form.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Usage advice | 7 Comments »

A turn of phrase

May 15, 2012

From David Samuels’s essay “Wild Things: Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos” in the June 2012 Harper’s magazine:

[p. 30] On March 24, 1897, Mayor William Strong granted a tract of South Bronx Park to Madison Grant and his New York Zoological Society … Grant selected William Temple Hornaday, at that time the most famous conservationist in America, as the zoo’s director … To build and maintain the collections, Grant chose Henry Fairfield Osborn, a notably pompous and deceitful man who served as the head of vertebrate palentology at the American Museum of Natural History and sponsored the excursion to Montana that discovered the frst fossilized remains of a lordly predator that he named Tyrannosaurus rex.

I admire the turn of phrase, “a notably pompous and deceitful man”.

More on Grant to come.

Posted in Writing | 1 Comment »

The language of the animals

May 15, 2012

From Barbara Ehrenreich’s “The Animal Cure”, from issue 19 of The Baffler, on spiritual encounters with animals, as reprinted in Harper’s magazine, June 2012:

[p. 14] We may not worship golden calves or offer human sacrifices to jaguar gods, but implicit in much of the new attention to animals is the commendably liberal idea  that they are not – intellectually, or morally – all that different from humans. After all, they can use simple tools; they can be altruistic; they can create what they seem to regard as works of art; they can reason and remember; they can fall int what looks like depression. Language is widespread in the nonhuman world, and not only among birds, dolphins, and whales. Recent research has found that American prairie dogs, which are closely related to squirrels, can issue calls informing one another about what kinds of creatures might be approaching.

Sigh.

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Posted in Animal communication | 2 Comments »

Thorny days

May 15, 2012

The Old English letter þ (known as thorn) played a central role in my posting on a “frugal typographer” who proposed in 1929 to save space by replacing the word the by þ. Now thorn is the subject of a New Yorker blog piece by editor Mary Norris: “The Thorn Word” (note play on The Thorn Birds).

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Posted in Writing systems | 4 Comments »

hot herbivores

May 14, 2012

From the weekend Palo Alto Daily News (from the San Jose Mercury-News), a piece by Sue McAllister:

Hot herbivores: ‘Sexiest vegetarian’ contest has three Bay Area finalists including Santa Cruz woman

SAN JOSE – The Bay Area is already home to renowned hot-dog eating champion Joey Chestnut. And from the opposite end of the dietary spectrum it may soon boast another star: the Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door.

In a field of 10 female finalists, three local women – whose photos handily portray them as vegetarians with a certain va-va-voom – are vying for the title in the annual contest sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA.

From the imperfect alliteration of hot herbivores to the goofy premise that sexy people will make vegetarianism more attractive, it’s an entertaining contest.

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Posted in Language and food, Language play | 1 Comment »

More quiffs

May 14, 2012

From Judith Thurman’s profile of cartoonist Alison Bechdel in the New Yorker:

The most prominent piece of art on her studio walls is a gigantic poster of Tintin, who looks a twin of [Bechdel’s character] Mo. so I presumed that he had inspired Bechdel’s avatar. “I can see it,” she said, though it wasn’t conscious. “Mo is me, not Tintin.”

The certainly share their quiffs.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics | 4 Comments »

T-bars

May 14, 2012

Ken Callicott messaged me on Facebook to say that he’d come across the men’s underwear term T-bar (or t-bar), which was new to him (and to me), though the metaphor (as in t-shirt, based on the appearance of the letter T) isn’t hard to puzzle out.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of clothing | 1 Comment »

Another informal WH construction

May 14, 2012

In the spirit of my posting on to-infinitival interrogatives, or ToInt, which also mentioned Sluicing and WH echo / reclamatory questions, I offer yet another informal WH construction — which, like these others, is awkward with the formal pronoun whom (rather than neutral who) in object function. This is the exclamatory interrogative construction (or ExclInt) in

Where they went! What they did! (It’s just amazing!)

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Posted in Pronoun case, Style and register, Syntax | 2 Comments »

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