Four far-flung meals in a Zippy cartoon yesterday — Indian tandoori, Italian-American eggplant rollatini, and Ethiopian and Peruvian breakfasts — led me to recall my first experience of traditional Japanese breakfasts, at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo during the 13th International Congress of Linguists. Since then I’ve enjoyed the experience in several Japanese (and non-Japanese) hotels in the U.S. And become addicted to miso soup for breakfast.
Archive for August, 2012
Follow-up: Another breakfast
August 14, 2012Against or for
August 14, 2012Passed on by Wipe Out Homophobia, this editorial cartoon by Dave Simpson of the Tulsa Tribune:
An argument that’s been made by many people on other occasions, in various formulations.
(R)evolution
August 14, 2012A SMBC cartoon, passed on by Lynne Murphy on Facebook, in three bites:
The set-up: revolution denialism.
Elaboration of the belief world. And then:
The pay-off, in evolution denialism.
Zippy’s movie career
August 14, 2012Today’s Zippy:
Another meta-posting, about the world in which Zippy and Griffy etc. “live” vs. the real world.
Follow-up: The A-Word
August 14, 2012A follow-up to yesterday’s posting about avoidance of taboo initials — especially F — in the New York Times: titles of books, plays, movies, musical albums, etc. present a special challenge to the NYT, in that indirect allusions or paraphrases (the paper’s usual scheme) are extremely difficult to manage (since they do violence to the titles); this is a rare occasion on which the paper will resort to asterisking, dashing, or underlining-out the entire offending word.
For his latest book, Geoff Nunberg has thoughtfully selected a main title that averts the difficulty for the Times, moving the offending item to the subtitle.
Jack POP
August 14, 2012Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
A phrasal overlap portmanteau (POP), with jack as the overlapping portion: lumber jack + jack-in-the-box. Hilary Price is fond of these, and as usual, the linguistic combo labels a real-world combo: a jack-in-the-box toy with (omigod) a lumberjack in it, complete with working ax.
Taboo initials (cont.)
August 13, 2012Another chapter in the saga of taboo avoidance in the NYT. In the last chapter, the paper had moved past its refusal to use avoidance strategies like F*** and the F-word, which flaunt the offending initial F, to avoiding the letter F within initialisms when it disguises the word fuck: STFU (for “shut the fuck up”) in this most recent case, but WTF (for “what the fuck”) and LMFAO (for “laughing my fucking ass off”, which involves anatomical ass, also tabooed) as well. Any allusion to the offending word by means of its initial letter is itself offensive.
These efforts at cleansing language in the Gray Lady’s pages have evoked lots of responses in critics; in a moment I’ll get to Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon (“The New York Times’ F-word problem; The paper of record goes to extremes to avoid profanity again and again — and misses the story” on August 10th). First, some further recapping.
Breakfast at Zippy’s
August 13, 2012Today’s Zippy has the Pinhead shaking up the waitress at The Gourmet (breakfast, lunch, banquets, cocktails):
Zippy starts out by trying to order two things that aren’t ordinarily breakfast dishes at all, but when warned off by the waitress, continues the international-food theme with exotic breakfast choices.
Zippyized
August 12, 2012Today’s Zippy is a meditation on commercial -ized:
(in the order of their appearance in English).
Food vehicles
August 12, 2012Today’s Bizarro, taking off from the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:
Four N + N compounds, suited to the food of an area: cabbage wagon; pasta cycle and bread sidecar (nice play on bread on the side); and tofu trailer. So many other possibilities: sushi sedan, masala minivan,…