Today’s Bizarro:
A speech balloon on the left, a thought balloon on the right. These two, and a scream balloon, are illustrated here, along with a link to a great “Evolution of Speechballoons” site, where it’s noted that
During the 18th century, British caricaturists changed the shape of speechballoons from gothic speech-bands or flags into fluffy balloons, our modern speechballoons.
Posted in Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
From a few weeks ago, Armistead Maupin, interviewed on NPR about Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage:
A lot of pundits have been kind of analyzing, oh, what does it mean and why did he do it. But as a gay man who’s been an activist for almost 40 years now, it was an extraordinarily moving thing to hear an unequivocal statement to the effect that gay love was the equal to opposite sex and attraction.
The relevant bit is boldfaced: a SPAR (a Subjectless Predicative Adjunct Requiring a referent for the missing subject) that’s non-canonical, in that the adjunct doesn’t obey the Subject Rule (doesn’t pick up its referent from the subject of the main clause); such non-canonical SPARs, or X-SPARS, are popularly known as “dangling modifiers”, a condemnatory label. But some types of X-SPARs are in fact acceptable (except to those who have internalized the teaching that X-SPARs are necessarily ungrammatical), and the Maupin sentence falls into not one, but two, of these types.
Posted in Danglers, Modification | 4 Comments »
An inventory of some postings on the adverb hopefully, divided into the pre-AP Stylebook period and the post-AP Stylebook period.
Posted in Links, Modification, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | 1 Comment »
Today’s Zippy:
Earlier strips had God playing Parcheesi and wrestling alligators. Now he’s/she’s out on the boards, wielding surfer lingo: the intensive scubetublar, the Surf Weasels (“a legendary underground surf rock instrumental band” from Portland OR), the surfing move shredding, the gnarl (challenging conditions, like a large wave), hang ten, garshed ‘tired, beat’, noodled ‘stoned, intoxicated’, throwing buckets (making huge amounts of spray), the green room (the inside of a barrel produced by a wave), grindage ‘food’. Totally gnarly, dudes and dudettes!
Posted in Language and culture, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
A new comment on “Dubious portmanteaus” (from last July):
I know this is an older article but I was just thinking today how much I hate portmanteaus. I hate ‘fandom’ and ‘cosplay’. I also hate the word ‘kidlet’, although I’m not entirely certain that it is a genuine portmanteau. I asked some friends who are parents and they seemed to think it is a combination of kid and piglet.
Two things here: the rage at a whole class of words (in this case, at portmanteaus in general), and the three specific examples that set off the commenter’s rage: fandom, cosplay, and kidlet.
Posted in Derivation, Innovations, Language play, Morphology, Playful morphology, Portmanteaus, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »
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