Last week Dennis Preston sent me a usage query about this quotation in a Talking Points Memo posting by David Taintor on April 30th:
But the organization’s Director of Education Elokin CaPese told TIME that “If the state of Tennessee gets to create the [sex] curriculum, it has to create something that umbrella reflects everyone.”
Dennis wondered about the verbing in umbrella reflects.
Language Log and this blog have devoted a good bit of space, over the years, to the New York Time‘s struggles to maintain three principles. There’s a constant tension, not always easily resolved; see the postings listed here. Mostly, the paper dodges the issue completely; alludes to characterizations like “profanity” or “salty language”; or (most often) resorts to semi-coy indirection, of the “but not in those words” variety.
But not always.
William J. Broad, “North Korea’s Performance Anxiety”, in yesterday’s NYT Sunday Review:
“It’s a boy,” Edward Teller exulted after the world’s first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
From the start, the nuclear era seethed with sexual allusions. Military officers joked about the phallic symbolism of their big missiles and warheads — and of emasculating the enemy. “Dr. Strangelove” mocked the idea with big cigars and an excited man [Major T.J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens] riding into the thermonuclear sunset with a bomb tucked between his legs.
Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear activist, argued in the 1980s that male insecurity accounted for the cold war’s perilous spiral of arms. Her book? “Missile Envy.”
Today, the psychosexual lens helps explain why North Korea, in addition to dire poverty and other crippling woes, faces international giggles over its inability to “get it up” — a popular turn of phrase among bloggers and some headline writers.
“Things like this never go away,” Spencer R. Weart, an atomic historian and director emeritus of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, said in an interview. “There’s little doubt that missiles are phallic symbols. Everybody agrees on that.”
In yesterday’s NYT Sunday Review, a piece by Arlie Russell Hochschild on “The Outsourced Life”, beginning:
In the sprawling outskirts of San Jose, Calif., I find myself at the apartment door of Katherine Ziegler, a psychologist and wantologist. Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
Ah yes, wantologist, with the Greco-Latin libfix -ology attached to the very native English root want.
(Later I’ll look a little bit at the content of Hochschild’s piece, but first, remarks on morphology.)
(The 2,000th posting on this blog. How time flies. Like an arrow.)
A recent commercial in a “lunchtime manifesto” series by McDonald’s (“It’s your lunch. Take it.”), here. Two office workers break out, to have lunch at McDonald’s. One declares defiantly:
I don’t want to be chicken. I want to eat it.
Free-range zeugma, in anaphora. The antecedent is the slang adjective chicken ‘cowardly’, but the anaphoric pronoun it refers to chicken meat. Different categories, wildly different senses (though historically related).
That’s sufficiently ear-catching. But then there’s the intrusion of eat it, which has several non-literal slang senses that are unfortunate in the ad context:
‘perform oral sex’; ‘suffer humiliation’
eat it! ‘exclamation of disgust or dismissal’
Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the first of these from 1963, the second from 1934, the exclamation from 1904. It identifies the it of the exclamation as the penis, but some speakers take it to stand for shit.
The McDonald’s message:
Lunchtime is YOUR time. Bite into a Premium Chicken Sandwich or Angus Deluxe & taste freedom.
Given the rest, I might have avoided bite, with its echo of Bite me!
A G&S takeoff by Randall Munroe:
In the midst of this:
A BA in communications guarantees that you’ll achieve
A little less than if you’d learned to underwater basket-weave
with the verb underwater basket-weave, backformed from the synthetic compound underwater basket-weaving.
From the Batman comics, a batmanteau:
From Wikipedia:
A batarang is a roughly bat-shaped throwing weapon used by the DC Comics superhero Batman. The name is a portmanteau of bat and boomerang, and was originally spelled baterang.
Last week’s report from my grand-daughter’s school, from a student in a lower elementary class:
In art we worked on making flowers with all kinds of tints and shades of colors. For music we sang “Frereshanka” and played instruments such as trumpet, trombone and baritone.
It took me a second or so to recognize that “Frereshanka” was “Frère Jacques”.
When I mentioned this at breakfast yesterday, my grand-daughter was impelled to sing the nursery song. It’s a powerful earworm. And endless, if you sing it as a round.
