Two recent Zippys on art: modesty in figure drawing, style morphing:
Archive for June, 2012
Zippy art
June 6, 2012X porn
June 5, 2012From the annals of snowclonelet composites, on non-subsective X porn, as in food porn, book porn, house porn, and real estate porn, none of which refer to actual pornography. From my 2009 posting on snowclonelet composites:
Since it just came up on ADS-L with reference to “X porn” (in examples like “food porn”): English has a number of N1 + N2 composite patterns, most of them non-subsective (the denotation of the composite is not within the denotation of N2), but all of them exhibiting some semantic oddities, and all of them formulaic to some degree, hence snowclone-like. In other words, “snowclonelet composites”. My current collection — which I’m sure is far from complete — has instances of
X fag, X porn, X queen, X rage, X virgin, X whore
The details are different for different cases.
In the case of porn, OED3 (Dec. 2006) has the subentry:
As the second element in compounds: denoting written or visual material that emphasizes the sensuous or sensational aspects of a non-sexual subject, appealing to its audience in a manner likened to the titillating effect of pornography
(with cites from 1973 on, including food porn, disaster porn, gastro-porn, weather porn, and more).
singletail (and flowertail)
June 5, 2012The Three Seasons restaurant (which I’ve mentioned here on other occasions) always has a vase of spectacular flowers on its bar. The current arrangement features eremurus. Giant eremurus, very pale pink. Here are some white eremurus in the garden, and an assortment of eremurus in mixed colors:
Eggcorn to portmanteau
June 5, 2012From Benita Bendon Campbell, a link to a recent One Big Happy strip, in which a child’s eggcorn becomes a portmanteau:
Ruthie has eggcornishly reanalyzed periodical on the basis of her knowing the word pterodactyl. Corrected, she then hopes to treat her word periodactyl as a portmanteau of periodical and pterodactyl.
Cartoons on-line
June 4, 2012In preparing material for the summer intern on Linguistics in the Comics, I’ve been assembling a file of relevant cartoons/comics available on-line: webcomics and print cartoons with websites.
Gaydar in the news
June 4, 2012In yesterday’s NYT, a piece on “The Science of ‘Gaydar’ ” by Joshua A. Tabak (a doctoral candidate in social and personality psychology at the University of Washington) and Vivian Zayas (an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell). The short summary:
“Gaydar” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work?
Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among facial features.
Sexual slang
June 4, 2012
I say STD, you think FTD
June 4, 2012Today’s Zits, with an exchange between Walt and Connie Duncan about their son Jeremy’s experience in his human biology class:
Jeremy said “STD”, Walt could dredge up only “FTD”; well, the initialisms are phonologically very close.
The craftsman
June 3, 2012Earlier this week in the NYT, “Doc Watson, Blind Guitar Wizard Who Influenced Generations, Dies at 89” by William Grimes. I’ve been playing a lot of Doc Watson recordings, including the wonderful Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City (1963).
Two passages from Grimes’s obit especially caught my eye.
