Yesterday was my 72nd birthday — 72 is an excellent number, 23 ∙ 32 — and good wishes (including felicitations in Swedish, Italian, and Hebrew) flooded my Facebook page and my mailbox. Among these was a setting of “Happy Birthday to You” by violinist Rachel Barton Pine, a wonderfully wild performance. Which led me to reflect on the history of this song and its association with the Linguistic Society of America.
Archive for September, 2012
Happy Birthday
September 7, 2012Still more fun with initialisms
September 7, 2012Today’s Bizarro returns to play with initialisms:
That would be Curly, Larry and Moe in the original, with Moe replaced by a chimerical genetically modified organism (GMO).
Not mentioning
September 6, 2012Two contexts in which social inclusiveness is applauded but LGBT people aren’t mentioned — sending a signal of exclusion; silence can be a powerful message. First, the public pronouncements of Queen Elizabeth II. And then the spectacle of the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
The inside-outside strategy
September 5, 2012The NYT struggled yesterday to report a famous story about the vice-presidency. In Frank Bruni’s op-ed piece, “The Hex on Paul Ryan”, he writes:
F.D.R.’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, famously characterized the job [of vice president] as not being worth “a warm bucket” of urine, which was euphemized in the retelling as “spit.”
Notice that Garner’s words are still being euphemized, but somewhat more directly. Bruni (or an editor) has taken piss from inside the quotation marks and moved it outside, where it can be euphemized as urine (using medical vocabulary instead of the vernacular). This “inside-outside strategy”, in combination with the reference to euphemism, has the virtue of making the original word choice clear (but without actually using the offending word).
desmans
September 5, 2012Heard last night on KQED, a BBC Science program, “Pyrenean desman: On the trail of Europe’s weirdest beast” by Rebecca Morelle. Odd creatures indeed, with a misleading name. (more…)
Noodo
September 5, 2012Today’s Zippy, with several varieties of language play:
Noodo the Great as the name of a magician (with Noodo /núdo/, i.e. Nude-o) is a transparent invention, based on magician names like Carter the Great and The Great Carzini. Then there’s Huddy Bedletter, Zucchini Park, and “Where Have All th’ Muu-muus Gone?”
harriers
September 4, 2012I’m now using 85¢ stamps in a recent Birds of Prey series — northern goshawk, peregrine falcon, golden eagle, osprey and northern harrier — to mail from the U.S. to Canada. In an unfortunately small-pixel image (the best I’ve been able to find):
The bird that caught my eye was the Northern Harrier (row by row, # 5, 3, 1, 4), so I wondered how harrier came to be used for a bird, a dog, and a cross-country runner.
Annals of regularization: deepfreezed
September 4, 2012On ADS-L on Sunday, Wilson Gray posted about an occurrence of PSP deepfreezed, adding that it was kind of like frigidaired or refrigeratored. The history turns out to be complex.
Begging to differ
September 4, 2012Yesterday’s Bizarro:
A cute pun on beg, involving beg ‘ask for something, typically food or money, as charity or a gift’ (NOAD2) and the idiom beg to differ ‘politely disagree’. As it turns out, these two uses of beg are historically related.
Follow-up: reporting Eastwood
September 4, 2012Discussion yesterday on ADS-L about Clint Eastwood at the RNC (on this blog, here), in which Benjamin Barrett noted that
… because it was unsaid, there are necessarily going to be people who don’t get the interpretation of “fuck yourself”
and Joel Berson added (note smiley):
Since there are (allegedly) such people, then shouldn’t papers of record like the NY Times and the Boston Globe have undertaken to explain it? : – )
I followed up with observations about the practices of newspapers like the Times, and today Larry Horn connected these to the euphemism treadmill, with a quote from Cicero.