(About my life, not language.)
Benita Bendon Campbell writes from Colorado:
Not too long ago, while cleaning a bunch of neglected desk drawers, I happened upon a few sheets of faded pale-green scratch paper from your days at The Reading Eagle. Pure Proust.
Ah, the green headline pads!
From Jim Drew, this query from (oh, alas) 2009:
It’s April, so naturally my boyfriend started singing Christmas songs. (Who doesn’t? <grin>) He was singing “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas” — Julio Iglesias, I think? [almost surely José Feliciano] — and I kept responding “But what?!” The line seems to demand a followup (other than “From the bottom of my heart”), something like “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, but it’s April, so I can’t” or “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, and I’m going to do so now” or “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, so forgive the repetition in this song.”
It’s fine as it stands. But it’s indirect, conveying a speech act indirectly by saying that you want to perform it (or would like to perform it), and thereby softening the bald performance somewhat.
Today’s Zippy, a meta-cartoon:
On Zippy and Family Circus:
In 1994, the surreal Zippy the Pinhead comic strip made multiple references to the Family Circus, including an extended series during which the titular lead character sought “Th’ Way” to enlightenment from Bil, Thel, Billy, and Jeffy. Bil Keane was credited as “guest cartoonist” on these strips, drawing the characters exactly as they appear in their own strip, but in Zippy’s world as drawn by Zippy creator Bill Griffith. Griffith described the Family Circus as “the last remaining folk art strip.” Griffith said, “It’s supposed to be the epitome of squareness, but it turns the corner into a hip zone.” (link)
That’s the title of the current (June 25th) New Yorker cover art, which celebrates both June as the month of weddings and June as Pride Month:
Art by Gayle Kabaker, in her first appearance in The New Yorker.
Back on the 13th, a NYT story, “New Orleans Struggles With Latest Storm, Newspaper Layoffs” by Campbell Robertson, with this passage:
In New Orleans and across the state of Alabama on Tuesday, as part of a basic restructuring of the news business at four papers owned by Advance Publications, scores of employees walked into one-on-one meetings and walked out 10 minutes later with severance packages. They included advertising employees, copy editors, press operators, crime reporters, photographers and graphic artists.
The Web site al.com, the online site for The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and The Mobile Press-Register, reported that 400 employees in Alabama would “experience an employment loss.”
The Birmingham News had a newsroom of 102 going into Tuesday; by the end of the day 61 were gone. The Times-Picayune laid off more than 200 people, or nearly a third of its overall staff.
I’ll say a bit about the substance of the story, but first a note on the remarkably indirect euphemism for be laid off: experience an employment loss.
From a science reporter yesterday, a query about where the expression there there came from. My answer came in two parts, one having to do with the comforting or reassuring there, there, the other with Gertrude Stein and Oakland (because my correspondent specifically mentioned them).
Caught in a rerun yesterday, a 2009 episode (season 6, episode 9) of CSI: NY with the investigators checking out underground “sploshing parties”. Sploshing has been around for some time, and has been mentioned by sex columnist Dan Savage, but somehow I wasn’t paying attention.
From Chris Waigl yesterday, a sentence from an article on the consequences of flooding at the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth MN:
[All but one of the animals in the barnyard exhibit — sheep, lambs, goats and the donkey — died in the flooding.] The zoo also lost a snowy owl and a turkey vulture and possibly a raven, which zoo officials can’t determine whether died or escaped.
Here we have relativization “from inside” a subordinate clause (in whether), yielding an “island violation”:
… which zoo officials can’t determine [ whether ___ died or escaped ]
Chris found this straightforwardly unacceptable, and I agree. But we can wonder how the writer ended up with this relative clause, especially when such island violations are usually rescued through the use of a resumptive pronoun:
… which zoo officials can’t determine [ whether they died or escaped ]
This strategy results in a semi-grammatical (but easily processed) clause, which I’ve called a ResIsland (for Resumptive – Island) gapless relative. Examples are easy to find — so easy that I don’t collect all the ones that come past me.
So why go with a “zero subject” clause?
Today’s Zippy:
A startling example of the snowclone The New Y (first discussed on Language Log in 2004, here; entered in the snowclone database in 2007, here; and treated many times on LLog over the years). I long ago stopped collecting examples — there are far too many of them — but every once in a while I come across a striking instance, like “Morbid is the new cute”.
