From Stan Carey, a link to this Cyanide and Happiness cartoon:
For “article adjectives”, read just “articles”. And add verb inflections.
And note that the cavemen’s speech before the “invention of grammar” did in fact have a grammar of its own. So what we get here is the usual view that grammar means ‘correct grammar’ — that is, the grammar for the formal written standard variety of the language. (Of course, you can ask how standardization would work in caveman society.)
Out of context, that sounds remarkably bad, but here it is in context (from Scott Kehoe, head of marketing at Audi, in an interview in a “Can Lincoln Be Cool Again?” segment on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning):
There was us and there was them, at that time, and if you look at who them was, there was Lexus, there was BMW, and Mercedes.
Now it’s better.
A follow-up to the first “Zits language” posting, which had cold slaw for cole slaw (an eggcorn that is now in the ecdb). This will take us some ways into the world of brassicas.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Grim Reapers, parent and child, with a play on the idiom kick the bucket ‘die’ and the name of the children’s game Kick the Can, and with the (rough) synonymy of bucket and can as the hinge.
Today’s Zits has Sara continuing to enchant Jeremy with her language:
Three things: Eggs Benedick (with /kt/ > /k/ — syllable-final “t/d-deletion”, very common in casual speech), holiday sauce (an eggcorn for hollandaise sauce), and ezackly (a repeat from the previous installment of the strip). Holiday sauce is the prize.
Today’s Zits, in which Sara enchants Jeremy with her language:
It’s a triple play: the eggcorn cold slaw, the pronunciation ezackly, and the idiom blend Achilles’ tooth.
In the NYT on the 9th, a piece by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “How Racist Are We? Ask Google”, reporting on his own research (“The Effects of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate: Using Google Search Data to Find What Surveys Miss”, here). The research design:
… many Americans use Google to find racially charged material. I performed the somewhat unpleasant task of ranking states and media markets in the United States based on the proportion of their Google searches that included the word “nigger(s).” This word was included in roughly the same number of Google searches as terms like “Lakers,” “Daily Show,” “migraine” and “economist.”
A huge proportion of the searches I looked at were for jokes about African-Americans. (I did not include searches that included the word “nigga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.) I used data from 2004 to 2007 because I wanted a measure not directly influenced by feelings toward Mr. Obama. From 2008 onward, “Obama” is a prevalent term in racially charged searches.
Note that the Times here doesn’t shrink from printing nigger (and nigga). Not all the reports on the study have been so straightforward.
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
That’s the portmanteau pencilguin, denoting something that is both a pencil and a penguin — which is formally of an interesting type.
(More viral silliness.)
It started with Jen Dewalt posting the label for Honey Badger frozen yogurt on Facebook:
The label points us back to a viral video, “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” (“Honey badger don’t care. Honey badger don’t give a shit.”), and to a website on “6 Animals That Just Don’t Give A F#@k” (where the honey badger is #1). Linguistic interest: the smart-ass tone of the video and the website; 3sg don’t; and the gay voice of Randall, the video’s narrator.
